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5K views1,797 pages

Abstracts Book

Uploaded by

J
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

International Pragmatics Association

https://pragmatics.international

ABSTRACTS

18th International Pragmatics Conference


Brussels
9-14 July 2023
18th INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS CONFERENCE

SPECIAL THEME: The shape of interaction: the pragmatics of (a)typicality

Conference chair: Jürgen Jaspers (ULB)


Local Organizing Committee: Philippe De Brabanter (ULB), Liesbeth Degand
(UCLouvain), Philippine Geelhand (ULB), Mikhail Kissine (ULB), Laurence Meurant (U
Namur & FNRS)
The International Conference Committee includes, in addition to the LOC members: Charles
Antaki (Loughborough), Valentina Bambini (Pavia), Diana Boxer (Gainsville, Florida), Winnie
Cheng (Hong Kong), Anita Fetzer (Augsburg), Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich (Charlotte, North
Carolina), Maartje De Meulder (Utrecht), Christiane Hohenstein (Winterthur), Michael Haugh
(Brisbane), Sachiko Ide (Tokyo), Cornelia Ilie (Strömstad), Napoleon Katsos (Cambridge), Sophia
Marmaridou (Atrhens), Rosina Marquez Reiter (London), Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester),
Melissa Moyer (Barcelona), Jemina Napier (Edinburgh), Neal Norrick (Saarbrücken), Ira Noveck
(Paris), Tsuyoshi Ono (Edmonton), Anna Papafragou (Philadelphia), Nausicaa Pouscoulous (London),
Mieke Vandenbroucke (Antwerp), Mieke Van Herreweghe (Ghent), Jef Verschueren (Antwerp), Tuija
Virtanen (Turku)

*****
IPrA President: 2018-2023: Stephen Levinson (MPI, Nijmegen)

IPrA Secretary General: Jef Verschueren (Linguistics, Antwerp)


IPrA Executive Secretary: Ann Verhaert (IPrA Secretariat, Antwerp)
Adjunct Secretary General: Mieke Vandenbroucke (Linguistics, Antwerp)

Members of the IPrA Consultation Board (2018-2023):


Nana Aba Appiah Amfo (Accra, Ghana), Charles Antaki (Loughborough, UK), Rukmini Bhaya Nair (New
Delhi, India), Barbara Bokus (Warsaw, Poland), Diana Boxer (Gainesvillle, USA), Charles Briggs (Berkeley,
USA), Frank Brisard (Antwerp, Belgium), Winnie Cheng (Hong Kong, China), Jenny Cook Gumperz (Santa
Barbara, USA), Anita Fetzer (Würzburg, Germany), Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich, Helmut Gruber (Vienna,
Austria), Yueguo Gu (Beijing, China), Susanne Günthner (Münster, Germany), Hartmut Haberland (Roskilde,
Denmark), Michael Haugh (Brisbane, Australia), Janet Holmes (Wellington, New Zealand), Sachiko Ide
(Tokyo, Japan), Cornelia Ilie (Strömstad, Sweden), Shoichi Iwasaki (Los Angeles, USA), Helga Kotthoff
(Freiburg, Germany), Dennis Kurzon (Haifa, Israel), Stephen Levinson (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Sophia
Marmaridou (Athens, Greece), Rosina Marquez Reiter (Surrey,UK),Yael Maschler (Haifa, Israel), Yoshiko
Matsumoto (Stanford, USA), Michael Meeuwis (Ghent, Belgium), Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester,
UK), Melissa Moyer (Barcelona, Spain), Neal Norrick (Saarbrücken, Germany), Tsuyoshi Ono (Edmonton,
Canada), Jan-Ola Östman (Helsinki, Finland), Salvador Pons Bordería (Valencia, Spain), Marina Sbisà (Trieste,
Italy), Gunter Senft (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Tuija Virtanen (Abo, Finland)

***

Editors of Pragmatics:
Editor-in-chief: Helmut Gruber (University of Vienna)
Associate Editors: Frank Brisard (University of Antwerp), Xinren Chen (Nanjing
University), Yoko Fujii (Japan Women’s University, Tokyo), Sophia
Marmaridou (University of Athens), Rosina Márquez Reiter (University of
Surrey), Constantine V. Nakassis (University of Chicago), Angeliki Tzanne (National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens, Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu (San Diego State
University), Elda Weizman (Bar-Ilan University)
IPrA owes a debt of gratitude to its host and sponsors:
USER NOTES:
1. This abstracts book only exists in electronic format. To go to the appropriate sections,
just click the corresponding bookmark on your pdf-screen.
2. All abstracts within the plenary, panel, lecture, and poster sections are ordered
alphabetically by title.
3. All abstracts in the panel contributions section are ordered alphabetically by title
within each panel that is itself alphabetically listed by title.
4. At the end of this book, there is a complete author index. To find the right page for the
author you’re looking for, just click the page number.
5. The abstracts contained in this book are in the form in which they were submitted.
Authors were given the opportunity to edit their abstracts themselves. Yet, the end
result may still not be fully satisfactory in all cases.

All abstracts (and all related materials) are also accessible online through the program at
https://ipra2023.exordo.com (with your IPrA username and password).
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Table of Contents

Plenary Lectures

Autistic Communication and the Neurodiversity Paradigm 2


Prof. Sue Fletcher-Watson1
1. University of Edinburgh

Discourse in and about International Sign Language: A Case of Multilingualism 3


Prof. Christian Rathmann1
1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Pragmatics, learnability and natural concepts 4


Prof. Anna Papafragou1
1. University of Pennsylvania

Presumed (in)abilities and the ‘shape of interaction’ in classrooms 5


Prof. Julia Snell1
1. University of Leeds

The Dark Matter of Pragmatics 6


Prof. Stephen Levinson1
1. Max Planck Institute

The Grand Tug-of-War: Clarity, Economy, and Expressivity Across the Ages 7
Prof. Laurence Horn1
1. Yale University

The social shape of language 8


Dr. Mark Dingemanse1
1. Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University

Panels

(A)typical users of technology in social interaction 10


Prof. Florence Oloff1 , Dr. Henrike Helmer1
1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

(A)typicality in narrative forms and practices 11


Prof. Neal Norrick1
1. saarland university

(A)typicality of Japanese ‘sentences’ in conversational contexts 12


Dr. Natsuko Nakagawa1 , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono 2
1. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 2. University of Alberta

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Im)politeness on written discussion websites: Relational work in Reddit-esque communication 13


1 2
Prof. Daria Dayter , Dr. Thomas Messerli
1. Tampere University, 2. University of Basel

A contrastive analysis of potentially face-threatening acts in different linguacultures 14


1 2
Dr. Weihua Zhu , Prof. Xinren Chen
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2. Nanjing University

Arts of distancing in talk-in-interaction 15


1 2
Dr. Akira Takada , Dr. Emi Morita
1. Kyoto University, 2. National University of Singapore

Boko Haram terrorism in Nigeria and atypical discourses 16


Dr. Ruth Karachi Benson Oji1 , Prof. Akin Odebunmi 2
1. Institute of Humanities, Pan-Atlantic University, 2. University of Ibadan

Children’s language creativity, emergent performativity and heteroglossia in multilingual settings 17


1 2
Prof. Ann-Carita Evaldsson , Prof. Amy Kyratzis
1. Department of Eucation, Uppsala University, 2. Department of Education, University of California

Clause combining at the discourse-grammar interface: Answers from coordination, subordination and
insubordination 18
1 1 2 1
Prof. Liesbeth Degand , Mr. Víctor Royo Viñuales , Dr. An Van linden , Dr. Wout Van Praet
1. UCLouvain, 2. Université de Liège

Cognitive and interactional perspectives on conversational humour 19


1 2 1
Prof. Michael Haugh , Dr. Béatrice Priego-Valverde , Mr. Amir Sheikhan
1. The University of Queensland, 2. Aix-Marseille University

Communicative practices in online dating 20


1 2 3
Ms. Elisabeth Andersen , Prof. Will Gibson , Dr. Riki Thompson
1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. UCL, Institute of Education, 3. University of Washington

Complex syntax for interaction 21


1 2 3
Prof. Yael Maschler , Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler , Prof. Jan Lindström
1. University of Haifa, 2. University of Neuchâtel, 3. University of Helsinki

Conflict talk in Spanish digital interactions 22


1 1
Dr. Lucía Fernández-Amaya , Dr. María de la O Hernández López
1. Pablo de Olavide University

Convergent and divergent information in multimodal and multisensorial communication 23


1 2
Prof. Paul Bouissac , Prof. Ellen Fricke
1. University of Toronto, 2. Chemnitz University of Technology

Corpus linguistic approaches to epistemic and evidential marking in talk-in-interaction 24


1 2
Prof. Johanna Miecznikowski , Dr. Jérôme Jacquin
1. Università della Svizzera italiana, 2. Université de Lausanne

Digital play as socio-pragmatic practice 25


1
Dr. Hiloko Kato
1. Department of German Studies University of Zurich / Game Design Zurich University of the Arts

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse and disfluencies in cognitive and speech disorders 26


1 2
Dr. Ludivine Crible , Dr. Christelle Dodane
1. Ghent University, 2. Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3

Discourse-pragmatic markers of Chinese origin in East Asian languages 27


1 2 3
Prof. Seongha Rhee , Prof. Reijirou Shibasaki , Prof. Wenjiang Yang
1. Mahidol University & HUFS, 2. Meiji University/University of British Columbia, 3. University of Macau

Discourses of identity: Placing self in the public sphere 28


1 1
Prof. Jenny Cook-Gumperz , Prof. Elena Raymond
1. University of California Santa Barbara

Doctor-child communication: Insights from pragmatics 29


Prof. Ilse Depraetere1 , Dr. Vikki Janke2
1. University of Lille, 2. University of Kent

Dude food and chick beer: Linguistic and semiotic perspectives on nutrition as a gendered cultural prac-
tice 30
1 2 3
Prof. Theresa Heyd , Dr. Sofia Rüdiger , Prof. Janina Wildfeuer
1. University of Greifswald, 2. University of Bayreuth, 3. University of Groningen

Emancipatory pragmatics: Interactional modality from the perspective of Ba-theory 31


1 2 2
Dr. Scott Saft , Dr. Sachiko Ide , Prof. Yoko Fujii
1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, 2. Japan Women’s University

Embodied and linguistic repair practices in atypical child-adult Interaction 32


1 2
Prof. Minna Laakso , Prof. Barbara A. Fox
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Colorado, Boulder

Emerging otherness in social interactions: Multimodal and multicultural approaches 33


1 2
Dr. Keiko Tsuchiya , Dr. Valentina Fantasia
1. Yokohama City University, 2. Lund University

English address terms in a globalized world: Socio-cultural impact on recent language variation and
change 34
1 2
Prof. Svenja Kranich , Dr. Anke Lensch
1. Universität Bonn, 2. Universität Koblenz

Experimental and corpus perspectives on (socio)pragmatics 35


1 2
Prof. Anne Bezuidenhout , Prof. Andreas Jucker
1. University of South Carolina, 2. Universität Zürich

Exploring the body as the source of meaning-making in sign language interaction 36


1 2
Dr. Emily Shaw , Dr. Alysson Lepeut
1. Gallaudet University, 2. Université de Namur

Exploring “image work” in Chinese communication 37


1
Prof. Xinren Chen
1. Nanjing University

First-order pragmatics: How lay people talk about speech (inter)actions 38


1
Prof. Klaus Schneider
1. University of Bonn

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gesture in spoken and signed-to-spoken language interpreting 39


1 2
Dr. Sílvia Gabarró-López , Prof. Alan Cienki
1. Pompeu Fabra University & University of Namur, 2. VU Amsterdam

Getting close in a ‘formal context’: Ideologies and styling practice in Japanese 40


1 2
Dr. Haruko Cook , Dr. Momoko Nakamura
1. Univery of Hawaii at Manoa, 2. Kanto Gakuin University

Going viral, cinematic and media perspectives: New studies on iconic communication and fictional dis-
course in a shared world. 41
1 2
Dr. Monica Cantero-Exojo , Dr. Eduardo Urios-Aparisi
1. Drew University, 2. University of Connecticut

Health and life events. (A)typical modalities and challenges to interaction 43


1 2
Prof. Stef Slembrouck , Prof. Melissa Moyer
1. Linguistics, Ghent University, 2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Hierarchies of knowledge in online health communities 44


1 2
Prof. Barbara De Cock , Dr. Carolina Figueras
1. UC Louvain, 2. Universitat de Barcelona

If you see what I mean: Comparative-contrastive analyses of implied meanings across populations, con-
texts and texts 45
1 1 1 1
Prof. Sara Gesuato , Prof. Emanuela Sanfelici , Dr. Elena Pagliarini , Prof. Francesco Vespignani
1. University of Padua

Imitation and simulation for instructing and learning Kata: A multimodal analysis of Japan-style trans-
mission of practical skills 46
1 2 3
Dr. Seiji Nashio , Dr. Ikuyo Morimoto , Dr. Yasuharu Den
1. Hiroshima University, 2. Kwansei Gakuin University, 3. Chiba University

Impoliteness in Chinese social media 47


1
Prof. Yongping Ran
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Institutional incongruity: When the practitioner is doing the right thing at the wrong time 48
1 2
Prof. Gonen Dori-hacohen , Dr. Bracha Nir
1. University of Amherst, 2. University of Haifa

Integration of conversation analytic and other linguistic methods 49


1 1
Mr. Yida Cai , Dr. Erika Sandman
1. University of Helsinki

Interaction in clinical and non-clinical settings with children and adults with communication disorders 50
1 1 1 1
Mrs. Paméla McMahon Morin , Prof. Carole Anglade , Prof. Stefano Rezzonico , Prof. Claire Croteau
1. Université de Montréal

Interaction in nursing: Conversation and multimodal analytical studies 51


1 2
Prof. Esther González Martínez , Dr. Evelyne Berger
1. Department of social sciences, University of Fribourg, 2. La Source School of Nursing, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences
and Arts Western Switzerland

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interaction in video-mediated settings in higher education 52


1 2 3
Prof. Sabine Hoffmann , Dr. Margarethe Olbertz-Siitonen , Prof. Götz Schwab
1. University of Palermo, 2. University of Jyväskylä, 3. Ludwigsburg University of Education

Interactionally troublesome exchanges: Accounts, evaluation, and antagonism 53


1 2
Dr. Melisa Stevanovic , Dr. Mervyn Horgan
1. Tampere University, 2. University of Guelph

Intergenerational encounters and old age 54


1 2
Dr. Kaarina Hippi , Prof. Camilla Lindholm
1. University of Oulu / University of Helsinki, 2. Tampere University

Internet memes of everyday life 55


Dr. Loukia Lindholm1 , Prof. Tuija Virtanen 1
1. Åbo Akademi University

It’s not what you are like, it’s what you like: Appraisal, stance and evaluation in online fandom 56
1 1
Dr. Thomas Messerli , Prof. Miriam Locher
1. University of Basel

Language aggression and conflict in post-digital societies 57


1 2
Prof. Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich , Prof. Maria Sifianou
1. University of North Carolina, Charlotte, 2. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Language and geopolitics: On the linguistic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 58


1 2
Prof. Helena Halmari , Prof. Arto Mustajoki
1. Sam Houston State University, 2. University of Helsinki

Language creativity in everyday Japanese discourse 59


1 1
Prof. Andrew Barke , Prof. Momoyo Shimazu
1. Kansai University

Language diversity and homogeneity 61


1 2
Dr. Kazuko Tanabe , Dr. Yuko Iwata
1. Japan Women’s University, 2. Meiji University

Learning and teaching Chinese as a foreign language: A cross-cultural pragmatic perspective 62


1 2 3
Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Daniel Kadar , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3.
University of Hamburg

Let the face respond: Conversational functions of facial gestures in turn-beginnings of responsive actions 63
Dr. Alexandra Groß1 , Dr. Carolin Dix 1
1. University of Bayreuth

Magical speech acts 64


1 2
Dr. Carsten Levisen , Dr. Nico Nassenstein
1. Roskilde University, 2. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Meaning-making in the family: Crossing methods and disciplines 65


1 2
Prof. Luk Van Mensel , Prof. Eline Zenner
1. XJTLU - UNamur - KU Leuven, 2. KU Leuven

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Membership categorisation and interpersonal relationships in social interaction 66


1 1
Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute , Ms. Andrea Rodriguez
1. The University of Queensland

Miscommunication and repair in interaction with voice agents and social robots 68
1 2
Dr. Wyke Stommel , Dr. Saul Albert
1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 2. Loughborough University

Mobility disabilities in interaction: A research agenda within atypical interaction 69


1 2
Prof. Gitte Rasmussen , Dr. Brian Due
1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. Copenhagen University

Modelling cultural and contextual influence: Patterns, templates and schemas in utterance interpreta-
tion 70
1 2
Dr. Elke Diedrichsen , Prof. Frank Liedtke
1. Technological University Dublin, 2. University of Leipzig

Multilingual pragmatics. A focus on pragmatic awareness in multilingual instructional settings 72


1 1
Prof. Pilar Safont , Dr. Laura Portolés
1. Universitat Jaume I

Multimodal and prosodic markers of information structure and discourse structure 73


1 2
Prof. Pilar Prieto , Prof. Frank Kügler
1. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2. Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Multimodal stancetaking – the (a) typical case of taking a stance? 74


1
Prof. Cornelia Müller
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Multimodality, metaphor, magic: Typical and atypical narratives across cultures, pre- & post-pandemic 75
1 2
Prof. Rukmini Nair , Prof. Laura Downing
1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, 2. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Narrative, argumentation and multimodality in (post-)Covid science mediation 76


1 1 1
Prof. Geert Jacobs , Ms. Sofie Verkest , Mr. Seppe Goddaert
1. Ghent University

Narratives on COVID-19 experiences in the digital age 77


1
Dr. Kazuyo Murata
1. Ryukoku University

Navigating a conversation with a stranger through laughter 78


1
Prof. Shoichi Iwasaki
1. UCLA

New trends in reformulation: Theory, methods and challenges 79


1 2 3
Dr. Salvador Pons Borderia , Dr. Shima Salameh Jiménez , Dr. Adrià Llibrer
1. University of Valencia, 2. Complutense University of Madrid, 3. University of Salamanca

On pragmatics and ‘Peach Tree Dishes’: Discourses of far-right extremism, conspiracy, and solidarity 81
1 2
Dr. Catherine Tebaldi , Dr. Dominika Baran
1. University of Luxembourg, 2. Duke

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Performing compliments in a variationist perspective 82


1 2
Prof. Marina Castagneto , Dr. Chiara Meluzzi
1. University of Molise, 2. University of Milan

Poetics of Phaticity: Contacting and Distancing in Contemporary Social Life 84


1 2
Dr. Shunsuke Nozawa , Dr. Makiko Takekuro
1. Hokkaido University, 2. Waseda University

Politeness and impoliteness in French and in comparison with other languages 85


1 2 3 2 4
Dr. Nicolas Ruytenbeek , Dr. Shima Moallemi , Prof. Els Tobback , Prof. Chantal Claudel , Prof. Kerry Mullan
1. KU Leuven, 2. Université Paris Nanterre, 3. Universiteit Antwerpen, 4. RMIT University

Practices of knowledge management in helping interactions 86


Dr. Susanne Kabatnik1 , Prof. Eva-Maria Graf 2 , Prof. Thomas Spranz-Fogasy 3
1. Greifswald, 2. Klagenfurt, 3. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Pragmatic approaches to visual discourses in online interactions 87


1 2
Dr. Carmen Pérez-Sabater , Dr. Agnese Sampietro
1. Universitat Politècnica de València, 2. University Jaume I

Pragmatic aspects in food-related communication 89


1 1 2
Prof. Daniela Cesiri , Prof. Francesca Coccetta , Dr. Katia Peruzzo
1. “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice, 2. University of Trieste

Pragmatic development, sense conventions and the puzzle of non-literal uses 90


1 1
Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum , Dr. Nicholas Allott
1. University of Oslo

Pragmatic Variation in Pluricentric Languages 91


1 2
Prof. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer , Prof. Klaus Schneider
1. Indiana University, 2. University of Bonn

Pragmatics of the ‘(a)typical clause’ across languages 92


1 2
Prof. Ritva Laury , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Alberta

Prosody, gesture, and conversation 93


1 2 3
Dr. Margaret Zellers , Dr. Maria Graziano , Prof. David House
1. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2. Lund University Humanities Lab, 3. Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan

Rapport management in onsite and remote interpreting 94


1 1 1
Prof. July De Wilde , Dr. Jelena Vranjes , Mr. Dries Cavents
1. Ghent University

Re-considering discourses of war and peace: 21st century transcultural perspectives 95


1 2
Prof. Cornelia Ilie , Prof. Manfred Kienpointner
1. Strömstad Academy, 2. University of Innsbruck

Reading Bauman & Briggs’s “Poetics and performance” three decades later: How can a/typical interac-
tions, spaces and temporalities critically inform pragmatics? 96
1 2
Dr. Daniel Silva , Dr. Daniela Palma
1. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Recruitment of environmental resources for interactional purposes in the early years 97


1 2
Dr. Amanda Bateman , Prof. Friederike Kern
1. University of Waikato, 2. University of Bielefeld

Recycling and reshaping previous turns in multimodal interactions 98


1 2
Dr. Vanessa Piccoli , Dr. Biagio Ursi
1. Université Paris Nanterre, 2. Université d’Orléans

Referential practices in action: a usage-based perspective on canonical and non-canonical uses of pro-
nouns referring to persons 100
1 2 3 3
Dr. Jens Lanwer , Prof. Wolfgang Imo , Prof. Evelyn Ziegler , Prof. Melitta Gillmann
1. University of Münster, 2. University of Hamburg, 3. University of Duisburg-Essen

Research involving languages you don’t speak: Reflections on ‘spaces of linguistic non-understanding’ 101
1 1
Dr. Marie Jacobs , Ms. Ella van Hest
1. Ghent University

Reshaping interaction in higher/tertiary education (HTE) under the challenges of inclusion 102
1 2 3 4
Prof. Christiane Hohenstein , Prof. Magdalene Lévy-Tödter , Dr. Agnieszka Sowinska , Prof. Bettina M. Bock
1. ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics, 2. FOM University of Applied Sciences, 3. Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
(Department of Experimental Linguistics) & Universidad Católica del Norte, Antofagasta, Chile (School of English), 4. University
of Cologne

Responses to news: Cross-linguistic perspectives 104


1 2 3
Dr. Michal Marmorstein , Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed , Dr. Xiaoting Li
1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. King’s College London, 3. University of Alberta

Revisiting ideologies of English in the Nordic countries 105


1 1 1
Dr. Dorte Lønsmann , Dr. Janus Mortensen , Ms. Marianne Haugaard Skov
1. University of Copenhagen

Robust and flexible interactive language technology for human empowerment 106
1 2
Dr. Andreas Liesenfeld , Dr. Hendrik Buschmeier
1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 2. University of Bielefeld

Shaping humour in interaction 107


1 2
Dr. Esther Linares-Bernabéu , Prof. Leonor Ruiz Gurillo
1. University of Valencia, 2. University of Alicante

Social meaning and Its place in pragmatics and sociolinguistics 108


1 2
Prof. Marina Terkourafi , Prof. William Salmon
1. Leiden University, 2. University of North Texas

Sociopragmatics of conflict talk and dispute resolution: Mitigation, reparation, and mediation practices 109
1 2 3
Dr. Carolina Figueras , Dr. Inés Olza , Dr. Marta Albelda Marco
1. University of Barcelona, 2. University of Navarra, 3. University of Valencia

Solitude speech: Empirical challenges 111


1 2
Dr. Mitsuko Izutsu , Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu
1. Fuji Women’s University, 2. Hokkaido University of Education

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sound patterns in interactions between human and nonhuman animals 112


1 2
Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed , Dr. Katariina Harjunpää
1. King’s College London, 2. Tampere University

Stance-taking, differentiation and (a)typicality in discourse: Ideologies of language, personhood, and


competence in multilingual communities 114
1 2
Dr. Jacqueline Messing , Dr. Kathe Managan
1. University of Maryland-College Park, 2. University of Louisiana Lafayette

Storytelling about and over food 116


1
Dr. Polly Szatrowski
1. University of Minnesota

Student practices in educational interaction 117


1 2 2
Dr. Myrte Gosen , Dr. Karianne Skovholt , Dr. Marit Solem
1. University of Groningen, 2. University of South-Eastern Norway

Symptomatic speech: A challenge for pragmatic approaches 118


1 1
Dr. Maria Francisca Lier-DeVitto , Dr. Lucia Arantes
1. PUC-SP

Tales from the South: Doing narrative analysis beyond the canon 119
1 1 1
Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar , Dr. Naomi Orton , Dr. Liliana Bastos
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Telling/not telling stories in discourses about Japan under atypical situations 120
1 1
Prof. Kaori Hata , Dr. Akira Satoh
1. Osaka University

The complex relationship between pragmatics and theory of mind: Empirical evidence across popula-
tions and theoretical consequences 121
1
Prof. Valentina Bambini
1. iuss

The cross-cultural pragmatic study of intercultural encounters: (Strictly!) language-anchored inquiries 122
1 2 3
Prof. Juliane House , Prof. Daniel Kadar , Prof. Meredith Marra
1. University of Hamburg, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3. Victoria University
of Wellington

The cross-cultural pragmatics of language and politics 123


1 2 3
Prof. Daniel Kadar , Prof. Juliane House , Prof. Zohar Kampf
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 2. University of Hamburg, 3. Hebrew University
of Jerusalem

The feedback society: Discourses, identities, modalities 124


1 2
Prof. Sylvia Jaworska , Prof. Camilla Vasquez
1. University of Reading, 2. University of South Florida

The impact of participants’ orientation in space on the functions of gaze in interaction 125
1 1
Ms. Barbara Laner , Dr. Elisabeth Zima
1. University of Freiburg

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of body, mind and technology – different approaches to theorizing and analyzing digitally
mediated interaction 126
Dr. Andreas Candefors Stæhr1 , Prof. Lian Malai Madsen1
1. University of Copenhagen

The pragmatics of digital disinformation 127


1
Prof. Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
1. University of Oregon

The pragmatics of human-machine interaction 128


1 2 1
Dr. Rita Vallentin , Dr. Miriam Lind , Prof. Britta Schneider
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), 2. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

The pragmatics of the referential process and its interpretation 129


1 1 1
Dr. Carmela Sammarco , Dr. Alfonsina Buoniconto , Dr. Debora Vena
1. Università degli Studi di Salerno

The pragmatics of trusting (artificial) others 130


1 2
Prof. Kerstin Fischer , Dr. Bracha Nir
1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. University of Haifa

The roles of new speakers in the revitalization of endangered languages 131


1
Dr. Yumiko Ohara
1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

The shapes of the interaction between social cognition and language use: Socio-cognitive processes in
different discourse activities 132
1 2 3 1
Prof. Edwiges Morato , Dr. Erik Miletta Martins , Dr. Patrik Vezali , Dr. Nathália Freitas ,
Dr. Rafahel Parintins2
1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 3. Universidade Federal dos Vales do
Jequitinhonha e Mucuri

The speech action of commenting across discourse types 133


1 1
Dr. Robert Külpmann , Prof. Rita Finkbeiner
1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Types of conventionalization of communicative expressions and processes of their emergence and dis-
appearance 134
1 2
Prof. Masaki Ono , Dr. Koichi Nishida
1. University of Tsukuba, 2. Yamaguchi Prefectural University

Who pays? Traditional gender roles as performances of normality in mainstream media 135
1 2
Dr. Maximiliane Frobenius , Dr. Cornelia Gerhardt
1. WWU Münster, 2. Saarland University

“Keywords” in sociopolitical debates: approaches to struggles about meaning in discourse 136


Prof. Philippe Hambye1 , Prof. Barbara De Cock1 , Ms. Coline Rondiat1 , Ms. Nadezda Shchinova1
1. UC Louvain

“Only joking”: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction 137


1 2 2
Dr. Chi-He Elder , Dr. Eleni Kapogianni , Dr. Isabella Reichl
1. University of East Anglia, 2. University of Kent

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Panel Contributions

(A)typical use of smart speakers: Usage patterns of stationary voice-assistants during the process of do-
mestication 140
Prof. Stephan Habscheid1 , Mr. Tim Hector 1 , Dr. Christine Hrncal 1
1. University of Siegen

Displaying and solving trouble related to digital devices: Understanding non-experts’ smartphone use 141
Ms. Helena Budde1 , Prof. Florence Oloff1
1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Emotional displays when blind people encounter problems with new technology 142
Dr. Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen 1 , Dr. Brian Due2
1. University of Copenhagen, 2. Copenhagen University

Learning the ‘new normal’: Adapted practices in telework 143


1
Dr. Elina Salomaa
1. University of Jyväskylä

Orienting to a problematic text: a longitudinal study of technology-mediated collaborative writing 144


Ms. Reetta Ronkainen1
1. University of Jyväskylä

Running into a robot : “mocking up” as a way to typify an unexpected encounter 145
Dr. Heike Baldauf-quilliatre1 , Dr. Lucien Tisserand 2
1. ICAR Lab, 2. CNRS, ICAR

The Atypical Interactant in a ‘Smart Homecare’ Participation Framework 146


Dr. Saul Albert1 , Ms. Lauren Hall 1 , Prof. Elizabeth Peel 1
1. Loughborough University

Tracing routinization in interactions with smart speakers 148


1 1 1
Dr. Mathias Barthel , Dr. Henrike Helmer , Dr. Silke Reineke
1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Direct reported speech in funny stories: observations from Italian radio phone-ins 150
1
Dr. Daniela Veronesi
1. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Gesture expressivity in storytelling interaction 151


1
Dr. Chris Rühlemann
1. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Identity of a story? Similarities and differences in oral history narrative typicality 152
1 2 1 1
Dr. Jiří Kocián , Dr. Jakub Mlynář , Dr. Karin Hofmeisterová , Mr. Hryhorii Maliukov
1. Charles University, 2. HES-SO Valais/Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

Narrating the present into the past 153


1
Dr. Tanima Bagchi
1. Indian Institute of Management Indore

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sharing mishaps and errors: Narrative comments on internet cooking sites 154
1
Prof. Neal Norrick
1. saarland university

Social norms for narrative tellability within a WWII-remembrance community of practice 155
1 1
Dr. Kim Schoofs , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop
1. KU Leuven

Strategic (A)Typical Narratives of Food Trends on Instagram 156


1 2
Dr. Kelsi Matwick , Dr. Keri Matwick
1. University of Florida, 2. Nanyang Technological University

The construction of meaning in personal experience narratives emerging from Portuguese radio phone-
in programs 157
1
Prof. Carla Almeida
1. Open University of Portugal

Typicality and Narration in the Toasts of Georgian Immigrants in the United States 159
1
Dr. Inola Matthews
1. City University of New York, Lehman College

A grammar of utterances connected to situation 161


1
Prof. Toshiyuki Sadanobu
1. Kyoto University

Continuing and Non-Continuing ‘Sentences’ in Tellings in Japanese Everyday Conversation 162


1
Dr. Yasuyuki Usuda
1. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

Japanese noun modifying clauses are more like sentences: structure and use in conversation 164
1 2
Dr. Natsuko Nakagawa , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono
1. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 2. University of Alberta

Mobilizing syntactic rules for discourse organization: A case study of utterances starting with a depen-
dent element in Japanese 165
1 2
Dr. Fumino Horiuchi , Dr. Toshihide Nakayama
1. Daito Bunka University, 2. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Morpheme-based sentence co-construction in Japanese conversation 166


1
Dr. Daisuke Yokomori
1. Kyoto University

The Multiple Clause Linkage Structure of Japanese speech 168


1
Dr. Takehiko Maruyama
1. Senshu University

Are you being rude, sarcastic or both? Sarcastic questions as a tool for conveying impoliteness 170
1 1
Ms. Efrat Levnat , Prof. Agnes Celle
1. universite paris cite

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How norms of proper behaviour are defined, constructed and maintained on discussion fora: the case of
one Macedonian internet forum 172
Ms. Fevzudina Saračević1 , Prof. Liljana Mitkovska 2
1. Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, 2. AUE-FON University in Skopje

In or out? perceiving identities through translanguaging practices in the Hong Kong protest 173
1
Ms. Vivian Yip
1. City University of Hong Kong

Interpersonal function of concessives in the R/ChangeMyView argumentative discourse. 174


1 2
Dr. Thomas Messerli , Prof. Daria Dayter
1. University of Basel, 2. Tampere University

Misunderstandings involving a mismatch between expectation and perception of politeness on Reddit 175
1
Ms. Alisa Kavetska
1. Jagiellonian University in Krakow

Negotiating relational work and (im)politeness: The use of creative forms of address and terms of refer-
ence in female-only/dominant subreddit communities 176
1
Dr. Shengnan Liu
1. Lancaster University

A Contrastive Study of Chinese and American English Stand-up Comedy 178


1
Ms. Jie Zhang
1. University of Wisconsin - Madison

Conflict or Solidarity? Discursive Practices and Social Functions of Complaints in Chinese and English TV
Series 179
1
Mr. Shuyang Ye
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Cross-cultural speech act creation on Twitter: an examination of Spanish and English complaint produc-
tion 180
1
Ms. Macy Floyd
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Requesting Behaviour in British and Greek Service Encounters. 181


1 2
Ms. Antonia Tsiakiri , Dr. Federica Barbieri
1. ESL Teacher, 2. Swansea University

“Her behaviour was disgusting”: Emotion and morality in online complaint discourse 183
1 2 3 3
Dr. Lindsay Yotsukura , Mr. Ayodele Akinola , Mr. Jonathan St-Onge , Mr. Will H W Thompson , Dr. Simon
DeDeo 4 , Mr. Sanshiroh Ogawa 1
1. University of Maryland-College Park, 2. Michigan Technological University, 3. University of Vermont, 4. Carnegie Mellon
University/Santa Fe Institute

Making distance with the fetus; conversation analysis on prenatal genetic counseling 186
1 2 3
Dr. Michie Kawashima , Prof. Hiroki Maeda , Dr. Akane Kondo
1. Kyoto sangyo university, 2. Rikkyo University, 3. Aiiku Clinic, Aiiku Maternal and Child Health Center

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Nominalizer nun-ke in Korean conversation: Impersonalizing through distancing 187


1
Prof. Kyu-hyun Kim
1. Kyung Hee University

Pragmaticization of the Japanese honorific suffix -haru as a resource to mark agentive “distance” 188
1 2
Dr. Emi Morita , Dr. Akira Takada
1. National University of Singapore, 2. Kyoto University

Social and spatial distancing in preschool groups in Sweden and Japan: Locating place of self and other
in group activities 189
1 2
Prof. Matthew Burdelski , Prof. Asta Cekaite
1. Osaka University, 2. Linköping University

Deconstructing Nuanced Perspectives in The Nigerian Boko Haram Experience: A Critical Socio-
Pragmatic Consideration 191
1
Dr. Oluwatomi Adeoti
1. Kwara State University, Malete

From Terrorists to Mere Bandits: Atypical Discourse Representations of the Diachronic Boko Haram
Nomenclature in selected Nigerian Newspapers 192
1
Dr. Daniel Nwogwugwu
1. Bowen University, Iwo

Linguistic Landscape of Public Signages in Nigeria Security Formations as Metaphorical (Re-


)Construction of Readiness Culture in the Fight against Insecurity 193
1 2
Dr. Chuka Ononye , Dr. Christabel Onyema
1. University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 2. Imo State University, Owerri

Pragmatic Presupposition of Newspaper Headlines on Children’s Involvement in Terrorism in Nigeria 194


1
Dr. Ezekiel Opeyemi Olajimbiti
1. Federal University Lokoja, Nigeria

Recruitment strategies and loyalist ideology in terrorist rhetoric in Africa and the Middle East 195
1
Dr. Ayo Osisanwo
1. Department of English, University of Ibadan, Ibadan

Terrorism in Flux: A Historical Pragmatic Tracing of Boko-haram Operations in Nigeria 196


1 2
Prof. Akin Odebunmi , Dr. Ruth Karachi Benson Oji
1. University of Ibadan, 2. Pan-Atlantic

The Pragmatics of terrorism in Ahmed Yerima’ Pari 197


1
Dr. Simeon Ajiboye
1. Bowen University, Iwo

Doing humor in a linguistically heterogeneous peer group. Children’s creative wordplay during on-task
and off-task activities 199
1
Mr. Nicola Nasi
1. University of Bologna

Language play and code-switching in bilingual preschoolers’ playtime interaction 200


1
Dr. Younhee Kim
1. University of Macau

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Translanguaging in Welsh traditional storytelling activities 201


1 2
Dr. Amanda Bateman , Prof. Friederike Kern
1. University of Waikato, 2. University of Bielefeld

Translanguaging, Language Creativity and Belonging in Boys’ Peer Group Play in a Bilingual Spanish-
English Preschool 202
1
Prof. Amy Kyratzis
1. Department of Education, University of California

Young boys’ heteroglossic practices in afterschool social networking: Creating social spaces for exploring
linguistic varieties and language norms in heterogeneous peer group settings 203
1
Prof. Ann-Carita Evaldsson
1. Department of Eucation, Uppsala University

Clause linkage strategies in colloquial Ancient Greek: The case of hṓste in documentary papyri 206
1
Dr. Giuseppina di Bartolo
1. University of Cologne

Clause-combining at the grammar-discourse interface in French 207


1 2
Dr. Wout Van Praet , Prof. Liesbeth Degand
1. UCLouvain, 2. UC Louvain

Context-dependent grammar: The Japanese sentence-final tteyuu in Twitter 209


1
Dr. Michiko Kaneyasu
1. Old Dominion University

How does insubordination relate to subordination? A constructional cline of discourse uses of comme
si-clauses in French 210
1 2 2
Mr. Víctor Royo Viñuales , Dr. Wout Van Praet , Prof. Liesbeth Degand
1. Université de Liège - UCLouvain, 2. UCLouvain

Insubordination and discourse structure: on Spanish insubordinate conditionals 212


1
Dr. Pedro Gras
1. Universiteit Antwerpen

Ob-Clauses in Old High German: Factors in the Divergence of Complement and Adverbial Clauses 214
1
Mr. Michael Redmond
1. Université de Neuchâtel

Periodic style and the syntax of clause linkage in Early New High German and Early Modern Danish 216
1
Prof. Pierre-Yves Modicom
1. Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3

Spanish ‘que’-constructions from an interactional-constructional perspective: patterns, levels, and de-


grees of (in)dependence 217
1
Prof. María Sol Sansiñena
1. KU Leuven

Stand-Alone Nominalization in Modern South Arabian 219


1
Dr. Fabio Gasparini
1. Freie Universität Berlin

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Subordination and insubordination in if/si-constructions: Evidence from spoken and written English and
Spanish 221
Dr. Cristina Lastres-Lopez1
1. Universidad de Sevilla

The discourse-grammar interface in the development of new adversative connectives 222


1
Ms. Luisa Ferrari
1. Sao Paolo State University

The semantics and pragmatics of insubordinate conditional clauses in Hungarian 223


1
Dr. Csilla Ilona Dér
1. Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

“It seems you are offended by my joke”: Negotiating attributions of offence to humorous language 226
1 2 2
Dr. Chi-He Elder , Dr. Eleni Kapogianni , Dr. Isabella Reichl
1. University of East Anglia, 2. University of Kent

Doing humour: Humour as behaviour 227


1
Dr. Henri de Jongste
1. Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts

Effects and functions of humour in selected talk shows 228


1
Dr. Agnieszka Piskorska
1. University of Warsaw

From humor in the lab to humor in the wild: neuro-linguistic studies dialoguing with the approaches of
conversational humor 229
1
Dr. Luca Bischetti
1. University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia

GIFs and conversational humour in Chinese instant messaging interactions 231


1 2
Dr. Jia Qiu , Prof. Xinren Chen
1. Jiaxing University, 2. Nanjing University

Inference in conversational humor 232


1
Prof. Laura Alba-Juez
1. UNED

Making Learner Agency and Interactional Competence “Visible” by Examining the Dynamic Construction
of Interactional Humor in a Multilingual Classroom 233
1
Dr. Yumi Matsumoto
1. University of Pennsylvania

Micro-conversations and ephemeral community in YouTube humorous comments 234


1
Prof. Salvatore Attardo
1. Texas A&M University-Commerce

Multimodal teasing in face-to-face interaction: a corpus-based approach. 235


1 1 1
Ms. Clarissa de Vries , Prof. Bert Oben , Mr. Geert Brône
1. KU Leuven

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negotiating Common Ground in Conversational Humor: The Case of Indonesian Humor Talk Show 236
1
Mrs. Hyunisa Rahmanadia
1. Eötvös Loránd University

Not bloody funny: Rhetorical resources for laughter in interaction 237


1 1 1
Dr. Christine Howes , Dr. Vladislav Maraev , Dr. Ellen Breitholtz
1. University of Gothenburg

Sequential organization of conversational humor: comparison of conversations among friends and


strangers 238
1
Dr. Béatrice Priego-Valverde
1. Aix-Marseille University

What’s the preferred response to humour? Responding to conversational humour in initial interactions 239
1 1
Mr. Amir Sheikhan , Prof. Michael Haugh
1. The University of Queensland

Formulating location and distance in post-match Tinder chats 241


1
Prof. Will Gibson
1. UCL, Institute of Education

Membership categorization analysis of post-match Tinder chat conversations 242


1
Dr. Carles Roca-Cuberes
1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Online dating, gender, & power: Digital turn-taking and making the first move on Bumble 243
1
Dr. Riki Thompson
1. University of Washington

“So fast on the keys, when do you have time to meet”: 4 ways invitations are generated interactionally in
Danish Tinder chats 244
1
Ms. Elisabeth Andersen
1. University of Southern Denmark

Complex Syntactic Patterns with German Verba sentiendi in Past Tense: Action Formation with Meinen
(‘to mean’) and Finden (‘to find’) 246
1
Ms. Sophia Fiedler
1. University of Neuchâtel

Complex syntax as multiple projections 248


1
Prof. Peter Auer
1. University of Freiburg

Complex syntax for assessing situations: ‘Pseudo-cleft’ construction in Mandarin conversation 249
1
Mr. Di Fang
1. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Discovering pseudo-cleft constructions in Estonian 251


1 2
Dr. Marri Amon , Prof. Leelo Keevallik
1. University of Tartu, 2. Linköping University

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Incremental clause-combining at the grammar-body interface 252


1 2 3
Prof. Jan Lindström , Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler , Prof. Yael Maschler
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Neuchâtel, 3. University of Haifa

Syntax and music for interaction: The [CTP + Music] Construction in Hebrew Musician-to-musician Dis-
course 253
1
Mr. Yuval Geva
1. University of Haifa

Teasing via the lo, ki ‘no, because’ construction in Hebrew face-to-face interaction 255
1 1
Dr. Anna Inbar , Prof. Yael Maschler
1. University of Haifa

Temporal clauses and insubordination in English: Evidence from conversation 257


1 2
Prof. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen , Prof. Sandra A Thompson
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of California Santa Barbara

The complex syntax of the the-N-is structure in spoken English: When projection meets accommodation 258
1
Dr. Florine Berthe
1. University of Pau and the Adour Countries

When e/‘and’ contrasts & ma/‘but’ connects: Additive and adversative conjunctions in Collaborative turns 259
Ms. Virginia Calabria1
1. KU Leuven

ze ma she-‘ani tsarix ‘that’s what I need’: ‘Reversed pseudo-clefts’ in Hebrew conversation 260
1 1
Prof. Yael Maschler , Dr. Hilla Polak-Yitzhaki
1. University of Haifa

« If you have a patrol at hand » – Insubordinate ‘if’-requests in emergency calls 262


1 1
Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler , Dr. Anne-Sylvie Horlacher
1. University of Neuchâtel

“We are completely stunned”: Corrective facework in hosts’ responses to AirBnB negative reviews 264
1 1
Ms. Patricia Díaz-Muñoz , Dr. Carmen Maíz-Arévalo
1. Complutense University of Madrid

(Re)Claiming epistemic personhood in Spanish on Twitter: A corpus-based examination of responses to


attacks to epistemic personhood 265
1
Dr. Manuel Padilla Cruz
1. Universidad de Sevilla

Are all negative reviews alike? A contrastive study of conflictual language in product and experience-
based reviews 267
1
Dr. María de la O Hernández López
1. Pablo de Olavide University

Colorism attributions and (non) verifications 268


1 2
Prof. Patricia Bou-Franch , Prof. Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich
1. Universitat de València, 2. University of North Carolina, Charlotte

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversational Human Voice in answers to complaints in the telecommunications sector: a contrastive


genre analysis of English and Spanish emails 269
Dr. Rebecca Van Herck 1 , Dr. Lieve Vangehuchten2
1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 2. University of Antwerp

Disagreement and reliability in comments for and against COVID vaccination on Facebook. Scientific vs
personal evidence 270
1 1
Dr. Marta Albelda Marco , Dr. Dorota Kotwica
1. University of Valencia

‘No es mi presidente, es un delincuente’. Aggressive digital interactions on Pedro Sánchez tweets 271
1
Prof. María Luisa Carrió-Pastor
1. Universitat Politècnica de València

Divergence and incongruence increase coordination in interaction 273


1 2 2 3
Dr. Gregory Mills , Dr. Christine Howes , Prof. Eleni Gregoromichelaki , Prof. Patrick Healey
1. Kingston University London, 2. University of Gothenburg, 3. Queen Mary University of London

Divergent senses and sensors in multimodal recipient design: Avoiding gestural mismatches in human-
robot interaction scenarios 274
1 1
Prof. Ellen Fricke , Dr. Jana Bressem
1. Chemnitz University of Technology

Faith in Deepfakes: Plausibility and veracity in digital face manipulation 275


1
Dr. Remo Gramigna
1. University of Turin

Group differences in crossmodal correspondences and multisensory perception involving music 276
1
Dr. Bruno Mesz
1. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero

Olfactory interferences in multimodal communication: from seduction to aversion 277


1
Prof. Paul Bouissac
1. University of Toronto

When divergence opens to the exploration of Alterity. Experiences of Infopoetry as abductive design 278
1 1
Prof. Salvatore Zingale , Ms. Arianna Bellantuono
1. Politecnico di Milano

“J’imagine” as deverbal discourse marker in spoken French. Position in turns and interactions 280
1
Mr. Stefan Schneider
1. Universität Graz

An utterance-centered corpus-pragmatic approach to the categorization of information source in spoken


Italian 282
1 1 1
Prof. Johanna Miecznikowski , Ms. Elena Battaglia , Mr. Christian Geddo
1. Università della Svizzera italiana

Discourse functions of look and see as evidential and epistemic markers in Italian political discourse: a
corpus based study 284
1 2
Ms. Tanja Trebucchi , Ms. Serena Coschignano
1. University of Bergamo, 2. University of Pavia

xix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Distribution and function(s) of parenthetical mi sembra/mi pare in spoken Italian 285


1
Mr. Flavio Pisciotta
1. Department of Humanities (DipSUm), University of Salerno

Evidential last I checked expressions 286


1 1
Mr. Ozan Mustafa , Prof. Gunther Kaltenböck
1. University of Graz

Expressing a low degree of certainty in interaction: the French epistemic adverb peut-être ‘perhaps’ in a
corpus of political debates and work meetings 287
1 1
Mrs. Ana Keck , Dr. Jérôme Jacquin
1. Université de Lausanne

French markers of evidentiality in interaction 288


1
Mrs. Gerda Hassler
1. University of Potsdam

Interactional uses of evidential markers in Galician 289


1
Dr. Mercedes González Vázquez
1. Universidade de Vigo

Managing knowledge in financial dialogues: corpus annotation of epistemic modality and evidentiality
in earnings conference calls 291
1 1
Mrs. Costanza Lucchini , Prof. Andrea Rocci
1. Università della Svizzera italiana

Qu’est-ce que (je vois que) tu fais ? De quoi (j’entends que) tu parles ? On the interaction of wh-placement
and situational verbs in French partial interrogatives 292
1 2
Mr. Jan Fliessbach , Mx. Johanna Rockstroh
1. University of Potsdam, 2. University of Bremen

Reportive evidentiality in French-in-interaction: distribution and pragmatic functions of reportive evi-


dentials 294
1 1
Ms. Clotilde Robin , Dr. Jérôme Jacquin
1. Université de Lausanne

Uncertainty vs. dispreference of German “ich weiß nicht”: A mixed-methods workflow of a corpus-based
interactional linguistic study 295
1 1
Dr. Henrike Helmer , Dr. Silke Reineke
1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Co-constructing sociability in online gaming communities 297


1
Dr. Carolin Debray
1. University of Basel

Digital play for life-saving knowledge? The multimodal arrangement in VR applications for first-aid pro-
cedures 298
Prof. Dusan Stamenkovic 1 , Prof. Janina Wildfeuer2
1. Södertörn University, 2. University of Groningen

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expression of embodiment in a virtual environment: players projecting themselves into the digital world 299
Dr. Julie Bardet1 , Ms. Lydia Heiden 2
1. ENS/ICAR, 2. ICAR Lab

Identity Work by Australian Fortnite Content Creators: Commercial, Public and Private Identities 300
1
Dr. Jonathan White
1. Högskolan Dalarna

Locating enemies in cooperative online games: on markers and professional vision 301
1
Mr. Federico Corradini
1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Multimodal Practices in MOBA Games on the Example of League of Legend‘s Player Communication 302
Mr. Luca Ferrari1 , Dr. Hiloko Kato 2
1. UZH University of Zürich, 2. Department of German Studies University of Zurich / Game Design Zurich University of the Arts

Non-task-related joint activities in massively multiplayer online games 303


1
Dr. Yan Zhou
1. Northwestern University

Videogame system messages as turns: a new participant 304


1
Ms. Sara Badia Climent
1. University of Valencia

“right - left - yes”: the interactional and collaborative achievement of synchronization with the avatar in
a Kinect dance game 306
1 1
Ms. Isabel Colon de Carvajal , Dr. Heike Baldauf-quilliatre
1. ICAR Lab

Coherence markers, word-finding difficulties, and their relationships: what can we learn from
Alzheimer’s disease? 308
1
Dr. Aurélie Pistono
1. Ghent University

Conversational and intonational characteristics of dialogue between autistic adults 309


1 2 1
Dr. Simon Wehrle , Prof. Kai Vogeley , Prof. Martine Grice
1. IfL-Phonetik, University of Cologne, 2. Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Cologne

Disfluencies and interruptions in everyday conversations with autistic children 310


1
Mrs. Lisa Vössing
1. Bielefeld University

In-the-moment episodes as structuring devices in the conversation of people with dementia 311
1
Dr. Simon Williams
1. University of Sussex

Linguistic correlates of cognitive impairment: findings from a corpus of pathological speech produced
by elderly Italian subjects with dementia 312
1 2 2 2
Ms. Elena Martinelli , Ms. Vita Garrammone , Ms. Francesca Mori , Ms. Incoronata Nolè , Ms. Franca
Cameriero 2 , Dr. Matilde Martino 2 , Dr. Gaetano Di Bello 2 , Prof. Gloria Gagliardi1
1. University of Bologna, 2. Universo Salute – Opera Don Uva

xxi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Non-autistic versus autistic children: Why should I say “um” if I’m not talking to anybody? 314
1 2 3 4 5
Ms. Cynthia Boo , Dr. Aaron Shield , Dr. Nancy McIntyre , Dr. Ruth Grossman , Dr. Peter Mundy , Dr. Letitia
Naigles 1 , Dr. Emily Zane 6
1. University of Connecticut, 2. Miami University, 3. University of Central Florida, 4. Emerson College, 5. University of California
- Davis, 6. James Madison University

On the representation of the other discourse in the autobiographical narrative of the speaker suffering
from aphasia: atypical characteristics 315
1
Dr. Aleksandra Nowakowska
1. Université Montpellier 3, UMR 5267 Praxiling

Prosody, gesture and disfluency in teenagers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) 316
1 1 2
Ms. Cwiosna Roques , Prof. Christelle Dodane , Dr. Ludivine Crible
1. Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3, 2. Ghent University

Relationships between speech and gesture in the production of disfluencies in stuttering and non-
stuttering adult French speakers 317
1 2 3
Prof. Christelle Dodane , Dr. Loulou Kosmala , Dr. Ivana Didirková
1. Laboratoire CLESTHIA (EA 7345) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2. Laboratoire PRISMES EA 4398 / EA 370 GReMLIN, Univer-
sité Paris Nanterre, 3. Laboratoire TransCrit UR 1569, Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis

The role of discourse markers, backchannels and pauses on discourse structure in Augmentative and
Alternative Communication (AAC) 319
1 1 1 1
Dr. Iris Hübscher , Prof. Christiane Hohenstein , Dr. Martina Spiess , Prof. Brigitte Gantschnig
1. Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Change of the world: With respect to seysang in Korean 321


1
Prof. Hyun Sook Lee
1. Jangan University

Development of the Vietnamese discourse marker ‘thật’/’thật là’ from the 17th century to the present 322
1
Dr. Mayumi Adachi
1. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

From a unit of time on a temporal axis to a discourse marker on a contextual–spatial axis: The case of
shunkan ‘(at the) moment’ 323
1 2
Prof. Reijirou Shibasaki , Ms. Keiko Takahashi
1. Meiji University/University of British Columbia, 2. Toyo University

From objective to subjective and to intersubjective functions: The case of the Thai jing 324
1
Ms. Kultida Khammee
1. University of Phayao

From temporal adverbials to discourse structuring markers: The development of Chinese yuanlai and its
Japanese cognate ganrai 325
1
Prof. Wenjiang Yang
1. University of Macau

From truth to truly: the case of shin-ni ‘truly’ in Japanese 326


1 2
Dr. Yuko Higashiizumi , Prof. Reijirou Shibasaki
1. Toyo University, 2. Meiji University/University of British Columbia

xxii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Textual-to-epistemicity or else? The case of Chinese shenzhi (yu)and Korean sim-ci-e 328
1
Prof. Haiping Long
1. Sun Yat-sen University

The way of truth: The case of the Korean DM cincca in comparison with Chinese DMs zhenshi and zhende 329
Prof. Seongha Rhee1 , Ms. Lin Zhang2
1. Mahidol University & HUFS, 2. Seoul National University

Registers of gender conscious person references in German 331


1
Prof. Helga Kotthoff
1. University of Freiburg

Sequential stand-offs in police encounters with the public 332


Prof. Geoffrey Raymond1
1. University of California Santa Barbara

The effects of agency on the construction of identities in political interviews 333


1 1
Dr. Luisa Granato Grasso , Mrs. Maria Moccero
1. Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Transgression and tradition in teenage girls’ talk: Positioning self in a changing world 334
1
Prof. Elena Raymond
1. University of California Santa Barbara

Unravelling bureaucratic dilemmas: identity and communicative style in advice seeking 335
1
Prof. Jenny Cook-Gumperz
1. University of California Santa Barbara

A-typical discourse as creative practice in the interaction of a care home 337


1
Prof. Almut Koester
1. WU Wien

Building a child-centered participation framework as a stepping stone to build trust in a medical en-
counter 338
1 2
Dr. Stéphanie Caët , Dr. Sara Debulpaep
1. Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France., 2. University Hospital Gent

Doctor-parent-child and facework theory 339


1
Prof. Karin Aronsson
1. Stockholm University

Gaze functions in repair-like interactions between a 10 year-old communicator with anarthria and his
mother 340
1
Mx. Aleksandra Kurlenkova
1. New York University

Introduction to PANIC2: ‘Pragmatic ANalysis of Interaction between Children and medical Caretakers’ 342
1 2 3
Dr. Vikki Janke , Dr. Sara Debulpaep , Prof. Ilse Depraetere
1. University of Kent, 2. University Hospital Gent, 3. University of Lille

Making a child feel at ease during a medical consultation: facework strategies 343
1 2 3
Prof. Ilse Depraetere , Dr. Sara Debulpaep , Ms. Siham Ezzahid
1. University of Lille, UMR 8163 STL, 2. University Hospital Gent, 3. University of Lille

xxiii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Cute snacks for empowered Chinese middle class women: How marketing colonizes ideological shifts 345
1 2
Prof. Gwen Bouvier , Ms. Menghan Deng
1. Shanghai International Studies University, 2. Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Gendering craft beer names 346


1 2
Mr. Steffen Schaub , Prof. Marcus Callies
1. University of Greifswald, 2. University of Bremen

Language, Food, and Sex in Taipivae, New Year’s Day, 2020 347
1
Dr. Kathleen Riley
1. Rutgers University

Linguistic and semiotic perspectives on nutrition as a gendered cultural practice – An introduction 348
Prof. Janina Wildfeuer1 , Prof. Theresa Heyd2 , Dr. Sofia Rüdiger3
1. University of Groningen, 2. University of Greifswald, 3. University of Bayreuth

On ‘pale hipsters’ and ‘well-educated young women’: A diachronic corpus-assisted analysis of gender
stereotypes in German veganism discourse 349
1
Mr. Markus Majewski
1. University of Hamburg

‘Eat your gender’: critical multimodal perspectives on gendering through food in global health and
lifestyle magazines 350
1 1
Ms. Iwona Gibas , Prof. Sylvia Jaworska
1. University of Reading

“Thirsty for More?”: Gender in Food and Beverage Advertising 351


1 1 1
Ms. Elisabeth Zimmermann , Dr. Anna Islentyeva , Ms. Hannah Graf
1. Universität Innsbruck

A pragmatic study of interactional explanation in Chinese from a Ba perspective 353


1
Dr. Yansheng Mao
1. Harbin Engineering University

Accommodation or appraisal: sentence-final-particles in ‘Ba’ dynamics 354


1
Dr. Yasuhiro Katagiri
1. Future University Hakodate

Analyzing Libyan Arabic interaction and communication from social and cultural perspectives: localiza-
tion of CA and DA 355
1
Prof. Mayouf Ali Amarif
1. Sebha University

Atmosphere in Japanese and Chinese Conversations: Relevance of Context and Interaction 356
1
Mr. Yusuke Mochizuki
1. Ritsumeikan University

Ba theory and deictic systems 357


1
Prof. Federica Da Milano
1. University of Milano-Bicocca

xxiv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ba Theory and the Creation of Humor Modality Through Pragmemic Triggers 358
1
Dr. William Beeman
1. University of Minnesota

Deictic expressions, interactional modality, and the ba-based cognition in Japanese and Korean 359
1 2
Prof. Kaoru Horie , Mr. Kangwon Lee
1. Kansai Gaidai University, 2. Nagoya University

Describing Experiences in ‘Languages of Craft’: Quotations Functioning as Interactional Modality in


Japanese Discourse 361
1
Ms. Yuko Nomura
1. Juntendo University

Habitual practices of gender presentations in Japanese society: How young and middle-aged generations
self-disclose and react on Instagram 362
1 1 2
Prof. Ayako Namba , Ms. Yuka Nishiyama , Prof. Masataka Yamaguchi
1. Kwansei Gakuin University, 2. Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Interactional Functions of ‘Deferential’ ‘-supnita’ in Korean Conversation 363


1
Prof. Myung-Hee Kim
1. Hanyang University, ERICA

Interactional Modality in Japanese verbal interaction 364


1
Prof. Yoko Fujii
1. Japan Women’s University

The fun of repeating: How Japanese speakers jointly engage in conversational playfulness 365
1
Dr. Saeko Machi
1. Rikkyo University

The Usage of Self-reference Terms in Japanese: An Interpretation Based on Ba Theory 366


1
Dr. Kishiko Ueno
1. Tokyo City University

Why Emancipatory Pragmatics, Why ba-theory, and why interactional modality? 367
1
Dr. Scott Saft
1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

Conversational repair in child-adult interaction of children speaking L1 or L2 369


1 1
Prof. Minna Laakso , Ms. Minea Tikkanen
1. University of Helsinki

Embodied and linguistic repair practices in in non-institutional play and language assessment by 5 to
6-yers-old children with developmental language disorder and typical language development 370
1 1
Dr. Inkeri Salmenlinna , Prof. Minna Laakso
1. University of Helsinki

Using video-based motion tracking to track movement during repair practices in child-adult interaction. 371
Dr. Satu Saalasti1 , Dr. Jaakko Kauramäki 1 , Prof. Minna Laakso 1
1. University of Helsinki

xxv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An interaction among governmental policies, communities and individuals with developmental difficul-
ties in England 373
Dr. Kyoko Aizaki1
1. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Bodies, languages, and other material conditions on migrant students’ interactions in Brazilian High Ed-
ucation 374
1
Prof. Joana Plaza Pinto
1. Universidade Federal de Goiás

Emerging intersubjectivity in multicultural interactions: The diversification of interactional resources


in second language Spanish 375
1
Mr. Victor Garre Leon
1. The University of Texas at Austin

Multimodal construction of pretend play interactions in kindergarten children 376


1 2
Dr. Valentina Fantasia , Dr. Arianna Bello
1. Lund University, 2. Università Roma 3

Prosodic variations in everyday interaction and how they guide social decision-making 377
1
Dr. Jonathan Caballero
1. Independent Researcher

When a proposal is rejected: Distributing deontic rights in emergency care team interactions in Japan
and the UK 378
1 2 3
Dr. Keiko Tsuchiya , Prof. Kyota Nakamura , Prof. Frank Coffey
1. Yokohama City University, 2. Yokohama City University Medical Centre, 3. Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust

Change and variation in address terms during oral arguments at the U.S. American Supreme Court 380
1
Dr. Elisabeth Reber
1. University of Bonn

Connecting socio-cultural developments and language change: Recent variation in gender-inclusivity in


the USA and the UK 381
1
Ms. Hanna Bruns
1. University of Bonn

Democratization effects on nominal address terms – Sir and Guys in 20th and 21st century American
English 382
1 2
Prof. Svenja Kranich , Ms. Hanna Bruns
1. Universität Bonn, 2. University of Bonn

Hi bestie! Address terms in communication between fashion companies and their customers on Insta-
gram 383
1 2
Dr. Minna Nevala , Dr. Hanna Limatius
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Vaasa

Intercultural perceptions of endearments and regional identity in Northern England 384


1
Dr. Nicole Baumgarten
1. University of Sheffield

xxvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The informal address term system of Sri Lankan English 385


1
Dr. Tobias Bernaisch
1. Justus Liebig University Giessen

Can expressive meaning be negotiated? Insights from a corpus-based study on lexical expressives 387
1
Ms. Mireia Cabanes-Calabuig
1. University of Cambridge

Identifying the core genre-related components of online discourses: Experimental and qualitative corpus
analytical methods 389
1
Ms. Júlia Ballagó
1. Eötvös Loránd University

Misinformation flourishes in L2: The Effect of Processing Disfluencies on Epistemic Vigilance 390
1
Prof. Didier Maillat
1. University of Fribourg

Pragmatic and social analyses of the discourse marker órale in Mexican Spanish 391
1 2
Ms. Elisa Camps Troncoso , Dr. Lori Czerwionka
1. Purdue University/Duolingo, 2. Purdue University

Pragmatic variation in Britain: A corpus-based study of politeness and social variation 392
1 1 2
Ms. Isolde van Dorst , Dr. Mathew Gillings , Prof. Jonathan Culpeper
1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, 2. Lancaster University

Pragmatics and mind-reading: an experimental investigation on the derivation of implicatures from the
listener’s perspective 393
1 2 3
Prof. Napoleon Katsos , Ms. Blanche Gonzales de Linares , Dr. Ekaterina Ostashchenko
1. Cambridge University, 2. University of Cambridge, 3. Manchester Metropolitan University

Resonance and Engagement ‘applied’ in Chinese Doctor-Patient interaction: A Western vs Traditional


Chinese medicine divide 394
1 2
Dr. Vittorio Tantucci , Dr. Carmen Lepadat
1. Lancaster University, 2. RomaTre University

Speaker trustworthiness: shall confidence match evidence? 395


1 1
Prof. Diana Mazzarella , Ms. Mélinda Pozzi
1. University of Neuchâtel

Third-wave im/politeness theory: Swearwords and the company they keep 396
1
Prof. Andreas Jucker
1. Universität Zürich

Why do we use the same words when we disagree with each other? An experimental approach to inter-
active alignment 397
1 2 3
Dr. Nele Põldvere , Dr. Victoria Johansson , Prof. Carita Paradis
1. University of Oslo/Lund University, 2. Lund University/University of Kristianstad, 3. Centre for Languages and Literature,
Lund University

‘You anti-semantic bastard!’ Impoliteness as a linguistic phenomenon. 398


1 2 2
Dr. Marta Andersson , Dr. Daniel Van Olmen , Prof. Jonathan Culpeper
1. Umeå University, 2. Lancaster University

xxvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Collaborative signing in a multiparty interaction: the case of overlap 400


1 2
Dr. Alysson Lepeut , Dr. Emily Shaw
1. Université de Namur, 2. Gallaudet University

Communication without a language model: The pragmatic skills of Balinese homesigners 401
1 1
Dr. Josefina Safar , Dr. Connie de Vos
1. Tilburg University

Conversational Repair in a Local Family Sign Language from Guatemala 402


1
Dr. Laura Horton
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Head Movements as Backchannels in American Sign Language Conversations 403


Mr. Paul Gabriola1
1. Gallaudet University

Self-initiated repair in German Sign Language (DGS) – results from the Public DGS Corpus 404
1 2
Ms. Elena Mpadanes , Prof. Okan Kubus
1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2. Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences

“Hey, look! This-is-im-por-tant!” Embodied focus during signing and speaking family dinners 405
1 2 3 4
Dr. Marion Blondel , Dr. Fanny Catteau , Prof. Christelle Dodane , Dr. Karine Martel , Prof. Aliyah Morgen-
stern 5
1. CNRS, France, 2. SFL, CNRS-Paris8, 3. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4. INSHEA, 5. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Constructing positive image at the first workplace meeting: insights from Chinese workplace reality show
interactions 407
Dr. Haidan Wang1 , Ms. Shu-Yu Huang1
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Context-dependent identity work in a workplace observation reality TV show 408


1
Dr. Weihua Zhu
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Heroes in harm’s way: Constructing images of healthcare workers in Chinese government microblogs
during COVID-19 409
1 1
Dr. Xueyu Wang , Ms. Zheng Zheng
1. Nantong University

Multimodal Evaluation and the Promotion of China’s National Image 410


1
Dr. Dezheng Feng
1. Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

The Image Work by Chinese Grass-root Officials in their Initial Interactions with Villagers 411
1 1
Ms. Hao Liu , Prof. Xinren Chen
1. Nanjing University

The pragmatics of Chinese as interlanguage: A study of compliment responses by British L2 Chinese learn-
ers 412
1 2
Dr. Yun He , Dr. Chengyu Zhuang
1. Cardiff University, 2. Oxbridge AcaVice

xxviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Bushi wo V(P)+ ni”: Managing the speaker’s image in interaction 414


1
Ms. Xiaohong Liu
1. Nanjing University

“Wo zhege ren…” (“I am a person who …”): Self-image foregrounding as a disclaiming device in Chinese
televised interviews 415
1 1
Dr. Yingzhe Jin , Prof. Xinren Chen
1. Nanjing University

Expectations of and influences on politeness – Lay perspectives in the context of human-human and
human-robot interaction 417
1 2
Ms. Eleonore Lumer , Dr. Hendrik Buschmeier
1. Bielefeld University, 2. University of Bielefeld

Folk concepts of politeness, respect and successful communication in Namibian English 419
1 1
Prof. Anne Schröder , Dr. Pawel Sickinger
1. Bielefeld University

Talking about national and regional boundaries: The public discourse on communicative differences
in German 420
1
Ms. Ronja Eggenschwiler
1. University of Zurich

What the meta-illocutionary lexicon can tell us about speech act taxonomies 421
1
Mr. Dominik Schoppa
1. University of Augsburg

“This apology doesn’t seem sincere at all”: a cross-cultural analysis of online (meta)discourses around
Will Smith’s apology 422
1
Ms. Eugenia Diegoli
1. University of Bologna

“Well, there’s an understatement, yes”: Meta-rhetorical uses of understatement 423


1
Prof. Claudia Claridge
1. University of Augsburg

Co-speech gestures in interpreting sign to speech 425


1 1
Dr. Liona Paulus , Dr. Jana Hosemann
1. University of Cologne

Exploring the semiotic complexity of interpreter-mediated discourse: Insights from a multimodal anal-
ysis of information provision strategies in medical consultations 426
1 1 1 2 3
Dr. Inez Beukeleers , Dr. Laura Theys , Prof. Heidi Salaets , Dr. Demi Krystallidou , Prof. Peter Pype , Mr.
Geert Brône 1
1. KU Leuven, 2. University of Surrey, 3. University of Ghent

Functions of gestures during disfluencies in simultaneous interpreting of speech 427


1
Prof. Alan Cienki
1. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

xxix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gestural alignment in spoken simultaneous interpreting: A mixed-method approach 428


1
Dr. Inés Olza
1. University of Navarra

Gesture and cognitive load in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting: A pilot study 429
1 1
Dr. Yuetao Ren , Prof. Jianhua Wang
1. Renmin University of China

How does physical separation affect the interpreter’s use of gestures in distance interpreting? 430
1
Dr. Jelena Vranjes
1. Ghent University

Making gestures inside and outside the booth ― A comparative study 431
Dr. Celia Martín de León1 , Dr. Elena Galvão2
1. Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2. Universidade do Porto

Reformulation structures in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) > French interpreting: A pilot study 432
1
Dr. Sílvia Gabarró-López
1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Self- and other-oriented gestures in consecutive dialogue interpreting: impact on the cognitive load and
performance appraisal in interpreter-mediated interactions 433
1 1
Dr. Monika Chwalczuk , Dr. Robert Balas
1. Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences

Simultaneous interpreters’ gestures as a window on conceptual alignment 434


1 2 3
Dr. Terry Janzen , Dr. Barbara Shaffer , Dr. Lorraine Leeson
1. University of Manitoba, 2. University of New Mexico, 3. Trinity College Dublin

The embodiment of renditions in signed-to-spoken language interpreting: Recontextualizing constructed


dialogue 435
1
Mrs. Vibeke Bø
1. OsloMet

Construction of shared affect in a Japanese research interview: changes in participation framework 438
1
Dr. Haruko Cook
1. Univery of Hawaii at Manoa

Formality and Intimacy in Japanese Variety Shows 439


1
Prof. Naomi Geyer
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Invoking rapport and feelings of usualness: Effects of quotidian reframing in a formal context 440
1
Prof. Yoshiko Matsumoto
1. Stanford University

Making connections: Reported speech, repetition, and eccentric metaphor in research interview dis-
course 441
1
Dr. Satoko Suzuki
1. Macalester College

xxx
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sounding like a skateboarder at the Tokyo Olympics: Vernacular honorific speech style and innovative
speaker identity construction in Japanese 442
Ms. Sara King1
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Style-shifting between Standard and Kansai Japanese at a business manners training camp 443
1
Dr. Junko Saito
1. Temple University, Japan Campus

Vernacularizing the Japanese TV live sport broadcast: A frame analysis of a youth vernacular in the Tokyo
Olympic skateboard telecast 444
1
Dr. Momoko Nakamura
1. Kanto Gakuin University

‘Hey! What are you doing now!’: Negotiating closeness and workplace relationships on Japanese TikTok 445
1
Dr. Gavin Furukawa
1. Sophia University

Demystifying Dementia: A Corpus Linguistic Study of the Construction of Alzheimer’s in Film 447
1
Dr. Monica Cantero-Exojo
1. Drew University

Emblems as Rhemes: Authenticity, Innocence, and Otherness in a Lahu Film 448


1
Dr. Judith Pine
1. Western Washington University

Experiencing Water and Swimming: Figurative Meaning and World Creation in Cinema 449
1
Dr. Eduardo Urios-Aparisi
1. University of Connecticut

Telecinematic culture and memetic recycling in pandemic times: Spanning the fictional - non-fictional
divide 450
1
Prof. Jan Chovanec
1. Masaryk University

The Pragmatics of Horror: Vertical Despair, Waste, and Wealth Inequality in The Platform (2019) 451
1
Dr. Ruth Yuste-Alonso
1. Hendrix College

Um David e muitos Golias: hyperbolization of fiction in Portuguese sports news 452


1
Dr. MariaClotilde Almeida
1. University of Lisbon - Portugal

“進診室前，�������,謝謝! Please take a picture of your tongue before you enter the consultation room,
thank you!”: Strategic uses of alternative modalities in Traditional Chinese Medicine consultations 454
1
Dr. Anne Schluter
1. Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

Communicating Uncertainty about COVID-19 to the Public: Variations of Speaker Identity and COVID-19
Development 455
1 2
Dr. Yi An , Dr. Mian Jia
1. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 2. The University of Texas at Austin

xxxi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Healthcare practitioner discussions with people with epilepsy warning people about risk: The exam ques-
tion. 456
Dr. Cordet Smart1 , Ms. Samantha Finlay 2 , Ms. Samantha Ashby 3 , Prof. Rohit Shankar 4 , Dr. Louise Gates 1 , Mr.
Wayne Flanagan 1 , Ms. Chelsea Hill 1 , Dr. Craig Newman 5
1. Exeter University, 2. Ulster university/Exeter University, 3. SUDEP Action, 4. Plymouth University, 5. UXClinician Ltd

Identity and Meaning Making in Persons with Dysarthria from an Acquired Brain Injury. Arguments for
More Inclusive Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks 457
1
Prof. Melissa Moyer
1. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Occupational Hazards and Challenged Bodies: Physiotherapists Interacting with Covid-19 Patients during
Respiratory Failure Treatment. 458
1
Prof. Stef Slembrouck
1. Linguistics, Ghent University

Remediation of narratives in podcasts on mental health and eating disorders 459


1
Dr. Małgorzata Sokół
1. University of Szczecin

Discourses of infertility on Instagram: constructing knowledge and (shared) identities through online
narratives 461
1 1
Ms. Sofie van der Meij , Dr. Jana Declercq
1. University of Groningen

Fellow sufferers have mutual sympathy: Comforting discourse among Chinese cancer patients in online
health community 462
1
Ms. Yue Zhao
1. Harbin Engineering University

Hierarchies of Knowledge in Responses to Messages of Newbies in Online Health Support Groups 463
Prof. Barbara De Cock1 , Prof. Carolina Figueras Bates 2
1. UC Louvain, 2. Universitat de Barcelona

How Multimodal Affordances of Platforms Shape the Epistemic Engine of Health Communities Online: A
Case Study 464
1
Dr. Heike Ortner
1. University of Innsbruck

Knowledge formation and patient expertise in Polish health communities on Facebook 465
1 2
Dr. Anna Tereszkiewicz , Dr. Magdalena Szczyrbak
1. Jagiellonian University in Krakow, 2. Jagiellonian University in Krakow, University of Pardubice

Sharing and reshaping specialized knowledge in online health communities: A quali-quantitative analy-
sis 466
1 2 1 3 4
Dr. Sarah Bigi , Dr. Vittorio Ganfi , Dr. Sibilla Parlato , Prof. Valentina Piunno , Dr. Maria Grazia Rossi
1. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2. Università Roma 3, 3. Università degli Studi di Bergamo, 4. Universidade Nova de
Lisboa

xxxii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Children’s linguistic abilities at 5-6 years of age can be predicted by expressive pragmatic skills at 3-4
years of age 468
Dr. Núria Esteve-Gibert1 , Dr. Nadia Ahufinger 1 , Ms. Julia Florit-Pons 2 , Dr. Mariia Pronina 2 , Prof. Pilar Prieto 3
1. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 3. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Disfluency Use as a Window to Pragmatic Language Competence in Bilingual Children with and without
Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) 469
1
Mrs. Marianna Beradze
1. Bar-Ilan University

How does the Degree of Intimacy Affect the Expressions of Suggesting Ideas?: A Comparative Analysis in
Japanese/American Task-based Interaction 470
1
Mrs. Lisa Shinke
1. Japan Women’s University

Inferential skills in children with Developmental Language Disorder: insights from a narrative compre-
hension task 471
1 2
Dr. Elena Pagliarini , Ms. Caterina Scilla
1. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2. Azienda AULSS 2 Marca Trevigiana

Investigating the effect of discourse structure in the derivation of implicature in autism 472
1 1 2
Dr. Elena Castroviejo , Ms. Isabel Martín-González , Prof. Agustin Vicente
1. University of the Basque Country, 2. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque Country

Metaphor comprehension in developmental dyslexia: an eye-tracking study. 473


1 2 1
Ms. Rita Cersosimo , Prof. Paul Engelhardt , Prof. Filippo Domaneschi
1. University of Genoa, 2. University of East Anglia

Retrieving implied meanings in a native vs a foreign language – inferencing skills among young adults 474
1 1 1
Prof. Emanuela Sanfelici , Dr. Elena Pagliarini , Prof. Sara Gesuato
1. University of Padua

Sentence processing at the syntax-pragmatics interface: Interindividual variation and ASD-related psy-
chological traits 475
1
Dr. Anna Czypionka
1. University of Konstanz

What inferences do people actually make on encountering informationally-redundant utterances? An


individual differences study 476
1 1 1
Ms. Margarita Ryzhova , Ms. Alexandra Mayn , Prof. Vera Demberg
1. Saarland University

Analysis of Dynamic Structure in Multimodal Information in Manzai: Forming and Unforming the Pat-
terns 478
1 1
Dr. Mamiko Sakata , Ms. Natsuho Miyagi
1. Doshisha University

How are knowledge, skills and emotions handed down to apprentices in pottery class where the master
is a person with aphasia? 479
1 2
Prof. Hiro Yuki Nisisawa , Prof. Rui Sakaida
1. Tokiwa University, 2. Future University Hakodate

xxxiii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Imitation and simulation in Jiu-jitsu practice: Participants’ orientation toward the organization of the
class 480
Dr. Yasuharu Den1
1. Chiba University

Instructing and Learning Kata in Unison: A Multimodal Analysis of a Taido Lesson. 481
1
Dr. Ikuyo Morimoto
1. Kwansei Gakuin University

Multimodal Analysis of Kata-based Training in a Child-oriented Karate Lesson: How to Achieve an Ade-
quate Imitation of an Expert’s Practice 482
1
Dr. Seiji Nashio
1. Hiroshima University

“Shu, Ha, Ri (Obey, Break, Separate)”: Logical Types in Tea Ceremony Learning 483
1
Dr. Daiji Kimura
1. independent

A corpus-based examination of Chinese impoliteness metalanguage on Weibo 485


1
Prof. Na Yang
1. Zhejiang Gongshang University

A Study of the Moral Order Construction of Collective Reprimand in Online Comments Aiming at Parent-
Child Conflict 486
1
Dr. Qian Chen
1. Northwest Normal University

Exploring the moral conflicts: Online public denunciations against children’s noise making on train 487
1
Dr. Rong Lei
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Investigating Chinese Online Impoliteness and Topic Sensitivity During COVID-19 488
1 1
Ms. Yuxin Jiang , Prof. Qun Zheng
1. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Membership categorization in taking offence in Chinese WeChat group talk 489


1 1 1
Dr. Shuangping Gong , Prof. Chaowei Pang , Dr. Rong Xiao
1. National University of Defense Technology

Ostensible offence in Chinese live-streaming commerce interactions 490


1 1
Dr. Ping Liu , Ms. Linlin Yang
1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Personality Traits and Mediation Discourse in the Rapport-challenge Contexts: An Interpersonal Prag-
matic Perspective 491
1 1
Prof. Ling Zhou , Mr. Jiewen Wu
1. Northeast Normal University

The Metapragmatics of Impoliteness and Offence on Chinese Social Networking Sites 492
1
Dr. Xu Huang
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

xxxiv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Troubles talk, sanctioned offence and participation order in online group chat 493
1
Dr. Lili Gong
1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

“We are extremely worried about him”: Emotion-based deontic claim in online pediatric medical consul-
tation 494
1 1
Ms. Minwen Wei , Prof. Yongping Ran
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

“We are on the air.” Rationalised coercive impoliteness in complaint handling via helpline 495
1 1
Prof. Yongping Ran , Ms. Jiabei Hu
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

“You are talking nonsense!”: Metapragmatic comments in Chinese academic blog conflictual interactions 496
Ms. Hui Jiang1
1. Liaoning Normal University

Decomposing a multi-unit question: how interviewers and respondents overcome institutional con-
straints 498
1 2
Dr. Maria Erofeeva , Ms. Vasilina Radkova
1. Ulster University, 2. Independent Researcher

Everybody gets a wow: miscues on Jeopardy meet the contestant segment 499
1
Prof. Gonen Dori-hacohen
1. University of Amherst

Incongruent intersubjectivity: Clarification requests and Corrections in Speech Language Therapy inter-
actions with Children 500
1
Dr. Bracha Nir
1. University of Haifa

Incongruity in institutional complaint recipiency 501


1 2 2
Dr. Bethan Benwell , Dr. Maria Erofeeva , Dr. Catrin Rhys
1. Stirling University, 2. Ulster University

“I will actually respond.” Balancing interactional and institutional demands in Dutch election debates. 503
1
Dr. Menno Reijven
1. University of Amsterdam

“(Inter)languaging: an integrative approach to language in its communicative habitat” 505


1 1 2 3
Dr. Charlotte Danino , Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern , Dr. Christophe Parisse , Dr. Marion Blondel , Dr. Stéphanie
Caët 4 , Dr. Camille Debras 5 , Prof. Diane Bedoin 6
1. Sorbonne Nouvelle University, 2. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 3. CNRS, France, 4. Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 -
STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France., 5. Paris Nanterre University, 6. University of Rouen

Co-speech pointing as a multimodal practice in grammar and interaction 506


Dr. Kurt Feyaerts1
1. KU Leuven

xxxv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Combining Conversation Analytic knowledge and computational linguistics: A case study of pre-
sequential elements in online interactions 508
Dr. Antti Kanner1 , Dr. Anna Vatanen1
1. University of Helsinki

Comparing the Finnish verbs “pystyä” and “osata” 509


1
Mr. Yida Cai
1. University of Helsinki

Egophoricity in talk-in-interaction in Wutun: Integrating Conversation Analysis with linguistic field


methods 510
1
Dr. Erika Sandman
1. University of Helsinki

Epistemic summons as an intersubjective resource of expressing knowledge in online interaction 512


1 1
Ms. Laura Lehmuskoski , Dr. Anna Vatanen
1. University of Helsinki

Integrating conversation analytic methods with the investigation of phonetic variation 513
1
Prof. Pia Bergmann
1. Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Interjections and response tokens - Integrating functional linguistics with sequential analysis 514
1
Dr. Søren Sørensen
1. Aarhus University

Multimodal Contextualization of Connectors on Stage 516


1
Dr. Beatrix Schönherr
1. Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Germanistik

Socio-pragmatic and conversational-analytic perspectives of code-switching between the Northern and


Central Thai dialects in online media 517
1
Mr. Isara Pittayasiri
1. Mahidol University

Structural and communicative aspects of intentional silence as a conversational strategy 519


1 2
Dr. Thanasin Chutintaranond , Dr. Chingduang Yurayong
1. Chulalongkorn University, 2. University of Helsinki & Mahidol University

The Danish Proximal Modal Particles as Codification of Disagreement Moves 520


1
Mr. Lennart Westergaard
1. Lund University

“Combining CA with corpus linguistics tools: methodological considerations and first results” 522
1
Ms. Melissa Juillet
1. University of Neuchâtel

xxxvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Ex)changing perspectives on speech and language pathologists’ scaffolding practices: when getting the
right meaning becomes more central than getting the right words 524
Dr. Lucie Macchi1 , Dr. Stéphanie Caët1 , Dr. Cédric Patin 1 , Mrs. Laure Descamps 2 , Dr. Christine Da Silva-Genest
3
, Ms. Ingrid Gibaru 4 , Mrs. Klerwi Le Bris 5
1. Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France., 2. Etablissement Public de Santé Mentale
de l’agglomération lilloise (EPSM-AL), 3. Université de Lorraine & EA 3450 Devah, 4. Centre hospitalier de Lens, 5. Institut de
Réhabilitation de la Parole et de l’Audition de Ronchin

Aphasia and the impact of the embodied aspect of service encounter for successful understanding 525
Prof. Carole Anglade1 , Prof. Claire Croteau 1 , Prof. Guylaine Le Dorze 1
1. Université de Montréal

Clinically relevant communication behavior analysis in interaction: Development and practical applica-
tion in school setting 526
Mrs. Paméla McMahon Morin1 , Prof. Stefano Rezzonico 1 , Mrs. Laurence Brassard 1 , Prof. Claire Croteau 1
1. Université de Montréal

Comparing timing of other-initiation of repair: a multimodal approach 527


1 1
Ms. Kati Pajo , Prof. Minna Laakso
1. University of Helsinki

Engaging children with autism in interactions with AAC: professionals’ strategies in an inclusive class-
room 528
1
Ms. Roxane Perrin Hennebelle
1. Laboratoire CLESTHIA (EA 7345) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Parents with aphasia – How focusing on their everyday family interaction may inform interventions 529
1
Ms. Helene Killmer
1. University of Oslo

Spoken and written persuasive discourse in deaf and hard-of-hearing adolescents 530
1 2 1
Ms. Maude Gagnon , Prof. Claire Croteau , Prof. Louise Duchesne
1. Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2. Université de Montréal

The Multiple Assessment of Connected Speech (MACS): an attempt to balance ecological validity and stan-
dardization in the assessment of communication disorders 531
1
Prof. Anna Zumbansen
1. University of Ottawa

Displaying limited availability for an upcoming recruitment in nurses’ interactions with hospital co-
workers 533
1 1
Dr. Angeliki Balantani , Prof. Esther González Martínez
1. University of Fribourg

From the transmission of clinical information during nursing handovers to the sharing of knowledge.
Keywords: handover, nurse, multimodal interaction, knowing, learning 534
1 2 1 3
Mr. Louis Maritaud , Ms. Isabel Colon de Carvajal , Ms. Justine Lascar , Mr. Benoit Chalancon
1. CNRS, ICAR, 2. ICAR Lab, 3. Centre Hospitalier Le Vinatier, Lyon

Getting to know patients: opening sequences of a simulation in psychiatric nursing education 535
1 1 1
Dr. Evelyne Berger , Prof. Alexandra Nguyen , Prof. Jérôme Favrod
1. La Source School of Nursing, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

xxxvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narratives and agency in the arts-based activities for Persons living With Dementia 536
1 1
Prof. Ilkka Arminen , Ms. Anna Heino
1. University of Helsinki

Nursing staff looking for objects with hospital co-workers 537


1 2
Prof. Esther González Martínez , Prof. Barbara A. Fox
1. Department of social sciences, University of Fribourg, 2. University of Colorado, Boulder

Use of the “burden of care” levels in discharge planning activities: An occasioned semantics analysis of
healthcare interactions 538
1
Dr. Hiroaki Izumi
1. Kyoto University of Foreign Studies

Autoethnographic reflections on video mediated interactions in higher education 540


1
Mr. Bjoern Stoevesand
1. Bielefeld University

Critical feedback between language teachers in international video conferencing 541


1
Prof. Sabine Hoffmann
1. University of Palermo

How visual access to ongoing digital text production shapes co-orientation in video-mediated Mandarin
tutorials 542
1 1
Mr. Hsin-Tzu Jen , Dr. Gabriele Kasper
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Maybe I can share my screen - The role of screen sharing on Spanish online interactions within a Virtual
Exchange Project 543
1 1
Ms. Naiara Martínez Niño , Prof. Marta García
1. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Multimodal interaction analysis of task-oriented student group work in higher education: observations
and reflections on studying online interaction 544
1
Ms. Silke Tork
1. European University Institute, Florence

Online Second Language Interactional Competence (L2 IC) in International Student Video Conferencing 545
1
Mr. Nils Drixler
1. University of Education Ludwigsburg

Orientations to locality and local meanings of food in a virtual exchange project 546
1 1
Dr. Margarethe Olbertz-Siitonen , Dr. Malgorzata Lahti
1. University of Jyväskylä

Task repetition and variance in online teachers’ instruction-giving: a multimodal (inter)action analysis 547
1 2
Dr. Ciara Wigham , Dr. Hatice Müge Satar Coen
1. Laboratoire ACTé, Université Clermont-Ferrand, 2. Newcastle University

To teach or not to teach: Communication strategies in video-mediated online interaction 548


1
Ms. Caroline Collet
1. Saarland University

xxxviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Epistemics and deontics in the story world: (In)congruent status-stance relations in direct reported
speech in stories of interactionally troublesome exchanges 551
Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop1 , Dr. Melisa Stevanovic 2 , Dr. Minna Leinonen 2 , Mr. Henri Nevalainen 2
1. KU Leuven, 2. Tampere University

Interviewees’ interpretative and naming practices as troublesome tools for tellability in sharing negative
experiences 552
1
Dr. Minna Leinonen
1. Tampere University

Public spaces as sites of interactionally troublesome exchanges for immigrants residing in Finland 553
1
Ms. Annika Valtonen
1. Tampere University

Reporting the thoughts of the antagonist: A delicate practice in the accounts of interactionally trouble-
some exchanges 554
1 2 1
Mr. Henri Nevalainen , Prof. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen , Dr. Melisa Stevanovic
1. Tampere University, 2. University of Helsinki

Social and health care professionals’ narratives of interactionally troublesome exchanges with their
clients: accounting for and against the active role of the client 555
1 2 2 2 2
Dr. Elina Weiste , Ms. Nanette Ranta , Dr. Melisa Stevanovic , Mr. Henri Nevalainen , Ms. Annika Valtonen ,
Dr. Minna Leinonen 2
1. Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, 2. Tampere University

The prosodic construction of inevitability of gender-based intergroup discrimination 556


Dr. Melisa Stevanovic1 , Mr. Henri Nevalainen 1 , Dr. Minna Leinonen 1 , Ms. Annika Valtonen 1 , Dr. Elina Weiste
2

1. Tampere University, 2. Finnish Institute of Occupational Health

Does Age Influence Intergenerational Interaction? Experiences from the UnVergessen Project 558
1 1
Prof. Katrin Karl , Mrs. Aldona Rzitki
1. University of Bern

Generations through time: Investigating ‘ageing talk’ via re-interviewing 559


1
Dr. Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak
1. Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań

Intergenerational encounters and multilingual resources in the talk of older adults 560
1 2
Prof. Boglárka Straszer , Dr. Kaarina Hippi
1. Dalarna University, 2. Tampere University / University of Helsinki

Perceptions of language use and generational differences between young and old 561
1 2
Dr. Kaarina Hippi , Prof. Hanna Lappalainen
1. Tampere University / University of Helsinki, 2. University of Eastern Finland

A semio-pragmatic analysis of the meme “El Risitas”: a trajectory from laughter to politics 563
1
Dr. Michel Marcoccia
1. University of Technology of Troyes

xxxix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Beyond bonding icons: Memes in interactional sequences in digital communities of practice 564
1 2
Dr. Ying Tong , Prof. Chaoqun Xie
1. Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, 2. Zhejiang International Studies University

From me to you: building relatability in academic Tumblr posts 565


1
Dr. Celia Schneebeli
1. University of Burgundy / Centre Interlangues

Internet memes in China: multimodal creativity in a translocal discourse system 566


1 2
Dr. Freek Olaf de Groot , Ms. Zhuoli Gao
1. University of Kurdistan Hewler, 2. University of Pennsylvania

Multimodal creativity, narrativity, and daily life in the “Breaking things down” meme 567
Dr. Loukia Lindholm1
1. Åbo Akademi

The Language Play and Social Indexicality of Internet Memes: An Analysis from Turkish, English, and
Bilingual Memes 568
1 1
Mr. Ümit Can Tunçer , Dr. Didar Akar
1. Bogazici University

What can visual aphorisms tell us about multimodal internet memes? 569
1
Ms. Kukka-Maaria Wessman
1. University of Turku

How K-wave Fandoms Create Language that is Between and Beyond Korean and English 571
1
Prof. Jieun Kiaer
1. University of Oxford

Stancetaking by book bloggers in public and private: Investment in relation to audience 572
1
Ms. Jenia Yudytska
1. University of Hamburg

The discursive construction of online fandom: Stancetaking in Chinese e-commerce live streaming inter-
actions 573
1 1
Mr. Jialiang Chen , Dr. Ping Liu
1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

‘It just had a sneaky vibe is all’: Stancetaking and the collective negotiation of advertising norms in
YouTube comment sections 574
1
Ms. Olivia Droz-dit-Busset
1. University of Bern

“OMG I ship them like crazy”: Acts of self-positioning through evaluations in Korean TV-drama fan com-
ments 575
1 2
Prof. Miriam Locher , Dr. Thomas Messerli
1. University of Basel, 2. Univers

Aggression, conflict and the interactional emergence of discriminatory discourse in social media 577
1
Prof. Stavros Assimakopoulos
1. University of Malta

xl
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Annotating hate speech: particular challenges and opportunities along the online-offline continuum 578
1 2 1 1 2
Dr. Didar Akar , Dr. Ayşecan Terzioğlu , Mr. Burak Işık , Ms. Pelin Önal , Ms. Elif Erol ,
Mr. Halil İbrahim Ergül2
1. Bogazici University, 2. Sabancı University

Covid-19 and “Divine” hate speech against women on Arabic Twitter 579
1
Dr. Najma Al Zidjaly
1. Sultan Qaboos University

Digital Discourses of Arab Feminism: Intersecting Layers, Conflicting Visions, Emerging Transnational-
ism 580
1 2
Dr. Eleonora Esposito , Dr. Francesco L. Sinatora
1. University of Navarra, 2. The George Washington University

Face-threats and Aggression in Televised Political Debates: A Case-Study of U.S. American Presidential
Debates 581
Ms. Lin Jiao1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Linguistic violence and online metapragmatic disputes on the aggression against a brazilian newswoman 582
Ms. Amanda Vallada1
1. Universidade Federal de Goiás

Metapragmatic conflicts via memes: A Greek case study 584


1
Prof. Villy Tsakona
1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Morality, civility, and aggression in the attribution and ratification of the Karen social identity 585
1 2
Dr. Lucía Fernández-Amaya , Prof. Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich
1. Pablo de Olavide University, 2. University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Offensive gestures and taking offense: Precision grip gestures, penis size and the cross-modal construc-
tion of anti-feminist discourses in South Korea 586
1
Dr. Lucien Brown
1. Monash University

Reciprocity and impoliteness online 587


Prof. Jonathan Culpeper1 , Dr. Vittorio Tantucci 1
1. Lancaster University

The metapragmatics of “offence” in Chinese in online discourse 588


1 2 1 2
Dr. Wei-Lin Melody Chang , Dr. Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen , Prof. Michael Haugh , Prof. Hsi-Yao Su
1. The University of Queensland, 2. National Taiwan Normal University

‘We are nationalists, not hate-filled supremacists’: A Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies Approach to Cat-
egorising (Online) Extremism 589
1
Prof. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
1. Swansea University

xli
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Violence, ambiguity and
metaphors we fight with in Donald Trump’s speech of January 6, 2021 590
Prof. Massimiliano Demata1
1. University of Turin

“With this kind of spelling, you should not be speaking”: Linguistic corrections as an impoliteness strat-
egy in Greek online political discussions 592
1
Dr. Maria Vasilaki
1. King’s College London

A study of metalinguistic comments in the Ukrainian comedy series “Servant of the People” 594
1
Prof. Helena Halmari
1. Sam Houston State University

Current challenges and language choice among Transcarpathian Hungarians 595


1 1
Dr. Daniele Artoni , Ms. Timea Lucsok
1. University of Verona

Has the war influenced the choice of the preposition: na Ukraine or v Ukraine? 596
1
Prof. Arto Mustajoki
1. University of Helsinki

Mediated Receptive Multilingualism: a case study of communication between Estonians and Ukrainians 597
1 2
Ms. Anna Branets , Prof. Anna Verschik
1. University of Tartu, 2. Tallinn University

Plain Language in Ukraine: What War Does to Public Communication 598


1
Dr. Thomas Rosén
1. university of Gothenburg

Shifts in attitudes toward the Russian language during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict 600
1 1
Ms. Hannah Ackerman , Dr. Lisa Johnson
1. Brigham Young University

Wartime language preferences: The shift in language use in Odessan online media 601
1 2
Mrs. Inna Kabanen , Mr. Francesco Bressan
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Verona

Creating Public Discourses with Personal Expressions in Japanese Linguistic Landscapes 603
1 1
Prof. Momoyo Shimazu , Prof. Andrew Barke
1. Kansai University

Creative language use during interpersonal talk and storytelling: Accounts from a Japanese izakaya 604
1
Dr. Todd Allen
1. Kansai University

Hard jacket with soft scarf: The language of Japan’s female political leader Koike Yuriko 605
1
Dr. Yoko Yonezawa
1. The University of Sydney

Japanese usernames on the internet: Creativity and self-characterisation 606


1
Dr. Xiangdong Liu
1. Western Sydney University

xlii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language creativity in business Japanese discourse between native and non-native Japanese speakers 607
1
Dr. Yun Meng
1. Niigata University

“With reluctance, I humbly venture to say one thing”: Creative use of Japanese honorifics in the perfor-
mance of linguistic rituals and Face Threatening Acts 609
1 1
Prof. Andrew Barke , Prof. Momoyo Shimazu
1. Kansai University

Crossing, gender, and identity 612


1
Dr. Yuko Iwata
1. Meiji University

Diversification and leveling in the end of sentence expression -ssu as a new honorific in Japanese 613
1
Dr. Kazuko Tanabe
1. Japan Women’s University

Exploring what are atypical and typical in modern Japanese: Newspaper imperial honorifics and lan-
guage policies 614
1
Dr. Noriko Sugimori
1. Kalamazoo College

Gender bias in teachers’ use of address terms across cultures, languages, and educational contexts 615
1 2
Ms. Aviv Orner , Dr. Hadar Netz
1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. Tel Aviv University

‘Face’-related Expressions in Historical Chinese Peking and Teochew Opera Scripts 616
1 2 3
Ms. Jiejun Chen , Prof. Daniel Kadar , Prof. Juliane House
1. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3.
University of Hamburg

A contrastive study of speech act realisation between CFL learners and Chinese native speakers 618
Ms. Puyu Ning1
1. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

A Preliminary Study on Footing Selection and Ritualised Context Determination 619


1
Dr. Song Yulong
1. Nanjing University

Chinese as a Foreign Language – A New Pragmatic Pathway 620


1 2 3
Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Daniel Z. Kadar , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3.
University of Hamburg

Criticising in Chinese and English Classroom Contexts: A Contrastive Pragmatic Inquiry 621
1 1 2 3
Mrs. Wenrui Shi , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Sympathise in Chinese: A Contrastive Pragmatic Inquiry 622


1 2 1 3
Ms. He Cang , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

xliii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A computational approach to embodied responsive actions in multimodal video analysis 624


1 2
Ms. Clara Lachenmaier , Dr. Kathrin Weber
1. Universität Bielefeld, 2. Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Facial gestures in multimodal feedback signals: Comparing response tokens in spoken and signed con-
versation 625
1 1 1 1
Dr. Jana Hosemann , Dr. Anastasia Bauer , Dr. Sonja Gipper , Mr. Tobias-Alexander Herrmann
1. University of Cologne

Multimodal responsive actions: Turn-initial particles and raised eyebrows in video-mediated interaction 626
Mrs. Marina Reis de Souza1
1. Hildesheim University

The use of silent mouth openings to show upcoming intervention in triadic screen mediated gaming in-
teractions 627
1
Ms. Lydia Heiden
1. ICAR Lab

A hierarchy of supernatural languages: Structure, function, and evolutionary dynamics 629


1
Dr. Aritz Irurtzun
1. CNRS-IKER

Bata blessings: Ancestors’ words in Kazakh cultural world 631


1
Dr. Eva-Marie Dubuisson
1. Nazarbayev University

Central Himalayan Ritual as Magical Speech 632


1
Dr. John Leavitt
1. Université de Montréal

Divine punishment and magic in Japan - an analysis of tenbatsu and kami - 633
1 1
Dr. Yuko Asano-Cavanagh , Prof. Robert Cavanagh
1. Curtin University

Emoji spells as speech acts 634


1
Prof. Ellen Hurst
1. University of Cape Town

Love charms and curses at the beach: Approaching Mijikenda verbal magic in a Kenyan mass tourism
context 635
1
Dr. Nico Nassenstein
1. JGU Mainz

Magic as Real Virtuality? 636


1
Prof. Adam Głaz
1. Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS), Lublin, Poland

Magical Affirmations – Affirmative Statements in the Pick-up Artist Paradigm 637


1 2
Prof. Daria Dayter , Dr. Sofia Rüdiger
1. Tampere University, 2. University of Bayreuth

xliv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rationality and magic 638


1
Dr. Katja Jasinskaja
1. University of Cologne

Siekopai Uja formulas as magical speech acts 639


1
Dr. Jorge Gomez Rendon
1. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador

The Metapragmatics of Black Magic: Cross-Cultural and Postcolonial Perspectives 640


1
Dr. Carsten Levisen
1. Roskilde University

What’s ‘magic’ about Tongan honorifics, speech preludes and other taboo-related practices? 641
Dr. Svenja Völkel1
1. University of Mainz

“I herein and hereby claim liberties”: Pseudolaw and Magical Speech Acts 642
1
Dr. David Griffin
1. Cardiff University

Analyzing family instant messages through interactional sociolinguistics and multimodality 644
1
Dr. Hanwool Choe
1. School of English, University of Hong Kong

Enacting and negotiating family roles in multilingual interactions: Insights from an ethnographic per-
spective 645
1
Dr. Rafael Lomeu Gomes
1. UiT The Arctic University of Norway / University of Oslo

Everyday language practices in the family: ‘After the beep, say a command’ 646
1
Prof. Luk Van Mensel
1. XJTLU

Multimodal approaches to meaning-making in family dinners 647


1 2 3 4
Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern , Dr. Christophe Parisse , Dr. Marion Blondel , Dr. Stéphanie Caët , Mrs. Sophie de
Pontonx 5 , Dr. Loulou Kosmala 6 , Dr. Charlotte Danino 1 , Dr. Camille Debras 7 , Dr. Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel 8 ,
Prof. Diane Bedoin 9
1. Sorbonne Nouvelle University, 2. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 3. CNRS, France, 4. University of Lille, 5. CNRS-
Paris Nanterre University, 6. Laboratoire PRISMES EA 4398 / EA 370 GReMLIN, Université Paris Nanterre, 7. Paris Nanterre
University, 8. INSPE-Sorbonne University, 9. University of Rouen

Online heteroglossia as a resource for ethnicity and kinship in mediatized Indian families 648
1
Dr. Usha Kanoongo
1. The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur

Playful approaches to take family language policy seriously, one brick at a time-space 649
1
Dr. Judith Purkarthofer
1. University Duisburg-Essen

Playfulness in (multilingual) family interaction 650


Dr. Ragni Vik Johnsen1
1. UiT The Arctic University of Norway

xlv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The family home as unique opportunity to explore the meaning of language varieties: A mixed-methods
approach 651
Ms. Freja Verachtert1 , Prof. Eline Zenner 1 , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop 1
1. KU Leuven

A Spontaneous Crowd of People or an Illegal Organised Gathering? Identifying and Resisting the Omni
Relevance Device ‘Organised Event’ in the Sarah Everard Vigil. 653
1 2
Terry Au-Yeung , Prof. Richard Fitzgerald
1. Cardiff University, 2. University of Macau

Age stereotyping and ageism in Belgian job interviews 654


1 2 1
Ms. Melina De Dijn , Ms. Federica Previtali , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop
1. KU Leuven, 2. Tampere University

Category relations and norms of feelings in children’s performances of a boyfriend-girlfriend culture 655
1 1
Mr. Fredrik Andreasson , Prof. Ann-Carita Evaldsson
1. Department of Eucation, Uppsala University

How to Criticize an Authoritarian Regime without Getting Caught: Practices of Mitigating Criticism in
Letters to the Editor in the GDR through Membership Categorization 656
1
Dr. Maximilian Krug
1. University of Duisburg-Essen

Manifesting epistemic hierarchy in the doctor-patient relationship: Self-answered questions as a re-


source for membership categorization in German and Russian oncological therapy consultations 657
1
Ms. Valeria Schick
1. University of Hamburg

Morality and Credibility of Friends and Family under Cross-Examination 659


1
Ms. Tianhao Zhang
1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Observable implicit categorization and defeasible explicit categorization: Doing “being friends” on
YouTube 660
1
Dr. Ryo Okazawa
1. Aichi Shukutoku University

The Morality of Categories in Contrastive Descriptions 661


1
Dr. Jessica Robles
1. Loughborough University

When identity categories are imposed: Vocative second-person pronoun + nominal in interaction 662
1
Mr. Pepe Droste
1. University of Münster

When Karen is calling the cops: using categorisation to sanction public conduct 663
1 2 3
Dr. Linda Walz , Dr. Jack Joyce , Ms. Natalie Flint
1. Leeds Trinity University, 2. University of Oxford, 3. Loughborough University

xlvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Tamara, y Sam?”: The relational and categorial negotiation of doing “being a (non)cheater” in implicit
account solicitation 664
Ms. Andrea Rodriguez1
1. The University of Queensland

“Then Mum will scold you”: Identity construction in sibling talk in a Chinese-Australian family 665
1
Ms. Zhiyi Liu
1. The University of Queensland

“You surely can’t colour using all of them at the same time?”: The role of the parent category in sanc-
tioning the other child’s behaviour and in mobilising ‘sharing’ as a moral foundation in sibling disputes
666
Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute1
1. The University of Queensland

Miscommunication and Repair in ‘Smart Homecare’ Interactions 668


1 1 1
Ms. Lauren Hall , Dr. Saul Albert , Prof. Elizabeth Peel
1. Loughborough University

Out of sight, out of mind? Speech recognition transcripts as a resource during miscommunications with
a robot 669
1 1
Mr. Damien Rudaz , Dr. Christian Licoppe
1. Telecom Paris

Repair in interaction with smart speakers in German – Repeating, insisting, altering and giving up 670
1 1
Dr. Silke Reineke , Dr. Henrike Helmer
1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Repair-capable Conversational AI: what’s missing 671


1
Dr. Arash Eshghi
1. Alana AI Ltd.

“I have learnt the Alexa-language” – A conversation analytical reconstruction of users’ incidental learn-
ing of how to talk to a voice agent 672
1
Mrs. Christiane Even
1. Heidelberg University of Education

“Pepper, what do you mean?” Miscommunication, repair and multimodality in robot-led survey interac-
tion 673
1 1 1
Mx. Lynn de Rijk , Dr. Wyke Stommel , Dr. Roel Boumans
1. Radboud University Nijmegen

Facilitating Residents’ Mobility in Caregiving Interaction 675


1
Ms. Yu-Han Lin
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

How mobility disabilities and wheelchair use shape closures of social interaction and dissolutions of in-
teractional spaces 676
1
Prof. Gitte Rasmussen
1. University of Southern Denmark

xlvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The consequences of ocularcentric participation frameworks for the ability for visually impaired people
to be mobile in situ 677
Dr. Brian Due1
1. Copenhagen University

“I feel like a normal person”: The interactive accomplishment of walking normally 678
1
Mrs. Emilie Nicolaisen
1. University of Southern Denmark

A case study on pragmatic meaning: The plasticity of third-person forms 680


1
Dr. Naomi Truan
1. Leiden University

A same message in two different situations ? 681


1
Prof. Irmtraud Behr
1. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Conversational Contributions in Discourse: Contextualization, Entextualization and Recontextualiza-


tion 682
1
Prof. Anita Fetzer
1. University of Augsburg

From context to constructions? A usage-based approach on German “wollen wir” and “sollen wir” ques-
tion formats in written interactions 683
1
Ms. Marie-Louise Bartsch
1. University of Hamburg

Goal-schemas as contexts for understanding 684


1
Prof. Marco Mazzone
1. Department of Humanistic Sciences (University of Catania)

Inferences from, and about, context in a joint inference model of utterance interpretation 685
1
Dr. Chris Cummins
1. University of Edinburgh

Inferential significance of ascription as pragmatic patterns 686


1 1
Prof. Ulf Harendarski , Mr. Joschka Briese
1. Europa-Universität Flensburg

Integrating shared and individual realities in communication: A model of emergent aspects of common
ground in interactive situations 688
1
Dr. Elke Diedrichsen
1. Technological University Dublin

The role of multiple viewpoints in utterance interpretation 689


1
Mrs. Aleksandra Uttenweiler
1. University of Leipzig

The role of the situation in utterance interpretation: How context and common ground informs a speech
act 690
1
Dr. Brian Nolan
1. Technological University Dublin

xlviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Unarticulated constituents versus ad hoc concepts 691


1
Dr. Alison Hall
1. De Montfort University

Uttering sentences and using templates 692


1
Prof. Frank Liedtke
1. University of Leipzig

“I only wrote that to frighten her” – Threatening speech in the Late Modern English period 693
1
Dr. Theresa Neumaier
1. TU Dortmund University

„hä (-) wie meinst du das¿‘ Sequential construction of non understanding in German spoken interaction 694
Dr. Robert Mroczynski1
1. University of Leipzig

Developing Multilingual Young Students’ Pragmatic Awareness through Pedagogical Translanguaging 696
1 1
Dr. Laura Portolés , Ms. Gema Gayete Domínguez
1. Universitat Jaume I

Pragmatic awareness of multilingual teenagers. Examining the effect of pedagogical translanguaging. 697
1 1
Prof. Pilar Safont , Dr. Richard Nightingale
1. Universitat Jaume I

The effect of pedagogical translanguaging on young learners’ metapragmatic awareness of requests 698
1 1
Mrs. Irene Guzman , Mr. Ignacio Martinez Buffa
1. Universitat Jaume I

Focus types and the prosody-gesture link in Catalan and German: A production study 700
1 2 3 1
Ms. Alina Gregori , Ms. Paula G. Sánchez-Ramón , Prof. Pilar Prieto , Prof. Frank Kügler
1. Goethe Universität Frankfurt, 2. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, 3. ICREA-Universitat Pom-
peu Fabra

Head movements and pitch accents as cues to information status in L2 French 701
1 1
Prof. Stefan Baumann , Dr. Florence Baills
1. IfL-Phonetik, University of Cologne

Prosodic marking of contrast in signed languages: the case of LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language) 702
Ms. Clara Lombart1
1. Université de Namur

Speech-associated gestures reflect topic-comment structures 703


1 2
Dr. Sandra Debreslioska , Prof. Pamela Perniss
1. Lund University, 2. University of Cologne

The multimodal marking of information status of referents in English academic discourses 704
1 2
Dr. Patrick Louis Rohrer , Prof. Pilar Prieto
1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Affective stancetaking in mediatised political speeches of ‘Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen’ (The German ‘Green
Party’ 706
1 1
Mrs. Clara Kindler , Prof. Cornelia Müller
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

xlix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Approaching multimodal stancetaking by viewpoint analysis in intercultural interaction 707


1
Prof. Ulrike Schröder
1. Federal University of Minas Gerais

Discourse markers and pragmatic gestures in Russian 708


1
Dr. Yulia Nikolaeva
1. Lomonosov Moscow State University

Multimodal Comparison in Orchestra Instructions 709


1 1 1
Ms. Katharina Meissl , Dr. Paul Sambre , Dr. Kurt Feyaerts
1. KU Leuven

Multimodal Resources for Stance-Taking in Storytelling with an Aphasic Man 711


Dr. Marjorie Goodwin1
1. UCLA

Prosodic cues to affective stancetaking in German and Polish parliamentary speeches 712
1 1 1
Prof. Maciej Karpinski , Prof. Katarzyna Klessa , Prof. Ewa Jarmołowicz-Nowikow
1. Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań

Stancetaking and adolescence. Multimodal positioning in dialogue among Italian teenagers 713
1
Dr. Emanuela Campisi
1. Università degli Studi di Catania

Taking an affective stance: How affectivity is mobilized in mediatised political debates 714
1
Prof. Cornelia Müller
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Taking stance with the Slapping movement. Inter-affectivity in interactions among children 715
1 2
Dr. Silva Ladewig , Ms. Lena Hotze
1. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 2. Europa-Universität Viadrina

The sequential and multimodal unfolding of enactments in VGT. A comparison of ‘enactment only’ and
embedded enacted stance expressions. 716
1 1 1
Ms. Fien Andries , Mr. Geert Brône , Mrs. Myriam Vermeerbergen
1. KU Leuven

“Cutting off” inappropriate formulations: A disalignment practice in Hebrew face-to-face interaction 718
1 2 3
Ms. Gil Newman , Dr. Anna Inbar , Dr. Leon Shor
1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. University of Haifa, 3. Achva Academic College

“Arm Your Community”: Ideology in Vaccine Advertising Campaigns Across Countries 721
1 2
Dr. Anna Islentyeva , Mr. Torben Scheffler
1. Universität Innsbruck, 2. Universität Hamburg

Analyzing a Creative Delivery of Covid-19 Advice: Metaphor, Multimodality, and Narrativity 722
1
Prof. Ming-Yu Tseng
1. National Sun Yat-sen University

Covid-19: an (a)typical discourse for an (in)visible enemy 723


1
Prof. Roberta Giordano
1. Università degli studi della Tuscia

l
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal metaphors in environmental awareness campaigns: pre-pandemic narratives of crisis and


hope 724
Prof. Laura Downing1
1. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Parent, Child, School: A Triad of Multimodal Interactions during the Covid-19 Pandemic in India 725
1
Dr. Annie Koshi
1. St Mary’s School

“I am Sher-locked” Atypicality, Typicality and Multimodality in Indian Students’ Pandemic Narratives 727
1
Prof. Rukmini Nair
1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

“Stuck in a scroll hole”: Metaphor scenarios of social media’s effect on mental health before and during
the Covid-19 Pandemic 728
1
Ms. Jennifer Foley
1. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Catchier than COVID: An analysis of pandemic coverage by Dutch news satire show Zondag met Lubach 730
1 1
Mr. Jonas Nicolaï , Prof. Pieter Maeseele
1. University of Antwerp

From one scientist to another: A Post-Normal Science approach to scientist interactions in a citizen sci-
ence project on air quality 731
1
Ms. Sofie Verkest
1. Ghent University

Managing Fact and Uncertainty: Science Mediation during Telephone Contact Tracing in Flanders. 732
1 2 1
Dr. Sofie Van de Geuchte , Mr. Romeo De Timmerman , Ms. Anne-Sophie Bafort ,
1 3
Prof. Mieke Vandenbroucke , Prof. Stef Slembrouck
1. University of Antwerp, 2. Ghent University, 3. Linguistics, Ghent University

Mediating prostate cancer patient empowerment 733


1 2
Prof. Ulrike Vogl , Dr. Ursula Vogl
1. Ghent University, 2. Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland (IOSI)

Mediating Scientific Thinking and Engineering Judgement (STEJ) in classroom contexts 734
Prof. Colleen Cotter1 , Ms. Agne Kocnevaite1 , Dr. Gabriel Cavalli 1 , Dr. Janet DeWilde 1
1. Queen Mary University of London

Parascientific genres in the times of Covid-19: Engaging an online audience throughout multimodality 735
1 1
Dr. Miguel Ruiz-Garrido , Dr. Juan Carlos Palmer Silveira
1. Universitat Jaume I

The mediating role of science teachers in the dissemination of scientific knowledge 736
1
Mr. Seppe Goddaert
1. Ghent University

The Misplaced Pragmatics of Official U.S. COVID-19 Mediatized Health Communication 737
1
Prof. Charles Briggs
1. University of California, Berkeley

li
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Building empathy remotely: A strategic-style shift for creating closeness in online dialogues in Japanese 739
1
Prof. Etsuko Yoshida
1. The University of Shiga Prefecture

Content Analysis of Narratives on COVID-19 by the Japanese Digital Native Generation Using Topic Mod-
eling 740
1
Dr. Ryoga Ishihara
1. Ryukoku University

Contested Experience: Building the COVID Long-hauler Identity 741


1
Ms. Brienna Johnson-Morris
1. University of California, Los Angeles

Digital natives’ online first meeting discourse about COVID-19 Disaster: The boundaries between exclu-
sion and empathy in the narratives 742
1
Prof. Kaori Hata
1. Osaka University

How the Pandemic Divides Us: Analysis of Pandemic Narratives from the Japanese Generation Z 743
1
Dr. Kazuyo Murata
1. Ryukoku University

Negotiating commonalities on COVID-19 experiences: An analysis of troubles-telling between unac-


quainted interactants 744
1
Ms. Satsuki Iseki
1. The University of Tokyo

Laughing off Troubles: Managing Social Distance Through Laughter on Delicate Matters in Social Inter-
action 746
1 2 1 1 3
Ms. Yi Ren , Dr. Yan Zhou , Ms. Ruyu Yang , Ms. Dayoung Jeong , Ms. Yukun Li
1. UCLA, 2. Northwestern University, 3. The University of Tokyo

Laughter and Affective Common Ground: How to get acquainted with a stranger in Covid-19 conversa-
tions in Thai 748
1 2 3
Dr. Yingyot Kanchina , Dr. Ratchadaporn Phonyarit , Prof. Shoichi Iwasaki
1. Mahidol University, 2. Walailak University, 3. UCLA

Laughter and quotation of thought in Japanese conversation 749


1 1 2
Prof. Tomoko Endo , Ms. Satsuki Iseki , Prof. Shoichi Iwasaki
1. The University of Tokyo, 2. UCLA

Laughter in opening sequences of initial conversations in English and Mandarin 750


1 2
Dr. Liz Carter , Dr. Yan Zhou
1. Vassar College, 2. Northwestern University

Smiles and Laughter with Style-shift: Mitigating Speakers’ Face-Threatening Acts 752
1 1
Mr. Yeonseob Lee , Mr. Hanbeom Jung
1. University of California, Los Angeles

Using Laughter as a Stance Marker to Negotiate Group Identity 753


1 1
Ms. Ariel Chan , Ms. Cheer Wu
1. University of California, Los Angeles

lii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Diachronical Study of the (Re)formulative Discourse Marker “esto” in
the Course of the Twentieth Century 755
Dr. Elena Pascual1
1. Universitat de València

Conversión, atenuación y refuerzo argumentativo en las enunciaciones reformulativas Decí que Y (que
si no X) en el español del Río de la Plata 756
1 1
Dr. Maria Marta Garcia Negroni , Dr. Manuel Libenson
1. Universidad de San Andrés

Genre variation in reformulation: Italian marker ovvero ‘or’ in legal vs journalistic texts 757
1 2
Prof. Jacqueline Visconti , Prof. Maria Cuenca
1. University of Genoa, 2. University of Valencia

Performing reformulation in substandard Italian 759


1
Dr. Giulio Scivoletto
1. Department of Humanities (University of Catania)

Reformulation Markers in Spanish and Korean 760


1
Dr. Heejung Kim
1. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Reframing reformulation from negation: correlates between formal and experimental results in Penin-
sular Spanish. 762
1 2
Dr. Shima Salameh Jiménez , Dr. Adrià Llibrer
1. Complutense University of Madrid, 2. University of Salamanca

TOTAL and O SEA: Viral transmission of conclusive meaning? 763


1
Dr. Salvador Pons Borderia
1. University of Valencia

*coof coof*: Metapragmatics and Narrative at the Intersection of 4chan’s /pol/ and COVID Conspiracy 765
1
Dr. Dillon Ludemann
1. University of South Carolina

A “victory for white life”: Strategic mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy claims in abortion discourse 766
1
Dr. Kristen Fleckenstein
1. Coastal Carolina University

Analyzing political discourses: Argumentative strategies used by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to
structure fear-based arguments during the Covid-19 pandemic 767
1 2
Ms. Fatima-Zahra Aklalouch , Dr. Laure Lansari
1. Universite Paris Cité, 2. Université Paris Cité

Anti-vaccine activism and the pragmatics of expertise 768


1
Mr. James Slotta
1. The University of Texas at Austin

Beauty, Bro-scientists and the end of men 769


1 2
Dr. Catherine Tebaldi , Dr. Scott Burnett
1. University of Massachusetts, 2. university of Gothenburg

liii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourses of climate-denial and capitalism at COP26: A critical ecolinguistic analysis 770


1
Ms. Kelsey Campolong
1. Ulster University

Discovery by Design: Toward a Semiotics of Found Contrarian Knowledge 771


1
Prof. Mark Peterson
1. Miami University

Rightwashing resistance: The pragmatics of “protest” co-option and the colonization of leftist discourse 772
1 1
Dr. Addie Sayers , Mr. Hanson Egerland
1. University of North Carolina Wilmington

The discursive construction of “truth” and “facts” in emails from a Polish ultraconservative NGO, Cen-
trum Życia i Rodziny 773
1
Dr. Dominika Baran
1. Duke University

“Women deserve better”: An analysis of Generation Z pro-life ‘feminist’ discourses 774


1
Dr. Polina Shvanyukova
1. Università degli Studi di Udine

Compliment Response and Chinese Modesty Revisited: Evidence from Corpus-based Metapragmatics and
Experimental Design Research 777
1
Dr. Mian Jia
1. The University of Texas at Austin

Gender-based variability in the prosodic realization of Italian compliments 778


1 2
Prof. Patrizia Sorianello , Dr. Glenda Gurrado
1. University of Bari (Dept DIRIUM), 2. University of Bari

How gender affects compliments in Italian 779


1 1
Prof. Giovanna Alfonzetti , Dr. Giulio Scivoletto
1. Department of Humanities (University of Catania)

Multimodality and Speech Act Perceptions across Cultures: The Case of Compliments 781
1
Ms. Fang Xie
1. University of Zurich

Rapport Management and Complimenting in Chinese 782


1 1 2 3
Ms. Yilin Chai , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Social Meanings of Congratulations: A Variationist Perspective 783


1
Ms. Anna-Marie Sprenger
1. University of Chicago

The linguistic act of complimenting in foreign language Italian textbooks 784


1
Ms. Giuliana Santoro
1. University of Basel

Variational Pragmatics in Chinese compliment responses: The impacts of age and gender 786
1
Dr. Yuqi Wang
1. Beihang University

liv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Variational pragmatics in the foreign language classroom: learning how to perform compliment re-
sponses in L2 Italian 787
Prof. Borbala Samu1
1. University for Foreigners of Perugia

Which politeness model for Italian compliments? An analysis in light of Variational Pragmatics 788
1 2
Prof. Marina Castagneto , Dr. Chiara Meluzzi
1. University of Molise, 2. University of Milan

Connection and Disruption between Japanese Voice Actors and Anime Characters 790
1
Ms. Liu Yang
1. University of Tsukuba

Extending the scope of phatic communion to political speech: Analyzing Redditors’ comments on
Japanese online reactions to Zelensky’s speech to US Congress 791
1
Prof. Masataka Yamaguchi
1. Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Fractal meanings and cultural logics: Metapragmatics of “jiko-sekinin (self-responsibility)” in Japan 792
1
Mr. Toshiyuki Aoyama
1. University of Tsukuba

Phatic and poetic simulacre in Japanese political argument 793


1
Dr. Kuniyoshi Kataoka
1. Aichi University

Poetic performance in tourist city’s identity construction 794


1
Dr. Hiroko Takanashi
1. Japan Women’s University

Poetics of Cheering: Multimodal Achievement of Phaticity in a Japanese Junior-High School Pep Rally 795
1
Mr. Takeshi Enomoto
1. Osaka University

Secrets of Phaticity: Weak Bonds in Rural Japan 796


1
Dr. Makiko Takekuro
1. Waseda University

The embodied poetics of yoga: Parallelism and communion within a military veterans’ yoga program 797
1
Dr. Robin Riner
1. Marshall University

The Phatic Function and the Liberal Imaginary of Communication 798


1
Dr. Shunsuke Nozawa
1. Hokkaido University

(C)overt self-praise strategies in Press Releases by French companies. What does it mean to be polite for
a company? 800
1
Prof. Els Tobback
1. Universiteit Antwerpen

lv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A comparative analysis of politeness and impoliteness in French and Korean 801


1 2
Ms. Ha Nah Kim , Ms. Georgeta Cislaru
1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2. Université Paris Nanterre

Espèce de linguiste! – An impoliteness construction in French? 802


1 1
Dr. Daniel Van Olmen , Dr. Delphine Grass
1. Lancaster University

Expression and perception of (im)politeness of formal and informal requests in Spanish L1, French L1
and Spanish L2 803
1
Mrs. Aurélie Marsily
1. Université catholique de Louvain

How to express embarrassment in Persian, Japanese and French 804


1 2
Dr. Shima Moallemi , Prof. Chantal Claudel
1. Utrecht University, 2. Université Paris Nanterre

Polite requests with “falloir” in the language of service encounters in Côte d’Ivoire 805
1
Ms. Linnéa Koré
1. university of Gothenburg

Politeness in multilingual medical consultations 806


1 2
Prof. Véronique Traverso , Dr. Vanessa Piccoli
1. CNRS, France, 2. Université de Nanterre

Processing pronouns of address during an online job interview in German 807


1 1 1 1
Ms. Maria den Hartog , Ms. Patricia Sanchez Carrasco , Dr. Gert-Jan Schoenmakers , Prof. Helen de Hoop ,
Dr. Lotte Hogeweg 1
1. Radboud University Nijmegen

Processing pronouns of address: a job interview in French 808


1 1 1 1
Ms. Patricia Sanchez Carrasco , Ms. Maria den Hartog , Dr. Gert-Jan Schoenmakers , Prof. Helen de Hoop ,
Dr. Lotte Hogeweg 1
1. Radboud University Nijmegen

Requesting behavior and personality – An experimental study of French requests 809


1
Dr. Nicolas Ruytenbeek
1. KU Leuven

« On remercie une fois encore » : Requests and anticipatory thanks in formal letters in L2 French 810
1 1
Ms. Sulun Aykurt-Buchwalter , Dr. Tatiana Aleksandrova
1. LIDILEM, Université Grenoble-Alpes

«Évitez les impératifs». Rules and formulae for master-servant directives in French nineteenth-century
etiquette and conduct books 811
1
Dr. Annick Paternoster
1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)

(Digital) Grief Counselling: Helping Interaction in Grief Work 813


1
Dr. Christina Siever
1. Universität Zürich

lvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Diagnosis in Telemedical Consiles. Recipient Design in a Triatic Consultation. 814


1
Prof. Karin Birkner
1. University of Bayreuth

Explicit and implicit discursive practices of managing coaching-relevant knowledge in agenda setting 815
1 2
Dr. Sabine Jautz , Prof. Eva-Maria Graf
1. University of Siegen, 2. University of Klagenfurt

Helping. Managing knowledge in interaction. 816


1 2
Dr. Ina Pick , Prof. Claudio Scarvaglieri
1. University of Basel, 2. Lausanne University

Knowledge management in counselling on dementia risk prediction 818


Dr. Carolin Schwegler1
1. University of Cologne

Knowledge management through formulation offers - the example of Messenger-supported group psy-
chotherapy 819
1
Dr. Susanne Kabatnik
1. Greifswald

Negative epistemic construction ‘I don’t know’ in German and Bosnian medical interaction. A cross-
linguistic study 820
1
Dr. Minka Dzanko
1. University of Sarajevo

Patients’ interpretations and knowledge management in medical interactions 821


1
Ms. Moa Hagafors
1. ICAR Lab

Practices of knowledge management in interpreter-mediated women’s healthcare interactions 822


1 1
Prof. Laura Gavioli , Prof. Claudio Baraldi
1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

‘Benefactor’ recipient design in calls for help to the stasi 823


1
Dr. Olga Galanova
1. Ruhr-University Bochum

“What you have discovered here for yourself so far, maybe represents a learning regarding the topic and
about yourself. Could one see it as such?” – (Epistemically) Pre-Structuring Alternative Thoughts and
Behaviours via Questions for Solution Generation 824
1 1
Ms. Frédérick Dionne , Ms. Melanie Fleischhacker
1. University of Klagenfurt

From “Good for her” to “You in danger, girl”: making multimodal moral judgements on Twitter’s ‘Am I
the Asshole’ posts 826
1 2
Dr. Elizabeth Marsden , Dr. Alba Milà-Garcia
1. Åbo Akademi University, 2. Universitat Pompeu Fabra

GIFs as Speech Acts 827


1
Ms. Ashley Dainas
1. Indiana University

lvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Graphical elements in online relationship maintenance: Age as a decisive factor 828


1
Dr. Carmen Pérez-Sabater
1. Universitat Politècnica de València

How emojis interface with grammatical structures on WhatsApp and Instagram 829
1
Dr. Brenda Corchado
1. Inter American University of Puerto Rico

Illocutionary context and management allocation of emoji and other graphicons in Mexican parent
school WhatsApp communities. 830
1 1
Dr. Elizabeth Flores-Salgado , Dr. Michael Witten
1. Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla

Kisses, peaches and fire: how emojis are used by online child sexual groomers 831
1
Ms. Andrea García-Montes
1. Universitat Politècnica de València

Pictures vs texting, texting about pictures. Conversational functions of everyday images on WhatsApp 832
1
Dr. Agnese Sampietro
1. University Jaume I

Stickers and gifs to create identities: the case of Cameroonians’ multilingual conversations on WhatsApp 833
Dr. Ginette Maguelouk Moffo1
1. University of Douala

Uses and functions of emoji in Spanish MPs’ Twitter profiles: the influence of political ascription and
gender 834
1
Dr. Carmen Maíz-Arévalo
1. Complutense University of Madrid

What is really at stake when we talk about “a pragmatics of emoji”? 835


1
Prof. Francisco Yus Ramos
1. University of Alicante

A pranzo is (not?) a dinner party. Observing words for mealtimes in a corpus of Italian and translated
fictional prose in Italian (XIX-XX century) 837
1
Dr. Floriana Sciumbata
1. University of Trieste

Animating food and drink: How cartoons create fantasies, stereotypes and expectations about food 838
1
Prof. Anthony Baldry
1. University of Messina

Kids and nutrition– the new frontier in the discourse about food 839
1 2
Prof. Viviana Gaballo , Prof. Sara Gesuato
1. Sapienza University of Rome, 2. University of Padua

Polite and politic work in Greek food blogs: The case of praise 840
1
Prof. Angeliki Tzanne
1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

lviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Road to Well-Being: Illy’s CSR campaigns as a best practice for local community engagement 841
1
Prof. Nicoletta Vasta
1. University of Udine

With a ‘Beat’ of Salt. The Evolution of Recipes in the TikTok Era 843
1
Dr. Ilaria Moschini
1. Università degli Studi di Firenze

“Eat, Play, Love”: An Interlinguistic Perspective on Montalbano’s Pragmatics and Aesthetics of Food 844
1
Dr. Carla Quinci
1. University of Padua

“Five Foods to eat if you have Covid-19”. Discursive strategies in health claims of food-related communi-
cation 845
1
Prof. Stefania Maci
1. University of Bergamo

A turning point in metaphor development: Significant improvements and shift in cognitive scaffolding
during school-age 847
1 2 3 4
Mr. Nicolas Petit , Prof. Valentina Bambini , Dr. Luca Bischetti , Dr. Ira Noveck
1. Hospital Le Vinatier, 2. iuss, 3. University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, 4. Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

Acquisition of manner implicatures and sense of conventionality in children 848


1 2 1 1
Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum , Dr. Elspeth Wilson , Dr. Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos , Mr. Henrik Torgersen
1. University of Oslo, 2. University of Cambridge

Class innovation and sense conventions at the syntax/pragmatics interface 849


1 1
Mx. Biu Rainey , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum
1. University of Oslo

Literalism in Autistic Individuals: Relation with Predictive Processing Accounts 850


1 2 3
Dr. Valentina Petrolini , Mr. Christian Michel , Prof. Agustin Vicente
1. University of the Basque Country, 2. University of Edinburgh, 3. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque
Country

Losing the thread: How 3- and 5-year-olds predict the outcome of a story when non-literal language is
used to update events. 851
Dr. Claire Prendergast1
1. University of Oslo

That child is a grasshopper (because he jumps a lot): children’s development of novel metaphor compre-
hension 852
1 2 2 1
Ms. Isabel Martín-González , Dr. Kristen Schroeder , Dr. Camilo Ronderos , Dr. Elena Castroviejo , Dr. Ingrid
Lossius Falkum 2 , Prof. Agustin Vicente 3
1. University of the Basque Country, 2. University of Oslo, 3. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque Country

The Emergence of Second-Order Epistemic Vigilance and its Developmental Trajectory 854
1 2 3 1
Dr. Marie Aguirre , Dr. Thomas Castelain , Prof. Nausicaa Pouscoulous , Prof. Diana Mazzarella
1. University of Neuchâtel, 2. Universitat de Girona, 3. University College London

lix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Uncoupling children’s literal bias from their metaphor comprehension abilities 855
1 1
Ms. Mary Beth Neff , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum
1. University of Oslo

When children are more pragmatic than adults: Norwegian children’s comprehension of precise and
imprecise absolute adjectives 856
1 1 2 1
Dr. Camilo Ronderos , Ms. Emma Mathisen , Dr. Ira Noveck , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum
1. University of Oslo, 2. Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

When do children (really) start understanding irony? 857


1 2 3 1
Ms. Ana Milosavljevic , Prof. Nausicaa Pouscoulous , Dr. Thomas Castelain , Prof. Diana Mazzarella
1. University of Neuchâtel, 2. University College London, 3. Universitat de Girona

‘They are wellies, not shoes’: Do children’s sensitivity to language norms grow stronger with age? 858
1 1 1
Dr. Rebecca Iversen , Dr. Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum
1. University of Oslo

An ethnographic multimethod investigation of speech actions in Namibian English and English English:
A focus on offers and responses to thanks 860
1 2 2 3
Prof. Klaus Schneider , Prof. Anne Schröder , Dr. Pawel Sickinger , Dr. Selma Ashikuti , Dr. Nelson Mlambo
3

1. University of Bonn, 2. Bielefeld University, 3. University of Namibia

Complaints and regional variation in French: Examples from Cameroon and France 861
1
Dr. Bernard Mulo Farenkia
1. Cape Breton University

Does space matter? Pragmatic variation in Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish 862
1 2 3 4
Prof. Jenny Nilsson , Prof. Jan Lindström , Dr. Love Bohman , Prof. Catrin Norrby , Dr. Klara Skogmyr Marian
4
, Prof. Camilla Wide 5
1. Institute for language and folklore, 2. University of Helsinki, 3. Södertörn Högskola, 4. Stockholm University, 5. University of
Turku

Expressing gratitude in Nigerian and British English 863


1 2
Dr. Foluke Unuabonah , Prof. Ulrike Gut
1. Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria, 2. Englisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Mün-
ster, Germany

Morphopragmatics of mitigation in German as a pluricentric language: subjunctive II and diminutive in


formal and informal conversations from Austria and Germany 864
1 2 2 1
Dr. Katharina Korecky-Kröll , Mrs. Maria Luisa Krapp , Dr. Georg Oberdorfer , Mrs. Anja Wittibschlager
1. University of Vienna, 2. University of Marburg

Pragmatic Variation During the Negotiation of Service Across Varieties of Spanish 865
Prof. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer1
1. Indiana University

Regional Varieties of Arabic as a Pluricentric Language: A Speech Act Perspective 866


1
Dr. Dina El-Dakhs
1. Prince Sultan University

lx
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The impact of the factors ‘nation’ and ‘region’ on pragmatic variation in pluricentric German. First re-
sults 867
Dr. Tanja Ackermann1 , Mr. Henrik Discher1
1. Freie Universität Berlin

Variational pragmatics study on impoliteness strategies in Chinese negative online consumer reviews 868
1
Prof. Wei Ren
1. Beihang University

Atypicality in copular predications in Mano (Mande) 871


1
Dr. Maria Khachaturyan
1. University of Helsinki

Clausal Constituents and Repair-related Actions in Augmentative and Alternative Communication 872
1
Prof. Patricia Mayes
1. University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Clause structure in Upper Kuskokwim conversational discourse 873


1
Dr. Andrej Kibrik
1. Institute of Linguistics RAS

Comment Clauses in Spoken Turkish: An Analysis of san/zannet/bil (presume/suppose/know)-predicates 874


1
Prof. Deniz Zeyrek
1. Middle East Technical University

Emergent clauses in three Tibeto-Burman verb-final languages 876


1 2
Dr. Pavel Ozerov , Ms. Stephanie Yam
1. University of Innsbruck, 2. University of Münster

From clause connectives to utterance-final suffixes in Korean: A discourse-pragmatic approach 878


1
Prof. Sung-Ock Sohn
1. University of California, Los Angeles

How far can we go with the clause? 879


1
Dr. Toshihide Nakayama
1. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Repeated predicates in Japanese conversation: special focus on adjectives 880


1
Dr. Ryoko Suzuki
1. Keio University

Split Clauses as a Byproduct of Speaker Incongruent Stance and/or Action Misalignment in Mandarin
Conversational Interaction 881
1
Prof. Hongyin Tao
1. UCLA

The (a)typicality of main clauses of relative clauses in Finnish conversation: syntactic and pragmatic
lightness 882
1 2
Prof. Marja-Liisa Helasvuo , Prof. Ritva Laury
1. University of Turku, 2. University of Helsinki

lxi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The atypicality of two-place clauses in Indonesian Conversation 883


1
Dr. Michael Ewing
1. University of Melbourne

The atypicality of verb-final clauses in Japanese conversation 885


1 2 3
Prof. Sandra A Thompson , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono , Dr. Yasuyuki Usuda
1. University of California Santa Barbara, 2. University of Alberta, 3. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

Gestures and information structure manage common ground to adhere to pragmatic frame 887
1
Ms. Sofia Koutalidis
1. Bielefeld University

Multimodal entrainment in conversation: a pilot study on parallel gestures and phonetic variation in
Swedish 889
1 2 1
Ms. Martina Rossi , Dr. Maria Graziano , Dr. Margaret Zellers
1. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2. Lund University Humanities Lab

On the coordination of prosody and hand gestures in native-nonnative conversations 890


1 1 1
Mr. Valentijn Prové , Prof. Bert Oben , Dr. Kurt Feyaerts
1. KU Leuven

The role of nonverbal and paraverbal features in Lingua franca communication in therapeutic mental
health encounters. A case study. 891
1 1
Prof. Leona Van Vaerenbergh , Dr. Sofie Van de Geuchte
1. University of Antwerp

Turn uptake in potentially-competitive contexts using manual gestures by speakers of Luganda 892
1
Dr. Margaret Zellers
1. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Dialogue interpreting in maternity: insights into rapport building and intersectional challenges 894
1 1
Dr. Elena Davitti , Ms. Soumely Madell
1. University of Surrey

Exploring multimodal face work in video remote interpreting and face-to-face interpreting 895
1 1
Dr. Esther de Boe , Mr. Mathijs Verhaegen
1. University of Antwerp

Face Threatening Acts in Telephone Interpreting 896


1
Prof. Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez
1. Universidad de Alcalá

Rapport management and multimodality in onsite and video remote interpreting 897
1 1 1
Mr. Dries Cavents , Prof. July De Wilde , Dr. Jelena Vranjes
1. Ghent University

Rapport management in remote interpreting in court settings. A psychological perspective. 898


1 1 1 1
Mrs. Diana Singureanu , Prof. Sabine Braun , Dr. Graham Hieke , Dr. Joanna Gough
1. University of Surrey

Social workers’ perceptions and experiences on rapport management in onsite and remote interpreting 899
1
Dr. Anu Viljanmaa
1. Tampere University

lxii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Staying connected: The effect of interpreting modality (onsite vs. video-mediated) on rapport manage-
ment in interpreter-mediated police interviews 900
Prof. Sabine Braun1
1. University of Surrey

Beyond war: Turbulent landscapes and affective regimes of Bosnia-Herzegovina 903


1
Prof. Maida Kosatica
1. University of Duisburg-Essen

Debating war (and the chances for peace) in the German public and media. Two open letters to the Ger-
man chancellor and their uptake in the German quality press 904
1
Prof. Helmut Gruber
1. Department of Linguistics, Vienna University

How do States Reminisce? Building Relations Through Bonding Narratives 905


1 2 3
Prof. Zohar Kampf , Dr. Tracy Adams , Prof. Gadi Heimann
1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. Yale University, 3. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Legacies of war, cosmopolitan spaces & diasporic discourses: Insights from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora
in London 906
1
Dr. Lavanya Sankaran
1. King’s College London

Nationalist rhetoric in political speeches as a strategic manoeuvre to mobilise for war. A Discourse-
Historical Approach 907
1
Prof. Martin Reisigl
1. Department of Linguistics, Vienna University

Peace into war transformation in Ukraine: What media keywords suggest 908
1 1
Prof. Serhiy Potapenko , Mr. Oleksii Deikun
1. Kyiv National Linguistic University

Re-writing history through fabricated historical narratives: a discursive “justification” of war. 909
1 2
Dr. Chang Zhang , Dr. Anastasia Stavridou
1. Communication University of China, 2. University of Manchester

Reframing from interpersonal to intractable conflicts: an argumentative approach 910


1
Dr. Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria
1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)

Toxic masculinity, toxic femininity and war 911


1
Dr. Jana Valdrová
1. University of Innsbruck

Vladimir Putin’s war rhetoric: between cold reflexion and loss of control 912
1
Prof. Daniel Weiss
1. University of Zurich

War-peace dialectic revisited: Scrutinizing neutrality-focused discourses in Sweden 913


1
Prof. Cornelia Ilie
1. Strömstad Academy

lxiii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Argumentative Patterns in Peace Discourse” 914


1
Prof. Manfred Kienpointner
1. University of Innsbruck

Black women fighting for justice: a comparative study of narrative performances of Brazilian and Amer-
ican social movements 916
1 1
Dr. Liliana Bastos , Dr. Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

De-/Re-contextualized Western Mono Performances: from Settler-colonial “Texts” to an Emergent Mono


Language Performance Genre 917
1
Prof. Paul Kroskrity
1. University of California, Los Angeles

De/centering vulnerability: A/typicality and communicative justice in a squat in Athens 918


1
Dr. Birgul Yilmaz
1. University of Reading

Disputes and textual trajectories of the sexuality of a gay military officer in Brazil 919
1 2
Dr. Flávia Correia Lima Huber da Costa , Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar
1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, 2. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Indexical Disorder: From the Situated Nature of Power to the Power to Situate Nature 920
1
Prof. Jonathan Rosa
1. Stanford University

Performance, Memory, and Poetics: The Role of Scribal Memory in the Transmission of Ancient Texts 921
1
Dr. Raymond Person
1. Ohio Northern University

Psychic Doppelgängers: Poetic Resonance During the Therapeutic Encounters 922


1
Prof. Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas
1. Emory University

Reading ‘trans-’ perspectives through Bauman & Briggs’s ‘entextualization’: Reformative or Destructive? 923
Dr. Sender Dovchin1
1. Curtin University

The ethnopoetics of reverie: Direct reported thought as (a)typicality. 924


1
Dr. Alex Pillen
1. University College London

The poetics and performance as critical perspectives: Young Bangladeshi Professional Women 925
1
Prof. Shaila Sultana
1. University of Dhaka

The poetics and politics of pornographic rhetoric: high performances in an extremist right wing govern-
ment 926
1 1
Dr. Branca Fabricio , Dr. Luiz Moita-Lopes
1. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

lxiv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Marielle vive”: The work of mourning and the politics of poetics and performance in contemporary
Brazil 927
Dr. Daniel Silva1 , Dr. Daniela Palma 2
1. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Creating private space as a requirement for interaction: The Case of an Autistic Child 929
1
Prof. Friederike Kern
1. University of Bielefeld

Multimodal interactional competence in the early years 930


1 2 3
Dr. Christophe Parisse , Mrs. Sophie de Pontonx , Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern
1. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 2. CNRS-Paris Nanterre University, 3. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Prickly peas and potato walls: The affordances of food pretend play during preschool lunches in Sweden 931
Dr. Annerose Willemsen1 , Prof. Sally Wiggins Young 1 , Prof. Jakob Cromdal 1
1. Linköping University

Recruiting objects to scaffold spatial thinking in early learning environments 932


1 2 3
Dr. Amelia Church , Dr. Amanda Bateman , Dr. Caroline Cohrssen
1. university of melbourne, 2. University of Waikato, 3. University of New England

Social interactional affordances of walking outdoors in preschools in Sweden and Japan 933
1 2 1
Prof. Asta Cekaite , Prof. Matthew Burdelski , Dr. Olga Anatoli
1. Linköping University, 2. Osaka University

Toddlers’ humorous use of environmental resources in peer interactions within an ECEC setting in Ice-
land 935
1
Ms. Bryndis Gunnarsdottir
1. University of Iceland

Young children’s local deployment of material resources: negotiating social relationships during peer
play 936
1
Dr. Magnus Karlsson
1. University of Gothenburg

‘Transformation objects´ – A help for bilingual preschoolers to transit from home to preschool and vice
versa 937
1
Prof. Polly Björk-Willén
1. Linköping University

Forms and functions of repetitions in doctor-patient interaction in cancer treatment encounters 939
1 1 1
Prof. Piera Margutti , Dr. Vittoria Colla , Dr. Valeria Barbieri
1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Painting hands: recycled visitors’ gestures in a museum guided tour 941


1
Dr. Biagio Ursi
1. Université d’Orléans

Recycling turns in multimodal dance instructions 942


1
Prof. Oliver Ehmer
1. University Osnabrück

lxv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Repetition and instruction in blind pedestrians training with guide-dogs 943


1 2 1
Dr. Monica Simone , Dr. Chloé Mondémé , Prof. Renata Galatolo
1. University of Bologna, 2. CNRS, Triangle (Lyon) & Cefres (Prague)

Reproducing multimodal configurations in interpreter-mediated healthcare interactions 944


1 2
Dr. Vanessa Piccoli , Prof. Véronique Traverso
1. Université Paris Nanterre, 2. CNRS, ICAR

Non-canonical uses of man ‘one’ and vi ‘we’ in medical consultations in Finland Swedish 946
1 2
Prof. Camilla Wide , Prof. Camilla Lindholm
1. University of Turku, 2. Tampere University

Perspectivation and typification – on generic uses of “ich”, “du” and “man” in German talk-in-interaction 947
Dr. Jens Lanwer1 , Ms. Nathalie Bauer1
1. University of Münster

Practices of Displaced Person Reference Forms in Interaction: Uses of Possessor-Possessive-


Constructions for Self- and Other-Reference 948
1
Prof. Susanne Günthner
1. University of Münster

Practices of Using the Overt First-Person Singular Pronouns in Japanese Conversation: The Case of Dis-
playing Disaffiliative Stance to Assertions 949
1
Ms. Miyabi Ozawa
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

The pragmatics of non-canonical usage types of personal pronouns in Lingála (Democratic Republic of
Congo) 951
1
Prof. Michael Meeuwis
1. Ghent University

The pragmatics of the 1st person plural in Catalan parliamentary debate 953
1
Dr. Neus Nogué
1. Universitat de Barcelona

Whose voice, whose experience? The open use of Finnish person constructions in tellings of personal
experience 954
1
Dr. Karita Suomalainen
1. Åbo Akademi University

“When you ….” Non-/Generic pronouns, conditional clauses, and the role of particles in referential prac-
tices 955
1
Prof. Monika Dannerer
1. University of Innsbruck

Challenges and Opportunities of Linguistically Diverse Data: Government-mandated Contact Tracing as


a Multilingual Tool to Reach Linguistic Minorities 957
Mr. Romeo De Timmerman1 , Ms. Anne-Sophie Bafort 2 , Dr. Sofie Van de Geuchte 2 , Prof. Mieke Vandenbroucke
2
, Prof. Stef Slembrouck 3
1. Ghent University, 2. University of Antwerp, 3. Linguistics, Ghent University

lxvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Co-constructing meaning through semi-understanding: Conducting the sociolinguistic interview in an


(un)known language 958
Dr. Carol Ready1
1. Oklahoma State University

Cultivating capabilities and coping: accepting moments of communicative opacity in multilingual en-
counters 959
1
Dr. Emma Brooks
1. Birkbeck college, London

Multilingualism in institutional settings: Linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork and spaces of linguistic non-


understanding 960
1 1
Ms. Ella van Hest , Dr. Marie Jacobs
1. Ghent University

The meaning making process in an ethnographic family research in the context of flight and Asylum 961
1
Dr. Jiayin Li-Gottwald
1. University of Kassel

Triangulating multilingualism: incorporating ‘spaces of linguistic non-understanding’ through the inte-


gration of several perspectives 962
1 2
Dr. Samantha Goodchild , Dr. Miriam Weidl
1. University of Galway, 2. University of Vienna

“It’s a bit difficult to understand because it isn’t native Spanish”: Silencing, voicing and adjusting linguis-
tic contributions in multilingual courtroom encounters 964
1 1
Dr. Marta Kirilova , Prof. Martha Karrebæk
1. University of Copenhagen

Accessibility and Inclusion? Reshaping academic communication using visual-gestural modality 966
1 1
Prof. Christiane Hohenstein , Ms. Larysa Zavgorodnia
1. ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics

Barriers and facilitators to inclusive communication as revealed by students with invisible disabilities 968
1
Dr. Agnieszka Sowinska
1. Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland (Department of Experimental Linguistics) & Universidad Católica del Norte,
Antofagasta, Chile (School of English)

Interactions of people with and without disabilities in participatory research groups 969
1
Prof. Bettina M. Bock
1. University of Cologne

Interdiscursive positioning of the sign language interpreter in the educational translation process 970
1
Dr. Priscila Regina Gonçalves de Melo Giamlourenço
1. Federal University of São Carlos

Is it a special communication in higher education? Mutual intentions and reciprocity among interlocu-
tors with different neurotypes 972
1 2
Dr. Lívia Ivaskó , Ms. Regina Mezőlaki
1. associate professor, 2. PhD student

lxvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language anxiety as a barrier to academic participation 974


1 2
Ms. Esther Jahns , Dr. Oliver Bunk
1. Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Multimodal and multisensory interactions in the orientation and mobility training sessions as the inter-
section of the visual-sensory and mobility impairment: With focus on instructors’ use of existence verbs
and verbs of perception 975
1 2 3 3
Prof. Rui Sakaida , Prof. Hiro Yuki Nisisawa , Prof. Mitsuhiro Okada , Prof. Yasusuke Minami
1. Future University Hakodate, 2. Tokiwa University, 3. Seijo University

Racialized and minoritized voices in critical academic writing in Canadian higher education 976
1 2
Dr. John McGaughey , Dr. Heejin Song
1. University of Toronto, 2. York University

Social sustainability and inclusion in higher education: Analysis of the (changing) institutional discourse
of counsellors, lecturers, and students on Belgian and German university websites 977
1
Prof. Magdalene Lévy-Tödter
1. FOM University of Applied Sciences

Social-haptic communication: an additional - (a)typical - resource for communication with and amongst
deafblind individuals 979
1 2
Dr. Laura Volpato , Prof. Johanna Mesch
1. “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice, 2. Stockholm University

(Dis)affiliative uptake of new information: Requests for reconfirmation in German and English conver-
sation 981
1
Ms. Marit Aldrup
1. University of Potsdam

A cross-linguistic study of newsmarks in Arabic, English, and Mandarin 983


1 2 3
Dr. Michal Marmorstein , Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed , Dr. Xiaoting Li
1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. King’s College London, 3. University of Alberta

Alternate newsmark response designs in Korean 984


1 2
Prof. Mary Kim , Prof. Stephanie Hyeri Kim
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2. California State University, Northridge

Finnish [verb-repeat + vai ‘or’]: from understanding checks to newsmarks 986


1
Dr. Aino Koivisto
1. University of Helsinki

Jo? Fakt? ‘Yeah?’ ‘Really?’ - registering and confirming (surprising) news in spoken Czech 987
1
Prof. Florence Oloff
1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Navigating degrees of informativity in responses to news: Trajectories of request for reconfirmation


sequences in Yurakaré 988
Dr. Sonja Gipper1
1. University of Cologne

lxviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ne? (‘yes?’): Between surprise and challenge in Greek telephone calls 989
1
Prof. Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Newsmarks from a multimodal perspective: The case of be’emet ‘really’ in spoken Hebrew 990
1 2
Dr. Leon Shor , Dr. Michal Marmorstein
1. Achva Academic College, 2. Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Prosody as a Stance Marker in Responsive so-Prefaced Yes-No Questions 992


1
Mr. Nadav Matalon
1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Responding to informings in German and Low German – On the fuzzy boundaries of newsmarks in cross-
linguistic research 993
1 2
Dr. Kathrin Weber , Dr. Katharina König
1. Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 2. University of Münster

Teachers’ responses to child-initiated informings in a bilingual preschool 994


1
Dr. Olga Anatoli
1. Linköping University

Eastern European perspective on the study of English language ideologies 996


1
Dr. Loreta Vaicekauskiene
1. Vilnius University

Exploring conflicting ideologies: the relationship of exceptionalism and English in Finland 997
1 1
Dr. Elizabeth Peterson , Ms. Katariina Pyykkö
1. University of Helsinki

Ideologies of English among Danish high school students 998


1
Ms. Marianne Haugaard Skov
1. University of Copenhagen

Revisiting ideologies of English in the Nordic countries – setting the scene 999
1 1
Dr. Janus Mortensen , Dr. Dorte Lønsmann
1. University of Copenhagen

The role of English for young Norwegians 1000


1
Dr. Ulrikke Rindal
1. University of Oslo

The role of English in Nordic multilingual families: help or hindrance to the national language? 1001
1 2
Dr. Kaisa Pietikäinen , Ms. Louisa Gühr
1. NHH Norwegian School of Economics, 2. University of Jyväskylä

“ ‘In Denmark we speak Danish’. No, we speak English in Denmark”: Ideologies about English in Denmark 1002
Dr. Jacob Thögersen1 , Dr. Dorte Lønsmann 1 , Dr. Kamilla Kraft 1
1. University of Copenhagen

Conversational AI Platform for Digital Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy 1004


1
Dr. Sviatlana Höhn
1. LuxAI

lxix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Culturally-aware educational language technologies 1005


1
Prof. Justine Cassell
1. Inria

Explainable Embodied Intelligence for Collaborative Robots: An Interactive Approach 1006


1 1
Dr. Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos , Prof. David Schlangen
1. University of Potsdam

Field testing an interactive language technology in an elderly care facility 1008


1 1
Ms. Rosalyn Langedijk , Prof. Kerstin Fischer
1. University of Southern Denmark

How do users with mild cognitive impairment deal with Conversational User Interfaces? Investigating
situations of signaling trouble 1009
1
Prof. Karola Pitsch
1. University of Duisburg-Essen

The machine/deep learning perspective for conversational AI and the modeling of language specifics 1010
1
Prof. Chloe Clavel
1. Telecom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris

Contextualized Laughter and Joint Construction of Humor in Dementia Interaction: A Discourse-analytic


Case Study 1012
1
Ms. Carolin Schneider
1. Utrecht University

Fictional interaction in humorous children’s narratives: a pragmatic analysis of the corpus CHILDHUM 1014
1
Dr. Larissa Timofeeva-Timofeev
1. University of Alicante

Gender and Humor in Lebanon 1015


1
Ms. Sasha Ghazal Louis-Karam
1. Université Paris Nanterre

Humorous styles in a conversational radio show 1016


1
Ms. Natàlia Server Benetó
1. The Ohio State University

Interactional humour strategies in improvised theatre: Co-constructing humour in performed fiction 1017
1
Prof. Daniela Landert
1. Heidelberg University

Making fun without words: the use of WhatsApp stickers in group interactions 1018
1 2
Dr. María Belén Alvarado Ortega , Dr. Esther Linares-Bernabéu
1. University of Alicante, 2. University of Valencia

Non-impolite evaluations in the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus. The case of mock impoliteness in Spanish 1019
1
Prof. Leonor Ruiz Gurillo
1. University of Alicante

lxx
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic differences between left- and right-wing online satirical news 1020
1 2 3 4
Dr. Shelby Miller , Mr. Joshua Loomis , Dr. Stephen Skalicky , Prof. Salvatore Attardo
1. University of North Texas at Dallas, 2. Victoria College, 3. Victoria University of Wellington, 4. Texas A&M University-
Commerce

Pragmatic study of affiliative style of humour in colloquial conversation 1021


1
Ms. Anastasia Khaylina
1. University of Alicante

Relational connection and separation in a football team: Conversational humour as relational practice 1022
1
Mr. Nicholas Hugman
1. The University of Queensland

The pragmatics of GPT-3, an Artificial Intelligence creating humor: exploring interaction with the audi-
ence in Jerry Seinfeld’s routine 1024
1
Mr. Jose Antonio Ortega Gilabert
1. University of Alicante

“Uhm, Bean.” – Interactional humour in films using dephonemicised language 1025


1 2
Dr. Cornelia Gerhardt , Dr. Maximiliane Frobenius
1. Saarland University, 2. WWU Münster

Change in social meaning to project celebrity persona: use of the Japanese causative-benefactive con-
struction in a TV talk-show 1027
1
Ms. Kimiyo Matsui
1. University of Sydney

Expanding social meaning to its most general: considering underlying cognitive processes 1028
1 1
Ms. Inbal Kuperwasser , Prof. Einat Shetreet
1. Tel Aviv University

Incorporating social meaning into a broader account of meaning in communication. How can a theory of
Hearer’s Meaning help? 1029
1
Prof. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
1. University of Manchester

Off-the-shelf features and pragmatic trajectories: The years of cioè in Italian 1030
Dr. Chiara Ghezzi1
1. University of Bergamo

Pragmatic alternatives and social meaning 1031


1 2
Prof. Eric Acton , Dr. Matthew Hunt
1. Eastern Michigan University, 2. University of Southampton

Pragmatic and knowledge lenience towards foreigners 1032


1 1
Dr. Anna Lorenzoni , Prof. Eduardo Navarrete
1. University of Padua

Predictions and uptake of social meaning in others’ utterances: Gender-neutral vs. gender-marked role
nouns 1033
1
Dr. Benjamin Weissman
1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

lxxi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social Meaning and Pragmatic Implicatures 1034


1
Prof. William Salmon
1. University of North Texas

Address terms in conflictive interactions 1036


1
Dr. Virginia González
1. Universitat de València

Between conflict and cooperation: The role of gestural (mis)alignment in spontaneous interaction 1037
1 1
Mr. Javier Yániz , Dr. Inés Olza
1. University of Navarra

Doctor’s animating practices as responses to third-party complaints in familial conflict mediation 1039
Ms. Zhenzhen Zhu1 , Prof. Yongping Ran 1
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Formulations in Triadic Interactions: Insights from Couples Therapy and Criminal Case Mediation 1040
1 2
Dr. Carolina Figueras , Dr. Katariina Harjunpää
1. University of Barcelona, 2. Tampere University

Functions of no sé (‘I don´t know’) in couple therapy corpus 1041


1
Dr. Dorota Kotwica
1. University of Valencia

How to keep on fighting. Enumerative narrations as a device to promote conflict 1042


1
Dr. Gloria Uclés
1. University of Helsinki

Intercultural Conflict Management: A Preliminary Study Based on Chinese and Spanish Narrative Anal-
ysis 1043
1
Ms. Lin Shao
1. Universitat de Barcelona

Interrogative sentences in conflict talk 1044


1
Mrs. Maria Bataller
1. Universidad Católica de Valencia

Management of disagreements in online focus groups: on the use of mitigation and intensification strate-
gies 1045
1
Ms. Laetitia Aulit
1. UCLouvain

Mitigation and affiliation strategies in couple therapy 1046


1
Dr. Josefa Contreras-Fernández
1. Universitat Politècnica de València

Negotiating empathy 1047


1
Dr. Carme Sanahuges
1. E.U.Gimbernat (affiliated to Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

lxxii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Questioning media reports on human rights abuses: conflict talk in discussing conceptualisations of acts
of violence. 1049
Ms. Stéphanie Pécher1
1. UCLouvain

Retrospective imperatives, a form of reproach? 1050


1 2
Dr. Cristina Villalba Ibáñez , Dr. Marta Albelda Marco
1. Universitat de València, 2. University of Valencia

Second-person reports and epistemic stance: a view from therapeutic interactions in Spanish 1051
1
Dr. Karolina Grzech
1. Stockholm University

The perception of conflict in everyday conversation. Human vs. (semi)automatic detection of conflictive
fragments 1052
1
Dr. Maria Estelles Arguedas
1. University of Valencia

The Role of Empathy to De-escalate Conflict in Couples Therapy 1053


1 2
Dr. Anna López Samaniego , Dr. Carolina Figueras
1. Universitat de Barcelona, 2. University of Barcelona

The role of metapragmatics in conflict mediation: rhetorical-pragmatic strategies used in the breakfast
show ‘Good Morning, Britain’ 1054
1
Dr. Esther Linares-Bernabéu
1. University of Valencia

For your mind only: On pragmatics and grammar in fictive interaction and extended reported speech 1056
1 2 3
Dr. Stef Spronck , Prof. Esther Pascual , Prof. Arie Verhagen
1. Utrecht University, 2. Shanghai International Studies University, 3. Leiden University

Reports of solitude speech in self-quotations 1057


1
Dr. Denys Teptiuk
1. University of Tartu

Speaker-referential Vocatives in Self-directed Solitude Speech: Diverse Manifestations of Self-reference


among Languages 1059
1 2
Dr. Takeshi Koguma , Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu
1. Kanazawa University, 2. Hokkaido University of Education

Swîch der rede! [’Silence your speech!’] The polyphonic structure of soliloquies in Middle High German 1061
1
Prof. Sonja Zeman
1. Universität Augsburg

What does an adult speaker say when alone? A sequential multiple-task analysis of Japanese solitude
speech 1062
1 2
Dr. Mitsuko Izutsu , Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu
1. Fuji Women’s University, 2. Hokkaido University of Education

lxxiii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When to prefer split-self conceptions: self-reference in solitude speech in English, Ainu, Korean, and
Japanese 1063
Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu1 , Dr. Takeshi Koguma2 , Dr. Mitsuko Izutsu3
1. Hokkaido University of Education, 2. Kanazawa University, 3. Fuji Women’s University

Designing Talk for Humans and Horses: Prosody as a Resource for Parallel Recipient Design 1066
1
Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed
1. King’s College London

Intraspecies and interspecies acknowledgements by the dairy cow 1067


1
Prof. Leonie Cornips
1. NL-Lab, Humanities Cluster (KNAW) & Maastricht University

Making sense of pet sounds – human responses to non-human animal vocalizations 1068
1 2
Dr. Stefan Norrthon , Prof. Jenny Nilsson
1. Stockholm University, 2. Institute for language and folklore

Prosodic matching in interspecies interaction: humans’ responses to cats’ vocalizations 1069


1 2
Dr. Katariina Harjunpää , Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed
1. Tampere University, 2. King’s College London

Signs of absence in interspecies play: vocal, verbal, and bodily manifestations of ‘being out of sight’ and
‘being out of reach’ 1070
1 2 1
Dr. Rea Peltola , Dr. Marine Grandgeorge , Dr. Yaru Wu
1. University of Caen-Normandy, 2. University of Rennes 1

Students imitating sounds of non-human animals 1071


1 2 2
Dr. Mika Simonen , Dr. Tuure Tammi , Dr. Pauliina Rautio
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Oulu

Atypical Hearing-Deaf Signing in an Urban Community 1073


1
Prof. Barbara LeMaster
1. CSULB

Epistemic stance-taking and advice giving in collaborative planning in an architectural design studio 1074
1 2
Dr. Min-Seok Choi , Dr. Leslie Moore
1. Francis Marion University, 2. The Ohio State University

Metapragmatic commentary and stance-taking in Guadeloupean Comedy 1075


1
Dr. Kathe Managan
1. University of Louisiana Lafayette

Nahuatl, indigeneity and narrative stance-taking in conversations about bilingual schooling and linguis-
tic activism in Mexico 1076
1
Dr. Jacqueline Messing
1. University of Maryland-College Park

Stance-Saturated Orthography: Making Sense of Russian-in-Ukrainian Facebook Posts 1077


1
Dr. Jennifer Dickinson
1. University of Vermont

lxxiv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The language of political leadership in atypical times: the case of Boston’s mayoral campaigns 1078
1
Dr. Jennifer Sclafani
1. University of Massachusetts Boston

Food and storytelling in German Taster Lunches 1080


1 1
Prof. Stefan Diemer , Dr. Marie-Louise Brunner
1. Trier University of Applied Sciences, Environment Campus Birkenfeld

Stancetaking as storytelling in focus groups on food 1081


1
Mr. Jonathon Coltz
1. Saarland University

Stories in Japanese Taster Lunches 1082


Dr. Polly Szatrowski1
1. University of Minnesota

BUT-Prefaced Turns in L2 Students’ Collaborative Talk 1084


1 2 3
Dr. Leila Kääntä , Dr. František Tůma , Dr. Teppo Jakonen
1. University of Jyväskylä, 2. Vienna University of Economics and Business, 3. University of Turku

Peer interactions around collaborative writing in early childhood education 1085


1 2
Dr. Myrte Gosen , Dr. Frans Hiddink
1. University of Groningen, 2. NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences

Peers as models for explaining and arguing: Students’ recycling practices in whole-class discussions 1086
1 2
Prof. Miriam Morek , Prof. Vivien Heller
1. University of Duisburg-Essen, 2. University of Wuppertal

Students’ practices in educational peer talk: On the accomplishment of mutual helping 1087
1
Ms. Denise Robbins
1. University of Wuppertal

Students’ vocabulary explanations in a beginner-level L2 French classroom: a conversation analysis per-


spective 1088
1
Ms. Loanne Janin
1. University of Neuchâtel

Taking notes while leading the discussion: Multiactivity in student-led discussion circles 1090
1 2
Dr. Hanbyul Jung , Dr. Gabriele Kasper
1. Seoul National University, 2. University of Hawaii at Manoa

“Students’ summons practices for initiating problem solving in small group work – and their interactional
consequences.” 1091
1 1
Dr. Marit Solem , Dr. Karianne Skovholt
1. University of South-Eastern Norway

“Turn your brain off”: The coaching process of young children 1092
1
Ms. Cynthia Hicban
1. Queensland University of Technology

Asymmetric interaction as a triggering notion in the speech therapy in the Language Clinic fields 1094
1 1
Dr. Lucia Arantes , Dr. Maria Francisca Lier-DeVitto
1. PUC-SP

lxxv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Body and language: speech acts and the constitution of the subject-researcher in language acquisition 1095
1
Ms. Glória Carvalho
1. Universidade Católica de Pernambuco

L’asymétrie dans les dialogues de l’enfant avec l’adulte. Entre faits de langue et effets dans le discours 1096
1
Dr. Rosa Figueira
1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Les asymétries du dialogue: que peut-on dire sur l’argumentation entre l’adulte et l’enfant ? 1097
1
Prof. Maria Fausta Pereira de Castro
1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas- UNICAMP/CNPq

Symptomatic speech and debility: intriguing problems concerning asymmetric interactions 1098
Dr. Luciana Carnevale1
1. Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste

“I don’t interview Blacks”: (anti)racist narratives, Blackness and Whiteness in the corporate context. 1100
1
Ms. Cleide De Mello
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Black resistance through oral narratives in brazilian universities 1101


1
Mrs. Natália Felix
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Brazilian social movements and their narratives as a tool in the fight for change 1102
1
Dr. Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo
1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

Discourses of perceived empathy: A sociolinguistic analysis of chronic patients’ narratives of medical


practices 1103
1 1
Dr. Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar , Ms. Grimanessa González-Tapia
1. Universidad Católica del Maule

Marked-body Language in labour narratives 1104


1 1
Ms. Barbara Venosa , Dr. Liliana Bastos
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Narrative Analysis and displacement processes: The case of Venezuelans in Brazil 1105
1
Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Narratives of (re)discovery: perspectives of black Brazilian undergraduate students in processes of racial


self-awareness 1106
1 1
Ms. Joana Gomes , Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Narratives of a “camelô-ambulante”: (Sur)vival on Rio de Janeiro’s commuter trains 1107


1
Mr. Douglas dos Santos
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

Narratives- the Weapon of the Powerless: Lay Witnesses’ Tactical Tool 1108
1
Ms. Tasheney Francis
1. University of Manitoba

lxxvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Public health crisis or typical behaviour? Examining narratives of traffic violence in the Global South
from a feminist perspective 1110
Dr. Naomi Orton1
1. PUC-Rio (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)

South re(existences): Narratives of women in the face of gender violence in Rio de Janeiro 1111
1
Ms. Alice Santos
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

“You’re part of the family, aren’t you?”: Applications of narrative analysis to the critical racial literacy
of health professionals. 1112
1 1
Dr. Clarissa Souza , Dr. Liliana Bastos
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Constructing Stigma against the Socially Marginalized amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: As Seen in Re-
narrated Stories about People with Mental Illness 1114
1
Mr. Yingqian Zhang
1. Osaka University

Discourses about Japan’s position on nuclear weapons 1115


1
Dr. Akira Satoh
1. Osaka University

How to survive in atypical situation as minority people: A comparative study of immigrants’ narratives
in Korea and the UK 1116
1 1
Ms. Hiroe Takemura , Prof. Kaori Hata
1. Osaka University

Implicatures in Russian regional news media in atypical situation 1117


1
Ms. Anastasia Semenova
1. Osaka University

Resonance in Agreement/Disagreement Process in Japanese Discourse: A Case Study of Multi-party Con-


versation in Atypical Situation 1118
1
Ms. Mugiho Kojima
1. Osaka University

Stereotype and Code-Switching: A case study of interactions among young people who have had the ex-
perience of studying abroad 1119
1
Ms. Satsuki Inaba
1. Osaka University

Telling or Not Telling Stories of Mental Illness? A Socio-linguistic Approach to a Japanese Woman’s Self-
Disclosure Narrative 1120
1
Ms. Bingzhu Zhou
1. Osaka University

The unspoken language of exclusion: family discourses on a leprosy victim during past wartime within
their family 1121
1
Dr. Ritsuko Izutani
1. Mukogawa Women’s University

lxxvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Why is ‘Listen to the Bell Ringing’ no longer screened? 1122


1
Prof. Takeshi Hashiuchi
1. St. Andrew’s University, Osaka

Adult Pragmatic Individual Differences and Adolescent Audience Design: Neural and Developmental Ev-
idence on a Partial Segregation from Theory of Mind 1124
1
Dr. Julia Udden
1. Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology, Stockholm University

Empirical study on face-threatening acts in autism: relationship between social cognition and pragmatic
aspects of politeness 1125
1 2
Ms. Regina Mezőlaki , Dr. Lívia Ivaskó
1. PhD student, 2. associate professor

Infants’ earliest pragmatic abilities: Social interaction and pragmatic development in the first year of life 1127
Dr. Gideon Salter1 , Dr. Danielle Matthews 1
1. University of Sheffield

Interplay between pragmatics and Theory of Mind in autistic adolescents: What the Cognitive Pragmatic
Treatment (A-CPT) suggests 1128
1 1
Dr. Ilaria Gabbatore , Prof. Francesca M. Bosco
1. GIPSI Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Turin

Metaphors, pragmatics and theory of mind: A developmental perspective 1130


1 2
Prof. Serena Lecce , Prof. Valentina Bambini
1. University of Pavia, 2. iuss

Pragmatic processes vs typologies of outputs 1131


1 2
Prof. Mikhail Kissine , Prof. Napoleon Katsos
1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2. Cambridge University

Realist irony: Two empirical studies 1132


1 2 2
Dr. Yolanda García-Lorenzo , Ms. Elise Clin , Prof. Mikhail Kissine
1. University of the Basque Country, 2. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Slowdowns in scalar implicature processing: Isolating the intention-reading costs in the Bott & Noveck
task 1133
1 2
Dr. Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos , Dr. Ira Noveck
1. University of Oslo, 2. Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

ToM and social pragmatics in dementia: Do patterns of neurodegeneration and language profiling mat-
ter? 1134
1
Dr. Olga Ivanova
1. Universidad de Salamanca

Weighting the neurocognitive correlates of pragmatic disorder in schizophrenia, between theory of mind
and executive functions: a systematic review and meta-analysis 1135
Mr. Federico Frau1 , Dr. Chiara Cerami 2 , Dr. Alessandra Dodich 3 , Dr. Marta Bosia 4 , Prof. Valentina Bambini 1
1. Department of Humanities and Life Sciences, University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Pavia, 2. IUSS Cognitive
Neuroscience ICoN Center, University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia/IRCCS Mondino Foundation, Pavia, 3. Center
for Mind-Brain Sciences-CIMeC, University of Trento, Trento, 4. School of Medicine, San Raffaele University/IRCCS San Raffaele
Scientific Institute, Milan

lxxviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“You are so clean!”: ToM, Irony production and affective relationships in school-aged children 1137
1 1 1 1
Prof. Francesca Ervas , Ms. Roberta Cocco , Dr. Sara Congiu , Dr. Cristina Sechi , Prof. Natalia Banasik-
Jemielniak 2 , Prof. Roberta Fadda 1
1. University of Cagliari, 2. Maria Grzegorzewska University

A cross-cultural study of hedging in academic spoken discourse 1139


1 2
Ms. Yuxiang Duan , Prof. Liesbeth Degand
1. UCLouvain, 2. UC Louvain

Are you human? AI-human intercultural communication which scams the scammer. 1140
1
Prof. Rosina Marquez Reiter
1. The Open University

Danish and German folk conceptions of ‘hate speech’ framing talk with / about the cultural other on
Twitter 1141
1 2
Dr. Eckhard Bick , Dr. Nicole Baumgarten
1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. University of Sheffield

Evaluations related to the pointing with a finger in a request: a multi-method, cross-cultural pragmatic
analysis of an intercultural encounter 1142
1
Dr. Johanna Isosävi
1. University of Helsinki

How Learners of Chinese Misunderstand Politeness and Impoliteness – A Speech Act Point of View 1143
1 2
Prof. Juliane House , Prof. Daniel Z. Kadar
1. University of Hamburg, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics

Questioning the East/West politeness divide by language-anchored regrouping: A psycholinguistic LIWC


clustering of 55-country 51-year of United Nations General Debate (1970-2020) 1144
1
Ms. Lin Shen
1. Beijing Foreign Studies University

Work in progress: biculturalism through bilingual policies in professional contexts 1145


1 2 2
Prof. Janet Holmes , Dr. Bernadette Vine , Prof. Meredith Marra
1. Victoria University of Wellingtom, 2. Victoria University of Wellington

A Contrastive Study of Face Threats in Historical Chinese and Japanese Memorials: A Speech Act Point of
View 1147
1 1 2 3 2
Ms. Mengyao Liu , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House , Mr. Iori Ohashi
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Chinese and German political discourse in contrast: An analysis of speeches at UN meetings on climate
change from the perspective of Cross-Cultural Pragmatics 1148
1 2
Dr. Chiara Bertulessi , Dr. Nicolò Calpestrati
1. University of Milan, 2. University for Foreigners of Siena

Chinese and U.S. American Official Conflictive Discourse - A Contrastive Pragmatic Analysis 1149
1
Mr. Sen Zhang
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages

lxxix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Comrade Little Vegetable, we believe you are real: atypical humor as motivated rudeness on presidential
candidates’ FB walls. 1150
Dr. Jennifer Wei1
1. English Department, Soochow University

Evasive Responses in Chinese and American Political Interaction: A Speech Act Point of View 1151
1 1 2 3
Mrs. Shiyu Liu , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Framing in Chinese and American Media Editorials about the Sino-US Trade Conflict: A Cross-Cultural
Pragmatic Analysis 1152
1 1
Prof. Lutgard Lams , Ms. Ying Xu
1. KU Leuven Campus Brussel

Politeness in Historical Diplomatic Exchanges – A Contrastive Pragmatic Approach 1153


1 2
Prof. Daniel Kadar , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 2. University of Hamburg

Politics and cyber-activism: mediating law across time, space, and genres 1154
1
Dr. Monika Kopytowska
1. University of Lodz

Refusing in Chinese and English Political Language Use: A Contrastive Pragmatic Study 1156
1 1 2 3
Mrs. Dan Han , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Speaker-audience intercommunication in political speeches: A contrast of cultures 1157


1 1
Prof. Peter Bull , Dr. Maurice Waddle
1. University of York

You lefties, you pickles, you Bibush: The strategic use of address terms across Hebrew and British dis-
course genres 1158
1 2
Prof. Elda Weizman , Prof. Anita Fetzer
1. Bar Ilan University, 2. University of Augsburg

Co-constructed and multifunctional feedback in face-to-face tandem interactions 1160


1 1 1
Dr. Céline Horgues , Dr. Sylwia Scheuer , Dr. Loulou Kosmala
1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Constructing feedback through talk and text in corporate performance appraisals 1161
1
Ms. Fien De Malsche
1. Universiteit Antwerpen

Constructing heterosexual desire as assessable affect: a corpus-assisted small stories approach to male
clients’ reviews of female sex workers on PunterNet 1162
1
Mr. Christos Sagredos
1. King’s College London

Hotel responses to feedback on TripAdvisor: An experimental study on consumer perceptions of face-


work 1163
1 2 1 2
Dr. Irene Cenni , Dr. Rebecca Van Herck , Prof. Bernard De Clerck , Dr. Sebastian Sadowski
1. Ghent University, 2. Radboud University Nijmegen

lxxx
18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the ‘creative’ language of bias in appraisals: metaphors and gendered identities in corporate perfor-
mance reviews 1164
Prof. Sylvia Jaworska1
1. University of Reading

Positive and Negative Stance in MOOC Reviews 1165


1
Dr. Hatime Çiftçi
1. MEF University

Self-presentation in the discursive construction of YouTube “small reviews” through evaluative feed-
back. 1166
1
Prof. Alejandro Parini
1. University of Belgrano

There is amazing feedback and then there is just feedback: Exploring discussions of feedback in online
corpora 1168
1 2
Dr. Ursula Lutzky , Prof. Andrew Kehoe
1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, 2. Birmingham City University

User feedback in response to self-praise on Chinese social media 1169


1 1
Ms. Yaping Guo , Prof. Wei Ren
1. Beihang University

Verbal feedback in the workplace : Observations on forms and functions within team meetings 1170
1 1
Ms. Céline Goussey , Dr. Ludivine Crible
1. Ghent University

“Tell Us Everything!”: Online and offline solicitations for customer feedback 1171
1
Prof. Camilla Vasquez
1. University of South Florida

From divergent to joint foci of visual attention 1173


1 2
Prof. Anja Stukenbrock , Dr. Angeliki Balantani
1. University of Heidelberg, 2. University of Lausanne

Gaze and its functions in atypical f-formations 1174


1 1
Dr. Elisabeth Zima , Ms. Barbara Laner
1. University of Freiburg

Gaze in music making: functions of gaze in orchestra rehearsals and chamber music lessons 1175
1
Dr. Monika Messner
1. University of Innsbruck

Interactional space and gaze: an overview 1176


1 1
Ms. Barbara Laner , Prof. Peter Auer
1. University of Freiburg

The relationship between gaze and hm_hm in dyadic and triadic interactions 1177
1 1
Ms. Johanna Masuch , Dr. Elisabeth Zima
1. University of Freiburg

lxxxi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of gaze in everyday multiparty interactions: Building participation framework during dinners
in signing and speaking families 1178
Prof. Diane Bedoin 1 , Dr. Stéphanie Caët2 , Dr. Christophe Parisse 3 , Mrs. Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel 4 , Dr. Claire
Danet 1 , Mrs. Sophie de Pontonx 5 , Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern 6
1. University of Rouen, 2. University of Lille, 3. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 4. INSPE-Sorbonne University, 5.
CNRS-Paris Nanterre University, 6. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

When gaze is not available – The role of the avatar in gauging partner’s orientation during interaction in
Virtual Reality 1179
1
Ms. Liliana Lovallo
1. University of Heidelberg

“Kannst Du ja mal ausprobieren”: How space, object manipulation, and participation role influence the
role and function of gaze and gestures* 1180
1 1 1 1
Dr. Jana Bressem , Prof. Ellen Fricke , Prof. Wolfgang Einhäuser , Mrs. Inka Schmitz
1. Chemnitz University of Technology

Blended Origo – Deixis in Virtual Reality 1182


1
Dr. Karsten Senkbeil
1. University of Hildesheim

Human, smartphone and territories of the self 1183


1 1
Dr. Andreas Candefors Stæhr , Prof. Lian Malai Madsen
1. University of Copenhagen

Mediating social and informational serendipity 1184


1
Dr. Jackie Militello
1. School of English, University of Hong Kong

Post-digital pragmatics: the conversational rhythm of situated mobile interaction 1185


1
Dr. Caroline Tagg
1. The Open University

Texting in Time: Approaching temporalities of smartphone-based interactions 1186


1
Prof. Florian Busch
1. Universität Bern

Digital Disinformation and Rumor-Busting: Diverse Interpretations of ‘Beiou Feng’ (Nordic Style) on Chi-
nese Social Media. 1188
1
Dr. Heidi Hui Shi
1. University of Turku

Telling (about) the same: Quoting practices in Spanish political hoaxes 1189
1 2
Ms. Anastasia-Ioana Pop , Dr. Agnese Sampietro
1. University of Valencia, 2. University Jaume I

‘I did my research’: The role of celebrities in disinformation dissemination and the performance of a
public apology 1190
1
Ms. Dominika Beneš Kováčová
1. The University of Ostrava

lxxxii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Alexa in multilingual polymedia environments: A case study on the role of smartphones in speech assis-
tant interactions 1192
Ms. Didem Leblebici1
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Old wine in new bottles – politeness and affectivity in voice assistant use as co-constructing traditional
forms of personhood, family and gender roles 1193
1
Prof. Britta Schneider
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Robot mediation: facilitating participation in multiparty interaction 1194


1 1
Mr. Ali Asadi , Prof. Kerstin Fischer
1. University of Southern Denmark

Semantic coherence and topic continuity in multi-turn HCI 1195


1 1
Dr. Netaya Lotze , Mrs. Anna Greilich
1. WWU Münster

Synthetic voice: Can sympathy be constituted? Vocal attractiveness and its utility for human-machine
interaction 1196
1
Ms. Florina Zülli
1. Department of German Studies University of Zurich

The heterogeneity of the speaker: How context is distributed in human engagement with smart speakers 1197
Dr. Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger1
1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

The pragmatics of human-machine interaction: how traditional methods and approaches from cross-
cultural pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics help? 1198
1
Dr. Doris Dippold
1. University of Surrey

Walking with Robi 1199


1 1 1 1
Dr. Jakub Mlynář , Dr. Déborah Gaudin , Mr. Benjamin Nanchen , Mr. Randolf Ramseyer
1. HES-SO Valais/Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

What’s wrong with Alexa? Analyzing the narratives of users in a discussion forum 1200
1 1
Dr. Nadia Gauducheau , Dr. Michel Marcoccia
1. University of Technology of Troyes

“Alexa, please now stop, I want to ask you something else” – Questions and requests in natural interac-
tions with a voice assistant 1201
1
Dr. Miriam Lind
1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Evaluative anaphoric encapsulators as manipulative presuppositions in political discourse 1203


1 2
Ms. Claudia Coppola , Dr. Federica Cominetti
1. Università Roma Tre; La Sapienza Università di Roma, 2. Università dell’Aquila

Inferring gaps of knowledge from anaphoric expressions in detective stories 1204


1 1 1
Prof. Anna Bonifazi , Ms. Pinelopi Ioannidou , Ms. Zala Salarzai
1. University of Cologne

lxxxiii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reference and reflexivity: the metafunctions of the discourse marker ‟in other words” in written English
discourse 1205
Dr. Milica Radulović1
1. University of Niš

Reference construction in German regulatory signs in public spaces. An exploratory study 1206
1 1
Ms. Charlotte Eisenrauch , Prof. Rita Finkbeiner
1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Referring as a joint-action in natural discourse 1208


1
Ms. Emilia Calaresu
1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Situational definites and inference from stereotypical situations in languages with definiteness splits 1209
1
Dr. Ulrike Albers
1. Structures Formelles du Langage

The recalibration of the referent through the reformulation in spontaneous spoken Italian 1210
1
Ms. Roberta Cicchirillo
1. Department of Humanities (DipSUm), University of Salerno

Viewpoint building and referential interpretation with three defocusing constructions in Spanish digital
news discourse 1211
1
Dr. Miguel A. Aijón Oliva
1. Universidad de Salamanca

An Event Approach for the Analysis of Interpersonal Trust in HRI 1213


1
Dr. Glenda Hannibal
1. Ulm University

Being Transparent about Competence: Using Transparency in Trust Calibration 1214


1 1
Mr. Matous Jelinek , Prof. Kerstin Fischer
1. University of Southern Denmark

Believe you me, I’m a button: Nonverbal and verbal affordances of trust in artificial others 1215
1 2
Ms. Michal Pauzner , Dr. Bracha Nir
1. SHENKAR Engineering. Design. Art., 2. University of Haifa

Building e-Trust: Effects of Reciprocity and Social Cues on Online Self-disclosure and Trust 1216
1 1 2
Dr. Jaap Ham , Mr. Zhenyu Zhu , Dr. Jettie Hoonhout
1. Eindhoven University of Technology, 2. Philips Research

Designing Trustworthy Chatbots for Eating Disorders 1217


1 1
Ms. Xin Shen , Prof. Kenny Chow
1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Distrusting self-driving cars, trusting Alexa. A discourse linguistic investigation of trust in Artificial In-
telligence 1218
1 1 1
Dr. Monika Hanauska , Prof. Annette Leßmöllmann , Dr. Nina Kalwa
1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

lxxxiv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Do we really perceive and react differently to Embodied Artificial Intelligence than to “any other” tech-
nology? 1219
Dr. Astrid Weiss1
1. TU Wien

Does lexical coordination affect epistemic and interpersonal trust? The role of conceptual pacts 1220
1 1 1
Ms. Mélinda Pozzi , Prof. Adrian Bangerter , Prof. Diana Mazzarella
1. University of Neuchâtel

In disinformation we trust. Why we trust strangers online 1221


1
Dr. Lorella Viola
1. University of Luxembourg

Prosodic cornerstones for building trust: Phrase-final pitch and tempo dynamics 1222
1 2 3
Prof. Oliver Niebuhr , Mrs. Hilla Goren-Barnea , Dr. Vered Silber-Varod
1. Centre for Industrial Electronics, University of Southern Denmark, 2. Computer Science Dept., Open University of Israel, 3.
TAD Center for AI and Data Science, Tel Aviv University

Trusting robots throughout the technology acceptance process 1223


1
Dr. Maartje de Graaf
1. Utrecht University

Why Overtrust in Social Robots Is Inevitable 1224


1
Prof. Kerstin Fischer
1. University of Southern Denmark

From Collective to Individual Memories: Linguistic implications for Preserving and Revitalising Run-
yankore 1226
1
Dr. Levis Mugumya
1. Makerere University

Learning an Indigenous language as a political statement in Canada: new speakers of Inuktitut 1227
Dr. Jennifer Hartog1
1. Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact, York University, Toronto, Canada

New Speakers of Hawaiian in an English Dominant Society 1228


1 2
Mr. Sebastian Ohara-Saft , Dr. Scott Saft
1. University of Hawaii at Mānoa, 2. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

The roles of new speakers in the revitalization of” Uchinaaguchi” 1229


1
Ms. Seira Machida
1. University of Hawaii at Hilo

The roles played by new speakers of the Ainu language: the case of Urespa Project 1230
1
Dr. Yumiko Ohara
1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

Covid-19 in Brazil: how were war metaphors useful? 1232


1
Dr. Heronides Moura
1. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

lxxxv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Embedding the Covid-19 pandemic in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God’s rhetoric 1233
1
Dr. Erik Miletta Martins
1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

Fake News in the Brazilian context of Covid-19 pandemic: textual construction of lethal knowledge 1234
1 1
Dr. Anna Bentes , Mr. José Elderson de Souza Santos
1. University of Campinas

Frames in political texts in favour of racial quotas at the University of Campinas (Brazil) in 2016 1235
1
Dr. Rafahel Parintins
1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

Interpersonal cognition in simultaneous interpreters’ discourse processing 1236


Prof. Hiroyuki Ishizuka1
1. Hiroshima Shudo University

Metaphorical conceptualization of aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease: trends observed in neurolinguistic


studies 1237
1 1
Prof. Edwiges Morato , Dr. Nathália Freitas
1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Socio-cognitive processes in reading and writing academic texts 1238


1 2 2
Dr. Kennedy Nobre , Dr. Anna Bentes , Mrs. Rafaely Carolina da Cruz
1. Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira, 2. University of Campinas

“People incorrectly correcting other people”: (Re-)Correcting comments as a means of stancetaking in


digital communication 1240
1 2
Dr. Karina Frick , Dr. Dimitrios Meletis
1. Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2. Universität Zürich

Assertion, normativity, and commitment at the minimalism/contextualism boundary: The case of com-
menting 1241
1
Prof. Kasia Jaszczolt
1. University of Cambridge

Commentative wenn-sentences in German 1242


1
Dr. Robert Külpmann
1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Commenting as an inherent function of because X constructions 1243


1
Mr. Martin Konvička
1. Freie Universität Berlin

Not Just a Laugh: Multi-Functions of Graphic Markers 1244


1 2
Dr. Pnina Shukrun-Nagar , Dr. Galia Hirsch
1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2. Bar Ilan University

The speech action of commenting: Approaches and challenges 1245


1 1
Prof. Rita Finkbeiner , Dr. Robert Külpmann
1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

lxxxvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The translation of I think as a speech act: A corpus based study in English-Turkish translations of TED
Talks 1246
Dr. Aytaç Çeltek1
1. Kırıkkale University

To whom does this message address? Sisterhood construction through commenting by Chinese women 1247
1
Ms. Bin Wang
1. University of Porto

“Momentos desagradables” – Linguistic triggers for speech action in social media 1248
1
Dr. Mailyn Lübke
1. Universität Osnabrück (Germany)

A Note on the Relation between Conversational Maxims and the Emergence and Disappearance of Com-
munication Styles 1250
1 2
Dr. Lina Ali , Prof. Masaki Ono
1. Cairo University, 2. University of Tsukuba

Considerations in the Transition of Address Terms 1251


1
Dr. Qinan Li
1. Peking University

Emergence and disappearance of Japanese Request Expressions and Proposed Formulas for Calculating 1252
1 2 3
Prof. Masaki Ono , Prof. Yukino Yamashita , Dr. Hyunju Ju
1. University of Tsukuba, 2. Jumonji university, 3. Mejiro University

Indirect self-expressions in English 1253


1
Dr. Koichi Nishida
1. Yamaguchi Prefectural University

Mechanisms of diachronic change of Aizuchi in Japanese: Aizuchi as a positive politeness 1254


1 2
Prof. Tsutomu Makihara , Prof. Naomi Koda
1. GUNMA University, 2. Tohoku University

The Emergence and Disappearance of Japanese Condolence Expression ‘Go-shusho-sama’ 1255


1
Dr. Masaki Yamaoka
1. Soka University

Gender and sexuality roles in Grace and Frankie: beyond sex for seniors and women entrepreneurs 1257
1
Prof. Janet Fuller
1. University of Groningen

The pragmatics of intimacy: A corpus perspective on First Dates Ireland 1258


1 2
Dr. Brian Clancy , Dr. Elaine Vaughan
1. Mary Immaculate College, 2. University of Limerick

Who pays on the first date? Moral accountability in the linguistic and embodied negotiation of gender
roles during blind dates on reality TV 1259
1 2
Dr. Maximiliane Frobenius , Dr. Cornelia Gerhardt
1. WWU Münster, 2. saarland university

lxxxvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I feel so emasculated”: Gender construction, discursive reproductions and payment negotiations in First
Dates Ireland 1260
Prof. Anne Barron1
1. Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

‘Woke’: Corpus assisted discourse analysis of a stigmatising keyword in polarised society. 1262
1
Dr. Melani Schroeter
1. University of Reading

(Re) contextualising the ‘anti-woke’ discourse: French and English attitudes towards gender-inclusive
language within online discursive spaces 1263
1
Ms. Paige Johnson
1. University of Liverpool

An Anglicism on the Foreground of Francophone Press. Combining Macro-diachronic and Enunciative


Perspectives on the Metadiscursive Keyword ‘Fake News’ 1264
1
Mrs. Elise Schürgers
1. Université de Liège

Constructing the meaning of sustainability through argumentation: locus from definition in the public
controversy surrounding sustainable fashion 1265
1
Ms. Chiara Mercuri
1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)

Discussing the Boundaries of Science. “Scientific” as a Keyword in Politicians’ and Experts’ Discourses
during the Covid-19 Crisis in Belgium 1266
1
Ms. Coline Rondiat
1. UCLouvain

Empty or overloaded? A comparative analysis of the keywords populism(s) and populist(s) in Belgian,
French, and Spanish media discourses 1267
1
Ms. Nadezda Shchinova
1. UC Louvain

Patterns of transphobia in English and German 1268


1
Dr. Berit Johannsen
1. University of Greifswald

Revolution in Context: Vector Space Representations of Keywords in 20th Century Latin American Insur-
gent Discourse 1269
1
Dr. Isabelle Gribomont
1. KBR (Royal Library of Belgium)

What do they mean by polarisation? Usage and meaning in Spanish and British press. 1270
1 2
Dr. M Dolores Porto , Dr. Manuela Romano
1. Universidad de Alcalá, 2. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

What is “sustainable development”? A contrastive keyword analysis of tweets about climate change in
Norway, France and Belgium 1271
1 2 3 3
Dr. Andrea Pizarro Pedraza , Dr. Louise-Amélie Cougnon , Prof. Kjersti Fløttum , Dr. Øyvind Gjerstad
1. Université Saint Louis-Bruxelles, 2. UCLouvain, 3. University of Bergen

lxxxviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Un)intended offence: intentionality and scales in the negotiation of offensive humour 1273
1 2
Prof. Michael Haugh , Prof. Rosina Marquez Reiter
1. The University of Queensland, 2. The Open University

Accountability and its discontents 1274


1
Prof. Laurence Horn
1. Yale University

Deniable offenses - different ways of communicating controversial messages 1275


1 1 1
Dr. Ellen Breitholtz , Dr. Vladislav Maraev , Dr. Christine Howes
1. University of Gothenburg

Egocentrism and salience in stand-up interaction 1276


Dr. Ibukun Filani1
1. Augustine University Ilara-Epe

Hateful illocutions and humour 1277


1
Dr. Vahid Parvaresh
1. Anglia Ruskin University

Having a license for offensive humour. The case of emigrant Romanian stand-up comedians’ discourse 1278
1
Dr. Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
1. University of Bucharest

Implied offensive language on social media 1279


Dr. Tahmineh Tayebi1
1. Aston University

Offensive humour and ‘only joking’ claims on Reddit 1280


1 1
Prof. Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen , Ms. Ylva Biri
1. University of Helsinki

The lifecycle of “edgy” stand-up jokes: from rhetoric to offended audiences 1281
Dr. Eleni Kapogianni1 , Dr. Chi-He Elder2 , Dr. Isabella Reichl1
1. University of Kent, 2. University of East Anglia

Using humour to call out racism: political satire, the right to offend and take offence 1282
Dr. Dimitris Serafis1 , Prof. Stavros Assimakopoulos2 , Dr. Anna Piata 3
1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), 2. University of Malta, 3. University of Neuchâtel

Lectures

“Brussels is in panic”. A relevance theoretical approach to political discourse. 1284


Dr. Ildiko Vasko1
1. Eötvös Loránd University

“Fear Allah”: (Im)politeness, Morality, and Religion. 1285


Mr. Ahmed Elgadri1
1. Lancaster University

lxxxix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Just Like, Risking Your Life Here”: Envisioning AI to Bolster Women’s Communication Practices in As-
sessing Risk of Harm in Online Dating 1286
Ms. Isha Datey1 , Dr. Douglas Zytko 1
1. Oakland University

-To omou (‘I think’) utterances in L2 Japanese: testing the effect of user background in their interpretation1287
Dr. Mika Kizu1 , Dr. Barbara Pizziconi2 , Dr. Eiko Gyogi3
1. Notre Dame Seishin University, 2. SOAS, University of London, 3. Okinawa University

A case-study of affect display in HE institutional email discourse at Covid-19 times: exploring the inter-
play between politeness and empathy 1288
1 1
Dr. Louisa Desilla , Dr. Angeliki Alvanoudi
1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

A cognitive model of discourse structure building: From the perspective of intonation units and cognitive
grammar 1289
1
Dr. Tomoko Sakita
1. Doshisha University

A continuum approach to Politeness in Chinese courtroom discourse 1290


1
Prof. Meizhen Liao
1. Kashi University

A corpus-based case study of human understanding of concepts and reality: Japanese “jibun” (‘self’) and
“shiawase” (‘happiness’) modified by “hontou-no” (‘true’) 1291
1
Dr. Yoko Mizuta
1. International Christian University

A Critical Multimodal Study of ‘Cute Language’ in Chinese Cyberspace and Beyond 1293
1
Dr. Feifei Zhou
1. Lingnan University

A new perspective on interpersonal relations: a triadic alternative to in/directness and imposition miti-
gation 1294
1
Dr. Isabella Reichl
1. University of Kent

A Pragmatic Cultural Analysis of Multilingual Linguistic Landscape in Cyprus 1295


1
Dr. Sviatlana Karpava
1. University of Cyprus

A Study on “Mounting”: A New Interactional Concept Related to Im/politeness in Japanese 1296


1 2
Dr. Seiko Otsuka , Dr. Ryogo Yanagida
1. Osaka Institute of Technology, 2. Jissen Women’s University

Acquisition and use of ‘poder’ and ‘conseguir’ among Hispanic learners of Brazilian Portuguese 1297
1 1
Dr. Cristina Perna , Ms. Martha Porto
1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul

Advertising in Pedro Almodóvar’s Films: A Multimodal Analysis 1298


1
Mr. Rui Pedro Vau
1. School of Arts and Humanities

xc
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ageing in a foreign land: loneliness among Mauritian Chinese migrants in the UK 1300
1
Ms. Xuechun Xiang
1. Queen Mary University of London

Aging metaphors in Chinese advertisements: A multimodal analysis 1301


1
Dr. Shuping Huang
1. National Sun Yat-sen University

An analysis of business closure signs during the Covid-19 pandemic in Korea 1302
1
Prof. Hye-Kyung Lee
1. Ajou University

An analysis of grammatical elements in conversation repairs: case markers and second language acqui-
sition. 1303
1
Ms. Kaori Doi
1. Institute of Technologists

An experimental approach to the production of criticisms and replies to criticisms in a work environment1304
Mr. Baptiste Bersier1 , Prof. Sandrine Zufferey 1 , Prof. Diana Mazzarella 2 , Dr. Sandra Schwab 1
1. University of Bern, 2. University of Neuchâtel

An interview of a victim of repression in Argentina. Negotiating the topics and the sense of the past 1305
1
Prof. Alejandra Vitale
1. Universidad de Buenos Aires

An Investigation of Chinese Adult English Learners’ Comprehension of Sarcastic Tweets in English 1306
1
Mr. Xuan Li
1. Queen’s University Belfast

Analysis of interaction features of high-school English textbook: A conversation analysis perspective 1307
1
Dr. Esmaeel Abdollahzadeh
1. Iran University of Science and Technology

Analysis of Pronominal Choices in African Suicide Notes 1308


1 1
Dr. Yunana Ahmed , Mr. Daniel Danladi
1. Gombe State University

Analysis of Social Media Posts Emanating from Selected Doxxed Actresses in Nigerian Kannywood Movie
Industry 1309
1
Ms. Ummi Ibrahim
1. Gombe State University

Animal metaphor as a co-joint enterprise of blame, categorization, and emotional interaction on social
media 1310
1 1
Dr. Ying Jin , Prof. Dennis Tay
1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Apologies in “Entrevías” and “Vivir sin permiso” – a test of pragmatic competence for learners of Spanish 1311
Dr. Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch1
1. University of Southern California

xci
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Apology in the discourse of Japanese Olympic Athletes 1312


1 2
Dr. Chie Yoshinaga , Dr. Ryo Takamura
1. Sanyo gakuen university, 2. Rissho University

Asymmetrical talk: an argument for the conjoint co-constitution of asymmetry in doctor-patient interac-
tion 1313
1
Dr. Ahmad Izadi
1. University of Bayreuth

Behind the scenes of remote teaching in the pandemic context and the new face-to-face in public schools:
digital hope or a necropolitical education? 1314
1
Ms. Viviane dos Santos Cavalcanti
1. SEEDUC-Rio

Bú kèqi (不客⽓Don’t be polite) and Yào yǒu lǐmào (要有礼貌You need to be polite) – Understanding Chinese
Politeness 1315
1
Dr. Qing Li Kinnison
1. Wofford College

Call-takers impoliteness in Estonian emergency calls 1316


1 1 1 1 1
Mr. Tiit Hennoste , Mrs. Andriela Rääbis , Ms. Piret Upser , Ms. Kirsi Laanesoo , Ms. Andra Annuka-Loik
1. University of Tartu

Celebrification and viewer interaction in microcelebrities’ product promotion videos 1317


1
Prof. Chi-hua Hsiao
1. Tunghai University

Challenges and limitations of analyzing impression management 1318


1
Mrs. Éva Szabó
1. University of Szeged; MTA-SZTE-DE Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics and Informatics

Changing sociocultural context, changing social meanings of gender references in the pragmatics of
translation 1319
1
Prof. Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
1. University of Oregon

Children’s and adults’ sensitivity to over-informativeness and under-informativeness in referential com-


munication 1320
1 1
Dr. Chiung-chih Huang , Dr. Kanyu Yeh
1. National Chengchi University

Chinese politeness revisited: evidence from the Yijing ‘Book of Changes’ 1321
1
Dr. Anita Huang
1. Columbia University

Code-switching and Code-mixing in Parsi Gujarati: A Structural Analysis 1322


1 1
Ms. Scherezade Dastur , Dr. Anindita Sahoo
1. Indian Institute of Technology Madras

xcii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Coherence and common ground in Facebook ‘group tagging’ interactions: Approaching platform-specific
communicative practices 1324
Mr. Vinicio Ntouvlis1
1. University of Vienna

Common ground updates do not depend on how information is conveyed: a recognition memory study 1326
1 1
Ms. Eleanor Miller , Prof. Mikhail Kissine
1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Complex structures in real communications between pilots and air traffic controllers: making a case for
a pragmatic analysis of Aviation English 1328
1 2
Dr. Malila Prado , Dr. Adriana Porcellato
1. BNU-HKBU United International College, 2. Universidade de Sao Paulo

Concealed Questions and Free Enrichment 1329


1 1
Dr. Yuji Nishiyama , Dr. Koji Mineshima
1. Keio University

Considering pragmalinguistic infelicities in persuasive writing: The case of Albanians writing in Greek 1330
1
Ms. Alexandra Vasilopoulou
1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Constraints on complaints: complementation in English and Dutch DCTs 1331


1 2
Dr. Caroline Gentens , Dr. Bram Vertommen
1. KU Leuven, 2. Utrecht University

Constructing a mob: A membership categorization analysis of accounts for gun use in local and national
media 1332
1
Dr. Sarah Creider
1. Teachers College, Columbia University

Construction and preliminary annotation of a telephone interpreting multilingual spoken corpus for the
study of face-threatening acts 1333
1 2 2
Mr. Marcelo Yuji Himoro , Prof. Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez , Prof. Antonio Pareja-Lora
1. Universidad de Alcalá / Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2. Universidad de Alcalá

Contingent (dis)agreement and emotional expressiveness in online sociopolitical talk 1334


1
Prof. Mei-Ya Liang
1. National Central University

Conventional meaning and conventional implicature: non-truth-conditional meanings of conditionals 1335


1 1
Dr. Alex Reuneker , Prof. Arie Verhagen
1. Leiden University

Converging evidence for time-space conflation in Mandarin Chinese 1336


1 1
Prof. Zhengguang Liu , Ms. Ziyan Zhang
1. Hunan University

Corpus analysis of negative emotive words in Discourse Grammar Framework 1337


1 2
Prof. Károly Bibok , Dr. Martina Szabó
1. University of Szeged, 2. University of Szeged and ELKH CSS-RECENS

xciii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Correlations between pronominal elements referring to persons and things. A case study of third person
and demonstrative pronouns in Hungarian 1338
Dr. Krisztina Laczkó1 , Dr. Szilárd Tátrai 1
1. Eötvös Loránd University

Covert Communication in Japanese Advertisements 1339


1
Prof. Shigeyuki Suzuki
1. Tokyo Kasei University

Covid 19 and Death Talk: A Conversation of Change 1340


1 2
Dr. Gulab Chand , Dr. Urjani Chakravarty
1. Manipal University Jaipur, 2. Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya

Cross cultural issues within a dialect context in the Orkney Islands 1341
1
Dr. Tom Rendall
1. Orkney College UHI

Crossover Phenomena and Echo Questions 1342


1
Mr. Takeshi Tsurusaki
1. None

Culture as a tool for identity work: an exploration of L2 Japanese learners’ autobiographic accounts 1344
1
Ms. Hiroko Ohashi
1. RMIT University

Deideophonization of Korean ideophones: Focusing on monosyllable words in spoken resister 1345


1
Dr. Jiyeon Park
1. Jilin International Studies University

Delimiting senses: core issues in the polysemy of prepositions 1346


1
Ms. Michelle Weckermann
1. University of Augsburg

Deontology of assertion 1347


1
Prof. Marina Sbisà
1. University of Trieste

Developing Idiomatic Competence among Chinese EFL learners: An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness
of a Self-designed Ediom Mobile App 1348
1 2
Dr. Siying Li , Dr. John Liontas
1. Xi’an International Studies University, 2. University of South Florida

Developing pragmatic fluency for study abroad: A targeted instructional intervention 1349
1 2
Dr. Jiayi Wang , Dr. Nicola Halenko
1. University of DeMontfort, 2. University of Central Lancashire

Developmental trajectories in the use of self-repair by a Japanese learner of English studying abroad 1350
1
Dr. Seiko Harumi
1. SOAS, University of London

Diplomatic criticism/condemnation: A cross-cultural pragmatic perspective 1351


1
Dr. Jun Ohashi
1. University of Melbourne

xciv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse Functions of Japanese Turn-final Use of Kedo ‘But’ in a Question-answer Sequence 1352
1
Dr. Suhong Hu
1. Institute of Linguistics, CASS

Discourse marker jiushishuo ‘(that) is to say’ as a preface of formulating others’ talk in Mandarin Chinese1353
Dr. Li Chen1
1. kanda university of international studies

Discourse, collective action and women’s rights groups in Nigeria and Germany: A comparative analysis
of online campaign discourses 1354
1
Prof. Innocent Chiluwa
1. Covenant University, Ota

Displaying uncertainty and avoiding disaffiliation with Estonian response particle mhmh ‘uh-huh’ 1355
1 1 1 1
Ms. Kirsi Laanesoo , Mr. Tiit Hennoste , Mrs. Andriela Rääbis , Ms. Andra Rumm , Ms. Andra Annuka-Loik
1
, Ms. Piret Upser 1
1. University of Tartu

Distinctiveness of Procedural Expressions in Sequences 1356


1
Prof. Takahiro Otsu
1. Kyushu University

Ellipses in Advertising Communications and Brand Strategies of Luxury Experience Businesses 1357
1
Prof. Nami Arimitsu
1. Toyo University

English expressions of ‘love’ in Japanese subtitles and dubbing 1358


Dr. Christopher Long1
1. Tohoku Gakuin University

Entering the voluntary arts: methodological approaches to examining group membership in an amateur
dance group 1360
Ms. Naomi Smart1
1. King’s College London

Establishing Common Ground in Multilingual Video-Mediated Interactions 1361


1
Dr. Budimka Uskokovic
1. The Ohio State University

Ethnopragmatics of Emotions in Pakistani culture: A Case of Urdu Affect Lexicon 1362


1 2
Ms. Saima Mubashra , Dr. Ghazala Kausar
1. Higher Education Department Pakistan, 2. National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan

Evaluative adjectives and the problem of collocation 1363


1
Prof. Marija Liudvika Drazdauskiene
1. Wszechnica Polska, Academy of Applied Sciences in Warsaw

Everyday is like war: The tensions and anxieties of Japanese youth negotiating typical and atypical mas-
culine pronouns and identities 1364
1
Dr. Ayumi Miyazaki
1. Japan Women’s University

xcv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Examining pitch range, gender, and politeness in Spanish polar questions 1365
1
Mr. Bruno Staszkiewicz Garcia
1. Purdue University

Experts and novices: Examining academic email requests to faculty during study abroad 1366
1 2
Dr. Nicola Halenko , Dr. Jiayi Wang
1. University of Central Lancashire, 2. De Montfort University

Explicit and Implicit (Im)politeness: A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Formulaic Expression
“Nikezhen+X” 1367
1 1
Prof. Shaojie Zhang , Ms. Keyuan Wang
1. Northeast Normal University

Exploring Illocutionary Force of Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM) Specified Canonical Constructions: A Col-


lostructional Approach 1368
1
Dr. Yoshiyuki Notohara
1. Doshisha University

Exploring the relationship between information structure and intersubjectivity in spoken Mandarin: A
corpus-based approach 1369
1
Dr. Carmen Lepadat
1. RomaTre University

Exploring unfamiliar ingredients in instructional cooking activities of foreign cuisines 1370


1
Ms. Shu-Yu Huang
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Expressing anger in Spanish speaking online service interactions: The case of Cabify customer com-
plaints 1371
1 1
Dr. H Powell , Prof. Maria Elena Placencia
1. Birkbeck college, London

Expressions of responsibility in the last statements by inmates on death row 1372


1 2
Prof. Jan-Ola Östman , Prof. Helena Halmari
1. University of Helsinki, 2. Sam Houston State University

Fallacies of war metaphors in the COVID-19 pandemic: a diachronic approach 1373


1 2
Dr. Maria Stroinska , Dr. Grażyna Drzazga
1. McMaster University, 2. University Medical Centre, Groningen

Fighting for democracy: Ideological implications embedded in the scenarios of WAR 1374
1 1 1
Dr. Hsiao-Ling Hsu , Prof. Huei-ling Lai , Prof. Jyi-Shane Liu
1. National Chengchi University

Food as a Source of Intercultural Communication in Virtual Exchange: Japan and China 1375
1 2
Mr. Martin Parsons , Dr. Mikel Garant
1. Hannan University, 2. Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai

From the universal impairment hypothesis to the double empathy problem: Theory of Mind and prag-
matic skills in autism as a case of epistemic injustice 1376
1
Dr. Eleonora Marocchini
1. Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE)

xcvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender neutralizing processes in Brazilian Portuguese: style and indexicalization in a feminist corpus 1378
1 1
Mrs. Rafaely Carolina da Cruz , Dr. Anna Bentes
1. University of Campinas

Gender Prejudices and Identity Contestations in Nigerian Police-Civilian Encounters 1379


1
Dr. Felix Ogoanah
1. University of Benin

General extenders in university classroom talk: discourse-pragmatic and register variation 1380
1
Dr. Federica Barbieri
1. Swansea University

Gestural discourse markers in multimodal topic-shifting 1381


Dr. Schuyler Laparle1
1. University of California, Berkeley

Greek political discourses in the years 2019-2022: instrumentalizing impoliteness and aggression 1382
1
Prof. Marianthi Georgalidou
1. University of the Aegean

How do scholars understand (im)politeness? An analysis using computational methods 1383


1 2
Dr. Xi Chen , Dr. Mian Jia
1. University of Central Lancashire, 2. The University of Texas at Austin

How to dismantle Responsibility in the Public Apology of the Diet of Japan — From the Perspective of
Local Grammar 1384
1 2 1
Dr. Huiling Chen , Mr. Hengcong Li , Dr. Jianying Du
1. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2. Osaka University

I AM criticizing you when I say “I am not criticizing you”: A multimodal analysis of the Chinese metaprag-
matic structure bushi wo shuo ni 不是我说你 1385
1
Mr. Zepeng Wang
1. Nanjing University

IAW phrases with attributive question words in German 1386


1
Dr. Steven Schoonjans
1. Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt & KU Leuven

Impoliteness of polite disagreement: The perception of (im)politeness between honorifics and speech
acts in Korean 1387
1
Dr. Narah Lee
1. The University of Queensland

In/directness in requests and refusals in multilinguals: A linguistic and textual perspective 1388
1 1
Dr. Ronit Webman Shafran , Prof. Anat Stavans
1. Beit Berl Academic College

Information status and verbal/non-verbal referential acts in Mandarin mother-child conversation 1389
1 1
Dr. Kanyu Yeh , Dr. Chiung-chih Huang
1. National Chengchi University

xcvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Initiating repair in transition space with the Norwegian particle “eller” 1390
1
Dr. Marja Etelämäki
1. University of Oslo

Innuendo and its Pragmatics on the Path to American Political Hate 1391
1
Prof. Norma Mendoza-Denton
1. UCLA

Institutional Crisis Communication: inspiring hope through verbal and non-verbal strategies 1392
1 1
Dr. Dorothy Agyepong , Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo
1. University of Ghana

Interactional Functions of ”Jiu shi” in Mandarin Chinese Conversation 1393


Dr. Yue Guan1
1. Peking University

Intergenerational discourses on climate change 1395


1
Dr. Hermine Penz
1. University of Graz

Interkinesthetics in Enskillment: Calibrating Force at the Potter’s Wheel 1396


1
Dr. Eton Churchill
1. Kanagawa University

Interpreting demonstratives using emanation paths: The role of voice source in early language develop-
ment 1397
1 2
Dr. Jack Wilson , Dr. Amy Bidgood
1. University of Salford, 2. Liverpool John Moores University

Interpreting Pragmatics of the Matrimonial Adverts: A socio-cultural perspective 1398


1
Dr. Tazanfal Tehseem
1. University of Sargodha

Interpretive Constructs: what do flattery, incitement and hypocrisy have in common? 1399
1
Dr. Roni Danziger
1. Lancaster University

Into the “grey zone” of formality 1400


1
Ms. Yuning Cao
1. Stanford University

Intralingual translation in “Suske en Wiske”: the case of the pragmatic particle “hè” 1401
1 2
Dr. Bram Vertommen , Mrs. Melina Pasanikolakis
1. Utrecht University, 2. University of Antwerp

Ironic speech and its prosodic correlates in the Spanish of Chilean women 1403
1 2 1
Dr. Abril Jimenez , Dr. Mariška Bolyanatz Brown , Ms. Isabella Silva DePue
1. Davidson College, 2. Occidental College

Japanese English L2 learners, email writing and pragmatic competence: A corpus approach to identifying
learner challenges 1404
1 1 1 1
Dr. Allan Nicholas , Dr. John Blake , Dr. Maxim Mozgovoy , Dr. Jeremy Perkins
1. University of Aizu

xcviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

L2 proficiency and preference organization in online text-based interaction 1405


1 1
Mr. Xingcheng Wang , Prof. Carsten Roever
1. University of Melbourne

Lexical blending: from typical concepts to atypical ad hoc concept creation. A corpus-based analysis 1406
1
Dr. Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin
1. The Iorgu Iordan Alexandru Rosetti Institute of Linguistics, Romanian Academy

Linear placement of subjects of active and passive clauses in Mansi: Pragmatic reasons for non-clause-
initial placement 1407
1
Dr. Susanna Virtanen
1. University of Helsinki

Management of disagreement in small group discussions for reading comprehension 1409


1
Dr. Masanobu Masuda
1. Kyoto Sangyo University

Managing Delicacy in Persian Conversations: the Case of Placeholders 1410


1
Dr. Elham Monfaredi
1. University of Washington

Mandarin Chinese peer advice online: A study of gender disparity 1411


1
Prof. Chihsia Tang
1. National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology

Maximizing the unique combination of critical and ethnomethodological approaches in critical discur-
sive psychology 1412
1
Ms. Mai Shirahata
1. University of Jyväskylä

Meaning control and algorithmic power in political discussions on social media 1413
1 2
Dr. Inês Signorini , Dr. Maria Lucena
1. Unicamp, 2. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Mediated justice or immoral act? Discourse of ambivalence about doxxing 1414


1
Dr. Carmen Lee
1. Chinese University of Hong Kong

Mediating Group Agency in the Digital Classroom 1415


1
Dr. Melanie Moll
1. Europäische Fernhochschule Hamburg

Mediating Interpersonal Interaction in the Interpreted Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences 1416
1
Dr. Rui Zhang
1. Dalian University of Technology

Metaphor of CAT and DOG in Taiwan Hakka proverbial expressions 1417


1 1
Prof. Huei-ling Lai , Dr. Hsiao-Ling Hsu
1. National Chengchi University

Metaphor Processing: Referring and Predicating 1418


1 1
Prof. Robyn Carston , Ms. Xinxin Yan
1. University College London

xcix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mitigated opinions in oral spontaneous conversations from Tegucigalpa, Honduras 1419


1
Mr. Danny Murillo Lanza
1. Universitat de València

Mitigation in social media posts of autistic users 1420


1 2
Prof. Nelya Koteyko , Dr. Martine Van Driel
1. Queen Mary University of London, 2. University of Birmingham

Mock Affect, and the socio-pragmatics of unlicensed epenthesis 1421


1 1
Prof. Rakesh Bhatt , Ms. Taraneh Sanei
1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modal values and NEG-raising in ‘I think’, ‘I’m sure’ and ‘there is a/some chance’ 1422
Mr. Jiqiang Lu1 , Prof. Kristin Davidse 1
1. KU Leuven

Modification of Linguistic Landscape as a Social Practice: Revealing the Gaze 1424


1 1
Prof. Michal Tannenbaum , Prof. Elana Shohamy
1. Tel Aviv University

Moments of WeChat, moments of identity struggle 1425


1
Prof. Chaoqun Xie
1. Zhejiang International Studies University

Multimodal Argumentation in digital media: brazilian political tweets as case studies 1426
1 1
Prof. Rosalice Pinto , Prof. Fabrizio Macagno
1. Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Multimodal narratives in children: the interplay between gesture and referring expressions 1427
1 1
Mr. Corrado Bellifemine , Ms. Camille Dupret
1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Narrating Success Stories - How Migrants from the Balkans Forge Their Identity as Entrepreneurs 1428
1 1
Prof. Nadine Thielemann , Ms. Lejla Atagan
1. WU Wien

National identity as a socially differentiated way of performing professional identity in the Qatari context
of the reformed national university 1429
1 2
Mrs. Afra Al-Khulaifi , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop
1. Qatar University, 2. KU Leuven

Negotiating the boundaries of resistance in parent-child interaction 1430


1 1
Prof. Richard Fitzgerald , Dr. Younhee Kim
1. University of Macau

Notions of disinformation as a resource in interaction: Empirical and theoretical observations on com-


menters’ metapragmatic awareness 1431
1
Dr. Cedric Deschrijver
1. Ming Chuan University

Nullius In Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus 1432
1
Ms. Nina Haket
1. University of Cambridge

c
18th International Pragmatics Conference

On Discourse Markers of Interruption: Iltan and Wusen in Korean 1433


1
Prof. Sunhee Yae
1. Chung-Ang University

On the acquisition of formal pronouns in Bangla 1434


1
Ms. Yangchen Roy
1. Jawaharlal Nehru University

On the persuasive power of personification in online car reviews: an empirical pilot study 1435
1
Dr. Gábor Simon
1. Eötvös Loránd University

On the pragmatics of English necessity verbs: the role of ‘source’ 1436


Dr. Benoît Leclercq1 , Dr. Bert Cappelle2 , Prof. Ilse Depraetere2 , Mr. Cyril Grandin 2
1. Université Paris 8, 2. University of Lille

On the stative progressive in English: A temporal structure analysis based on a cognitive perspective 1438
1 1
Mr. Naoaki Wada , Ms. Haruka Shimura
1. University of Tsukuba

Person deixis in Persian interactions: A dialogic account 1439


1 2
Prof. Mohammad Amouzadeh , Ms. Masoumeh Diyanati
1. Sun Yat-sen University and University of Isfahan, 2. University of Isfahan

Persuasion and power: An analysis of metadiscourse in EFL students’ oral practices 1440
1 2 3
Dr. Yi Zhao , Dr. Mian Jia , Dr. Yi An
1. Tsinghua University, 2. The University of Texas at Austin, 3. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Phonetic Encoding of Sincerity in Expressive Speech Acts: An Analysis of Japanese Apologies in Experi-
mental Settings 1441
1 1
Prof. Sachiko Shudo , Dr. Takayuki Konishi
1. Waseda University

Plain Language Initiatives for Cross-Cultural Communication: Comparison between European Institu-
tions and Japanese Public Offices 1442
1
Dr. Naoko Hosokawa
1. The University of Tokyo

Plain Speech: Ideology, Identity, and Religious Practice in 19th-Century Quakers’ Use of “Thee” and “Thou”1443
Ms. Jessica Marsh1
1. University of Surrey

Please laugh: illocutionary acts as a theory of meaning for jokes 1444


1
Mr. Alexander Sparrow
1. Victoria University of Wellington

Police officer serving as a moral judge in Chinese mediation discourse 1445


1
Dr. Wenjing Feng
1. Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

ci
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Politeness and Ritual in Ancient Chinese: A Case Study of Shijing 1446


1 2 3 4
Mr. Yafeng Liu , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 3.
Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 4. University of Hamburg

Politeness in Sundanese: Verbs affixation system and its meaning alternation 1447
1
Ms. Intan Wulandari
1. Gadjah Mada University

Post-positioned tag questions in pursuit of response: A multimodal approach 1448


1
Ms. Juman Al-qaoud
1. University of Cologne

Practices of resisting categorization: Membership categorization analysis of tele-cinematic discourse in


Japanese 1449
1
Dr. Miyuki Takenoya
1. Toyo University

Pragmatic intervention in academic writing 1451


1 2
Dr. Aurélia Lyrio , Dr. Antonio Abreu
1. Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES), 2. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho - UNESP; Faculdade
São Leopoldo Mandic, Campinas

Pragmatic values of Spanish ‘future’ forms in colloquial speech: Grammar in interaction 1452
1 1
Ms. Claudia Gómez-Valadés , Prof. María Sol Sansiñena
1. KU Leuven

Pragmaticists’ views on what laypeople should know about language 1454


1 2
Dr. Tomas Lehecka , Prof. Jan-Ola Östman
1. Åbo Akademi University, 2. University of Helsinki

Pragmatics and loyalty issues in the translation of university diplomas and CVs 1455
1
Prof. Verena Jung
1. AKAD University

Pragmatics of atypical capitalization: ‘alternating caps’ in digital discourse 1457


1
Prof. Jannis Androutsopoulos
1. University of Hamburg

Pragmatics of queer ‘palabreo’ in Chile 1458


1
Dr. Jaime Crisosto-Alarcón
1. Universidad del Bío-Bío

Pragmemic Dialogicality of Hate-Speech Comments on Facebook in Arabic, English, and Romanian 1459
1
Dr. Hussain Al Sharoufi
1. Gulf University for Science&Technology

Primary School Children’s Narratives 1460


1
Dr. Kyoko Sugisaki
1. Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg

cii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Public Discourse Changes with the Times and Media: Writer and Reader Responsibility in Corporate Mis-
sion Statements 1462
Ms. Mana Kitazawa1
1. Keio University

Rationales for Covert Hate Speech: A game-theoretic approach 1463


1
Ms. Xinya Liu
1. University of International Business and Economics

Reaching the “Black Box” of Politicians: Mediating Political Intentions Through the Eyes of Journalists 1464
1
Ms. Mia Schreiber
1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Reconsiderating the interactional functions of Bushi /Meiyou (‘No-’) prefaced responsive turns in Man-
darin conversation. 1465
1
Dr. Jia Li
1. Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University / Graduate School, The University of Tokyo

Reference Ascriptions, Ambiguity, and Coordination 1467


1
Prof. Mihai Hîncu
1. Valahia University of Târgoviște

Refusals in English as a lingua franca: An investigation of Chinese and Indonesian speakers 1468
1
Mr. Xianming Fang
1. Monash University

Repair lexemes as tweet-initial responses in Finnish Twitter interaction 1469


1
Ms. Helena Nurmikari
1. University of Helsinki

Repair of misunderstandings on Twitter: report on a pilot study 1471


1 2
Ms. Chloé Duquesnoy , Prof. Ilse Depraetere
1. Université de Lille, 2. University of Lille, UMR 8163 STL

Reporting Non-literal: An Empirical Study of Belief Reports on Metaphors 1472


1
Ms. Xiaoxuan Chen
1. University of Cambridge

Resistance by defendants in Chinese criminal trials 1473


1 1
Ms. Yan Chen , Dr. Alison May
1. University of Leeds

Resisting gaslighting: Conversational strategies, linguistic resources, and oral deaf people 1474
1
Dr. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan
1. National Cheng Kung University

Ritual Small Talk in Chinese: A Speech Act Analysis 1475


1 1 2 3
Ms. Zongfeng Xia , Prof. Fengguang Liu , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár , Prof. Juliane House
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Russian čto li as modal particle: Testing pragmatic hypotheses with robots 1476
1 2
Ms. Beatrice Bernasconi , Prof. Kerstin Fischer
1. Roma Tre University - Sapienza University of Rome, 2. University of Southern Denmark

ciii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Selectional Restrictions as Natural Language Ontology_Presupposition Projection and Copredication 1477


1
Mr. Zhengjie Situ
1. University of Edinburgh

Self-denigration in academic settings: Ritualized relational equilibrium in doctoral defense sessions 1479
1 1
Dr. Alireza Jalilifar , Dr. Nadia Mayahi
1. Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz

Self-promotion in Academia: Constructing value positions and identity narratives in job application
statements 1480
1
Dr. Mohammed Albakry
1. Middle Tennessee State University

Sensitivity to Inter-speaker Gaps in the Broad Autism Phenotype 1481


1 1 1 1 1
Prof. Felicia Roberts , Mr. Wei Siong Neo , Dr. Mai Yamamoto , Dr. Brigitte Kelleher , Dr. Daniel Foti
1. Purdue University

Sharing Syntax for Complex Interactions 1482


1 2 1
Prof. Eleni Gregoromichelaki , Dr. Gregory Mills , Dr. Christine Howes
1. University of Gothenburg, 2. University of Kingston

Social action formats across languages: The case of initial proposals in German and Finnish messaging 1484
1 2
Dr. Katharina König , Dr. Aino Koivisto
1. WWU Münster, 2. University of Helsinki

Social Inclusion through Language within a Multilingual Academic Setting 1485


1
Ms. Anthonia Bamidele
1. University of Limerick

Some Remarks on the Pragmatics of the GPT-3 1486


1
Dr. Sung Do Kim
1. Korea University

Speech act and ideological analysis of media report on selected Boko Haram operation in Nigeria 1487
1
Mrs. Abiodun Ayeni
1. Veritas University Abuja

Speech Act Theory of Quotation: Quotation, Indirect Quotation and Japanese Quasi-quotation 1488
1
Prof. Etsuko Oishi
1. Tokyo University of Science

Speech and thought presentation: the norms and contemporary present-tense fiction 1489
1
Prof. Reiko Ikeo
1. Senshu University

Speech reporting in a historical socio-pragmatic perspective: an investigation of 18th- and 19th-century


Flemish witness depositions 1490
1
Ms. Magda Serwadczak
1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Universiteit Antwerpen

Spoken and Written L1 and L2 Narratives: A Cross-Modal Approach 1491


1
Dr. Keiko Nakamura
1. Meikai University

civ
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stance alignment in television sportscasting of a high school baseball tournament game – another case
of open communication in Japanese 1492
Ms. Tomoko Nagayama1
1. Kanagawa University

Sustainability communication as an identity-negotiation strategy: A case study of Instagram business


accounts from the food industry 1493
1
Dr. Marie-Louise Brunner
1. Trier University of Applied Sciences, Environment Campus Birkenfeld

Task openings during EFL oral proficiency exams 1494


1
Mr. David Ryska
1. Masaryk University

That’s everything we need: Everything-cleft constructions in spoken British English 1495


1 2 1
Ms. Eleni Seitanidi , Dr. Nele Põldvere , Prof. Carita Paradis
1. Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, 2. Lund University/University of Oslo

The Babel Fish Out of Water: Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and the Role of Contact Languages in World
Englishes 1497
1
Dr. Sven Leuckert
1. Technische Universität Dresden

The commodification of pluricentricity in language teaching: Taiwanese Mandarin teachers in the ne-
oliberal gig economy 1498
1
Ms. Sandra Kaltenegger
1. City University of Hong Kong

The Copula Polarity Marker in Wagdi and its Reformulation in Contrastive Contexts 1499
1
Mr. Vyom Sharma
1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

The Cyclic negative nature of exceptive markers: From implicit to explicit The case of Hebrew bilti (’not’) 1501
Dr. Ruti Bardenstein1
1. Ben Gurion University and Shenkar College

The discursive construction of maternal martyrdom in family talk 1502


1 2
Dr. Domenica DelPrete , Dr. Catherine Box
1. Columbia University, 2. University of Pennsylvania

The dynamics of coding human arguments in Datooga: Integrating functional-typological and socio-
interactional approaches 1503
1 1
Dr. Alice Mitchell , Ms. Mandy Lorenzen
1. University of Cologne

The effect of explicit pragmatic instruction on production of pragmatic routines 1504


1
Dr. Naoko Osuka
1. Meiji University

The Ideology of the Jordanian Media Women’s Discourse: Lana Mamkgh as an Example 1505
1
Dr. Amani Atieh
1. Fahad bin Sultan University

cv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Indonesians’ View on Deadline: How It is Expressed Metaphorically 1506


1 1
Ms. Dyta Septiyatik , Dr. Sailal Arimi
1. Universitas Gadjah Mada

The interactional achievement of authenticity in heritage environments 1507


1
Prof. Antje Wilton
1. Freie Universität Berlin

The Intercultural Interaction and Sociocultural Adaptation Experiences of Asian Students in Estonia 1508
1
Prof. Anastassia Zabrodskaja
1. Tallinn University

The management of (dis)agreement in conversation: Argumentation as a sequential adjustment of epis-


temic positions 1509
1 2
Dr. Franco Pauletto , Dr. Biagio Ursi
1. Complutense University of Madrid, 2. Université d’Orléans

The metapragmatics and materialities of transnationalism: Imagining and enacting care for migrant
workers 1510
1 2
Dr. Lydia Catedral , Dr. Farzad Karimzad
1. City University of Hong Kong, 2. Salisbury University

The metapragmatics of swearing: The indexical field of fuck 1511


1
Dr. Hsi-Yao Su
1. National Taiwan Normal University

The notion of ‘Freedom’ in Right-Wing Libertarian Populist Discourse 1512


1
Dr. Marcia Macaulay
1. York University

The pragmatic duality of humor during oral corrective feedback 1513


1
Dr. Hilal Ergül
1. University of Northern Iowa

The pragmatics of high boundary tones in German 1514


1 2 1
Mr. Timo Buchholz , Dr. Jet Hoek , Prof. Klaus von Heusinger
1. Universität zu Köln, 2. Radboud University Nijmegen

The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy 1515


1 2
Prof. Sandrine Sorlin , Prof. Tuija Virtanen
1. University Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3, 2. Åbo Akademi University

The Pragmatics of Tense Shift: Historical Present in Modern Hebrew Personal experience stories 1516
1
Prof. Zohar Livnat
1. Bar Ilan University

The Relationship Between Mood and Modal Concord in Spanish Directive Complements 1517
1
Dr. Tris Faulkner
1. Kalamazoo College

cvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Relative Effects of Corrective Feedback and Language Proficiency on the Development of L2 Prag-
matic Competence: The Case of Request Downgraders 1518
Prof. Yuan-shan Chen1 , Dr. Hui-Tzu Hsu 2 , Dr. Hsuan-Yu Tai 3
1. Department of Applied English, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, 2. Language Center, National
Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, 3. Department of English, National Kaohsiung University of Science and
Technology, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

The role of group memberships or identities in communicators’ production: a relevance-theoretic ap-


proach 1519
1
Ms. Kyu Hyun Park
1. Northumbria University

The role of proficiency level in pragmatic marker recognition and production 1520
1 2
Dr. Annarita Magliacane , Dr. Ariadna Sánchez Hernández
1. University of Liverpool, 2. Complutense University of Madrid

The role of prosody for the expression of illocutionary force: a corpus-based study of the pragmatic sys-
tem of Questions in spoken Italian and French 1521
1 1
Prof. Emanuela Cresti , Prof. Massimo Moneglia
1. Università di Firenze

The semantics of the BE+V-ing form with ALWAYS-type adverbials 1522


1
Dr. Mariko Goto
1. Kyushu Institute of Technology

The sequel of an atypical campaign: a psycho-narratological approach to Donald Trump’s speeches in his
second presidential run 1523
1
Ms. Belinda Wing-shum Ko
1. City University of Hong Kong

The significance of “uncreative” semiotic practices in online activism: Domestic workers’ resharing on
Facebook 1525
1 1
Ms. Yuyan Liang , Dr. Lydia Catedral
1. City University of Hong Kong

The tension between demoting a minority language and promoting a multilingual policy: The case of
Arabic in Israel 1526
1
Dr. Muzna Awayed-Bishara
1. Tel Aviv University

The Use of Address Terms by Saudi Facebook Users in Arabic: A Discursive Approach 1527
1
Dr. Mohammad Mahzari
1. Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University

The ‘persuasive advantage’ of narrative in health communication: Evidence from discussions of


vaccination-related indecision on the parenting forum Mumsnet 1528
1 1 1 2 3
Prof. Elena Semino , Dr. Tara Coltman-Patel , Mr. William Dance , Prof. Alice Deignan , Dr. Zsofia Demjen ,
Dr. Claire Hardaker 1
1. Lancaster University, 2. University of Leeds, 3. University College London

cvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

To bow or not to bow: The Effectiveness of Explicit Pragmatic Instruction in Japan 1529
1
Prof. B. Bricklin (Brick) Zeff
1. Hokkai-Gakuen University

Trademark(tm): a usage-based theory of the trademark sign in the U.S. 1530


1 1 1 1 1
Dr. LaReina Hingson , Ms. Kyra Larsen , Mr. David Chandler , Mrs. Ellie Dearden , Ms. Abby Carr , Ms. Amy
Clayton 1
1. Brigham Young University

Translanguaging, “English only” and silence in the university classroom 1531


1 1 1
Dr. Toni Dobinson , Dr. Qian Gong , Dr. Paul Mercieca
1. Curtin University

Trilingual code switching among Yunnanese migrants from Myanmar in Taiwan: A conversation analysis
approach 1532
1
Ms. Haw-Yuann Maa
1. National Taiwan Normal University

Typical/Atypical Inference Levels in Low-Context Culture: A Comparison of Generation Zs and Millenni-


als in the UK Using an Asian TV Drama Clip 1533
1
Prof. Mariko Boku
1. Ritsumeikan University

Typicalising language shift as inevitability: From German to English at an Austrian university 1534
1 1
Dr. Marion Nao , Prof. Kristina Hultgren
1. The Open University

Understanding styling practices through the lens of metapragmatics 1535


1
Mr. Florian Grosser
1. University of Vienna

Understanding the Affective Aspects of Chinese Relational Practice from the Perspective of “Heart” and
“Face” 1536
1 2
Dr. Linlin Fan , Prof. Yongping Ran
1. Jinan University, 2. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Unpacking ‘baby man’ in Chinese social media: A feminist critical discourse analysis 1537
Dr. Qian Gong1 , Ms. Yifan Chen 1
1. Curtin University

Use of inscribed objects in role-play training sessions at a Japanese insurance company 1538
1
Ms. Koyuki Mitani
1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Vaccine indecision on Mumsnet Talk over time: ‘I am still unsure…’ 1539


1 2 2 2 2
Dr. Zsofia Demjen , Dr. Tara Coltman-Patel , Mr. William Dance , Dr. Claire Hardaker , Prof. Elena Semino
1. University College London, 2. Lancaster University

Verbal humor as a discourse strategy in the environment of adult education: negotiating distance, equal-
ity, and othering 1540
1 1
Dr. Giorgos Giakoumakis , Prof. Marianthi Georgalidou
1. University of the Aegean

cviii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

War symbols and anti-Asian sentiments in online animal rights advocate discourse 1541
1 2
Dr. Arisa Koba , Mr. Yingqian Zhang
1. Nagoya Bunri University, 2. Osaka University

What are the emic understandings of attentiveness in Japanese? 1542


1
Dr. Saeko Fukushima
1. Tsuru University

What disruptive effects in cognitive processing should be taken into account in sign language interpret-
ing? The case of interpreting in a medical context 1543
1 1 2 3
Mr. Alain Bacci , Dr. Franck Amadieu , Dr. Fred Paas , Dr. Florence Encreve
1. CLLE, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France, 2. Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3. Université Paris VIII

What happens to interpersonal pragmatics when everybody swears? Relational and identity functions
of swearing in Only Murders in the Building 1544
1 2
Dr. Karyn Stapleton , Dr. Kristy Beers Fägersten
1. ulster university, 2. Södertorn University Stockholm

What is hidden from you: Implicit pragmatic phenomena in Hungarian fake news headlines 1546
1 1 1
Dr. Zsuzsanna Németh , Dr. Katalin Nagy C. , Prof. Enikő Németh T.
1. University of Szeged

What role play and elicited conversation can tell about L2 interactional competence? 1547
1 1
Mr. Jingxuan Wu , Prof. Carsten Roever
1. University of Melbourne

When it comes to quantifiers, argumentativity is not only about quantity 1548


1 1
Mrs. Nicole Katzir , Prof. Mira Ariel
1. Tel Aviv University

When Your Conference Presentation Takes An Atypical Turn: Audience’s Question(ing) Design in Ques-
tion & Answer Sessions 1549
1 1
Ms. Pınar Topal , Dr. Hale Işık-Güler
1. Middle East Technical University

Who is the city for? Perceptions of ‘urban’ namesigns in semiotic landscapes of gentrification 1550
1
Dr. Gabriella Modan
1. The Ohio State University

Working through idio-pragmatics: An approach in translation to analyzing historical contrastive prag-


matics 1551
1
Dr. Damián Robles
1. Lamar University

Written responses to complaints – strategies and challenges in EFL interactions 1552


1
Prof. Sara Gesuato
1. University of Padua

‘Atypical’ Ethics of Asylum Interpreters: From Invisibility to Advocacy 1553


1
Dr. Fabrizio Gallai
1. Università degli studi Internazionali di Roma

cix
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘We must guard everything very carefully because we know that there are many people here…’: identity
and othering in intercultural workplace conflict resolution meetings 1554
Dr. Ping Du1
1. University of Nottingham Ningbo China

“Alone in the nest”: The discourse of war and peace in the online activity of Mansi internet users 1555
1
Dr. Csilla Horvath
1. University of Helsinki

“Aside from being sexy, what do you do for a living?” A sociopragmatics study of the responses to con-
versational openers in dating apps 1556
1
Ms. Clara Cantos Delgado
1. Complutense University of Madrid

“Ecocide is our reality now” – a cross-cultural analysis of the Twitter response to the brown coal mine in
Turów 1557
1 2
Dr. Martina Berrocal , Prof. Nadine Thielemann
1. Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 2. WU Wien

“I don’t know they’re caught, do I? “: Negotiating Epistemic Access in Dungeons & Dragons 1558
1 2
Ms. Samantha Finlay , Dr. Catrin Rhys
1. Ulster university/Exeter University, 2. ulster university

“I will kill you in the appropriate time, place and manner should the occasion arise” - The role of explic-
itness in the use of threatening language 1559
1
Dr. Marianna Varga
1. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

“It is our duty to secure our own customs” – Attitudes about migrants, language learning and dialect use
in the rural North of Europe 1560
1 2 3
Prof. Lena Ekberg , Dr. Ellen Bijvoet , Prof. Jan-Ola Östman
1. Lund University, 2. Uppsala University, 3. University of Helsinki

“The youths are wiser now”: a progressive discourse analysis of resistance in Nigeria’s electoral rhetoric 1561
Mrs. Chioma Ikechukwu-Ibe1 , Mr. Sopuruchi Christian Aboh2
1. Department of Humanities (DipSUm), University of Salerno, Italy, 2. Department of English and Communication, The Hong
Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

“We refugee women are capable of sharing our stories and leading campaigns for a fairer world”: migrant
identity and affective positionings in UK charity refugee narratives 1562
Dr. Sofia Lampropoulou1 , Dr. Korina Giaxoglou 2 , Ms. Paige Johnson1
1. University of Liverpool, 2. The Open University

“You may feel a few butterflies in your stomach the first time walking out on a frozen lake”: Balancing
between positive and negative risk in adventure tourism discourse from “arctic Lapland” 1564
Prof. Annelie Ädel1 , Prof. Jan-Ola Östman2
1. Högskolan Dalarna, 2. University of Helsinki

Posters

cx
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I did not realize that emoji are annoying (���)”: Constructing and challenging norms in the metaprag-
matic discourse about emoji 1567
Dr. Wan-Hsin Ann Lee1
1. National Taiwan Normal University

A Contrastive Study of Chinese “-ma (嘛)” and Japanese “-jan (じゃん)”: Focusing on the One-N(P) Sentences
and Colloquial Quotative Forms 1568
1
Ms. Qiong Wang
1. The University of Tokyo

A Contrastive Study of Requests, Apologies, Refusals, and Expressions of Gratitude in Portuguese and
Spanish 1569
1
Ms. Beatriz Oliveira
1. Universidade de Aveiro

A Feeling, a Desire or Something Else? A Case-Study of Idioms with Voglia and How Learners of Italian as
FL and SL Acquire Them 1570
1 1 1 1
Dr. Andrea Civile , Dr. Andrea Fiorista , Dr. Alice Migliorelli , Dr. Mauro Le Donne
1. University for Foreigners of Perugia

A Pragmatic Approach of Types and Functions of Allusion and Its Mechanism in Chinese Diplomatic Dis-
course 1571
1
Prof. Mian Huang
1. Chongqing Normal University

A Relevance Theoretic Approach to Vlogging in India 1572


1 2
Dr. Urjani Chakravarty , Dr. Gulab Chand
1. Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya, 2. Manipal University Jaipur

A Study on the Variety of Intensifiers Taught in English Language Textbooks in Japan 1573
1
Mr. Timothy Wilson
1. Hiroshima Shudo University

An investigation of disagreement between kohai and senpai by Japanese youth living in the United States 1574
Dr. Yan Wang1 , Ms. Mira Parker1
1. Carthage College

An Irish-Algerian cross-cultural pragmatic investigation into the realization of invitations. 1575


1
Mr. Islam Ben Adel
1. Univerity of Limerick

Another Glance at English Directives: How Different Directive Constructions Prefer to Cooccur in Dis-
course 1576
1
Dr. Hidemitsu Takahashi
1. Hokkaido University

Atypical Solidarity in an Indonesian Fandom of KPop Idols: Linguistics Context of Hyperreality and
Parasocial Relationships 1577
1 2 3
Mrs. Dian Ekawati , Mrs. Maria Teodora Ping , Mrs. Lusi Lian Piantari
1. Padjadjaran University, 2. Mulawarman University, 3. Universitas Al Azhar Indonesia

cxi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Autism: deficit or difference? A reconsideration of the way we assess theory of mind 1578
1
Ms. Rachel Cullen
1. PhD student

Autistic and non-autistic adult women’s written narratives of emotional autobiographical memories 1579
1 1
Ms. Florence Merken , Ms. Philippine Geelhand
1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Autistic children’s novel metaphor comprehension under reduced uncertainty 1580


1 2 3 3
Prof. Agustin Vicente , Dr. Elena Castroviejo , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum , Dr. Kristen Schroeder , Dr. Camilo
Ronderos 3 , Ms. Isabel Martín-González2
1. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque Country, 2. University of the Basque Country, 3. University of Oslo

Between Collective and Individual: A Contrastive Study of the Expression “Common Sense” in Japanese,
English, and Dutch 1582
1
Dr. Ruth Vanbaelen
1. University of Tsukuba

Dealing with atypicality in oral and written discourse concerning refugees who have experienced torture 1583
Dr. Iphigenia Moulinou1
1. University of Athens, Greece

Development and Evaluation of Learning Materials on Vocabulary with Cross-linguistic Similarity -


Compared with Showing Dictionary Definitions 1584
1
Ms. Yewen Wang
1. Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu University

Development of Narratives of Second Language Learners of English 1585


1
Dr. Anna H.-J. Do
1. New York City College of Technology, City University of New York

Disappointed and Distant: The Emotional Facial Expressions of Ironic Speakers 1586
Dr. Marc Aguert1
1. Normandie Univ, UNICAEN, LPCN

Exemplification, Topic Management, and Unexpectedness: The Case of the Japanese X Toka 1587
1
Ms. Motomi Kajitani
1. The University of New Mexico

Explicature and the narrowing or broadening of target texts by sign language interpreters 1588
1 1
Dr. Campbell McDermid , Anita Harding
1. Gallaudet University

Facework of Intimacy and Distancing in Teacher-Student Interviews 1589


1 1
Dr. Makoto Imura , Dr. Seiko Otsuka
1. Osaka Institute of Technology

Factors Influencing Request Emails by Japanese Learners of English in Academic Settings 1590
1
Dr. Riko Umeki
1. Fukuyama Heisei University

cxii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender and Professional Identity: Variation in Discourse Particles among Taiwanese Educational YouTu-
bers 1591
Ms. NienEn Liu1
1. University of Edinburgh

Gender differences in pragmatic abilities of autistic children and adolescents (Work in Progress) 1592
1 2
Ms. Marie Belenger , Prof. Mikhail Kissine
1. Université Libre, 2. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Gendered perspectives on mansplaining 1593


1 1
Ms. Kerrigan Beagley , Dr. Lisa Johnson
1. Brigham Young University

Gesture in learners signed-to-spoken language interpreting 1594


1
Mrs. Elisabeth Hansen
1. University College Copenhagen

Hidden inequalities in the L2 classroom: The case of pragmatic markers in Spanish translation 1595
1
Dr. Luzia Dominguez
1. Cardiff University

How doctors and patients negotiate different interpretations of empathy through the interaction of sim-
ulated medical consultation in English as a lingua franca 1596
1
Ms. Yukako Nozawa
1. Toyo University

Identifying the effect of variability on word learning in ASD 1597


1 1
Ms. Solene Jaspard , Prof. Gaetane Deliens
1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Impoliteness in Adversarial Contexts 1598


1
Mr. Rodrigo Agustin Lana
1. University of Heidelberg

Inclusive language ideologies in a highly exclusive educational environment: Teachers’ valorization of


multilingual repertoires at an international school in Flanders 1599
1
Ms. Anne-Sophie Bafort
1. University of Antwerp

Interactions of secondary-school students during collaborative writing and their potential for writing
development 1600
1
Ms. Julia Schrittenlacher
1. University Duisburg-Essen

Investigating the strategies used by Italian and British English native speakers in making requests. 1601
1
Ms. Beatrice Massa
1. Phrasee

Invitations in Japanese: An analysis of their turn formats and sequential organisations 1602
1
Dr. Chisa Matsukawa
1. University of Central Lancashire

cxiii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

L1 pragmatic transfer in Japanese L2 students’ written peer feedback 1603


1
Dr. Sugene Kim
1. Nagoya University of Commerce & Business

L2 Sensitivity to Scalar Boundaries in Implicature Processing 1604


1 2
Dr. Glenn Starr , Dr. Emilie Destruel
1. University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 2. University of Iowa

Language teacher identity in a non-native context: A case study of teachers of English language in Ghana 1606
Dr. Joyce Anku1
1. University of Ghana

Language, gender and gendered discourses in the Community of Practice of Professional Chefs 1607
Ms. Natalia Lara1
1. University of Westminster

Listenership always matters: Listener responses in L2 paired speaking assessment 1608


1
Ms. Rena Gao
1. The Univeristy of Melbourne

Looking at Taarof from the inside and the outside. First findings from an online study 1609
1
Ms. Niloufar Saber Gigasari
1. Guest Researcher

Metaphor understanding in school-aged children: from good-enough to very good understanding ? 1610
1 2 1
Ms. Sarah Ferrara , Dr. Marc Aguert , Dr. Christelle Declercq
1. Université de Reims Chamapgne-Ardenne France Laboratoire C2S ( Cognition, Santé, Société), EA6291, 2. Normandie Univ,
UNICAEN, LPCN

Multimodal Analysis of Elderly People’s Understanding of Instructions 1611


1
Dr. Mariko Karatsu
1. University of Arizona

Multimodal interaction analysis of non-lexical vocalisations in low-verbal autistic children 1612


1
Dr. Fernanda Cruz
1. University Federal of São Paulo

Naming Domestic Animals: Cattle Names in an Iraqw Speech Community 1613


Dr. Chrispina Alphonce1
1. Lecturer, The University of Dodoma

Parental Scaffolding During Book Reading in Japanese Households 1614


1
Mrs. Moeko Ozaki
1. Keio University

Perceptions of bullshit in political discourse re-framed for entertainment purposes 1615


1
Dr. Mariya Chankova
1. South-West University N. Rilski, Blagoevgrad

Phonetic Alignment in Semi Naturalistic Conversations 1616


1 1 1
Ms. Charlotte Dumont , Ms. Marie Belenger , Prof. Mikhail Kissine
1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

cxiv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic and discursive development in children with Developmental Language Disorder: do prosody
and gestures pave the way? 1617
Mr. Albert Giberga Moreno1 , Dr. Alfonso Igualada 1 , Dr. Nadia Ahufinger 1 , Dr. Mari Aguilera 2 , Dr. Ernesto
Guerra 3 , Dr. Núria Esteve-Gibert 1
1. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2. Universitat de Barcelona, 3. Universidad de Chile

Pragmatic Aspects of Multilingual and Multi-modal codeswitching between Vernacular Arabic, French,
and English: A Study of Algerian English as a Foreign Language Learners’ Facebook Practices. 1619
1
Ms. Asma Rahmouni
1. Limerick University

Pragmatic Functions and Perceptions of Chinese Rhetorical Questions in Mundane Conversations – Is it


Impolite? 1620
1
Ms. Jun Wang
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Pragmatic Self-Concepts of School-Aged Children 1621


1 1
Mrs. Maria Busch , Prof. Stephan Sallat
1. Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg

Predicting Suicidality: The Role of Information Structure 1623


Mr. Eyal Liron Dolev1 , Prof. Guido Seiler 1
1. University of Zurich (Zurich Center for Linguistics)

Preferences and Understanding of Pragmatic Jokes in Japanese Learners of English 1624


1
Dr. Goran Vaage
1. Kobe College

Production of referential expressions in typical and autistic children: a linguistic pragmatic study 1625
1 2 2
Dr. Melania Masià , Ms. Zuriñe Abalos , Dr. Elena Castroviejo
1. Universitat de les Illes Balears, 2. University of the Basque Country

Prosody and gesture as markers of focus in 3- to 6-year-olds’ interactive speech 1626


1 2 3
Ms. Sara Coego , Dr. Núria Esteve-Gibert , Prof. Pilar Prieto
1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 3. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Italian epistemic marker “mi sa” [to me it knows] compared
to “so” [I know], “non so” [I don’t know], “non so se” [I don’t know whether], “credo” [I believe], “penso”
[I think] 1627
1 1 2 1
Prof. Ramona Bongelli , Prof. Andrzej Zuczkowski , Prof. Roberto Burro , Prof. Ilaria Riccioni
1. University of Macerata, 2. University of Verona

Representation of Italian mirror compounds: evidence from elicited pantomime 1628


1 2 2
Mrs. Irene Lami , Dr. Maria Graziano , Dr. Joost van de Weijer
1. Lund University, 2. Lund University Humanities Lab

Representations of the current Ukrainian military conflict in the local linguistic landscape 1629
1 1
Prof. Milan Ferencik , Mr. Jonathan Eddy
1. University of Prešov

cxv
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Securitizing Speech Acts: Characteristic Approaches for Communicating Existential Threats and Their
Successfulness 1630
Ms. Regina Holze1
1. University of Passau

Seditious Sheep: Weaponizing metaphors in Hong Kong Children’s Books 1631


1
Dr. Jennifer Eagleton
1. Hong Kong based independent scholar

Semi-spontaneous speech: comparing autistic and typically developing children 1632


1 1 1
Ms. Zuriñe Abalos , Dr. Elena Castroviejo , Dr. Begoña Vicente
1. University of the Basque Country

Social media as a platform of cultural representations: Looking at Japanese work culture through
YouTube content 1633
1 2 3 4
Dr. Hsin-Hua Chiang , Dr. Saki Ohira , Prof. Etsuko Yoshida , Dr. Kazuyo Murata
1. The University of Tokyo, 2. Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, 3. The University of Shiga Prefecture, 4. Ryukoku University

Sociopragmatic Analyses of the Sequential Organisation of L2 Requests 1634


1
Dr. Aika Miura
1. Rikkyo University

Subjectivisation and Depersonalisation as overt and covert techniques of authorial stance taking in lin-
guistic research papers written in English, Serbian and German 1636
1
Ms. Milica Rodić
1. Heidelberg University

Taking Experiential Learning to Task: The TBELT Model 1637


1 2
Dr. Catherine Box , Dr. Domenica DelPrete
1. University of Pennsylvania, 2. Columbia University

The Arabic Tayyib: Current developments and new trends 1638


1
Mrs. Amereh Almossa
1. University of York; Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University

The evidence of the MultiModal Narrative (MMN) intervention on preschool children’s narrative and
pragmatic abilities 1639
1 2 3
Ms. Julia Florit-Pons , Dr. Alfonso Igualada , Prof. Pilar Prieto
1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 3. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

The expression of substitution in Italian in monologic and dialogic contexts: a corpus-based analysis 1640
1
Ms. Antonia Russo
1. University of Bergamo

The Imposition of Gender Images in Japanese Society: The Use of ‘Kawaii’ in Young Female Magazines 1641
1 1
Ms. Yuka Nishiyama , Prof. Ayako Namba
1. Kwansei Gakuin University

The linguistic manifestation of politeness in digital communication (e-mails): in relation to university


professors and native/non-native students 1642
1 1
Dr. Andrea Pap , Dr. Judit Bándli
1. Eötvös Loránd University

cxvi
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The noblesse oblige: On the manifestation of politeness in EFL doctoral defense session interactions 1643
1
Dr. Nadia Mayahi
1. Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran

The Use of Aggressive Language in Twitter: a Contrastive Study Between Peninsular Spanish and British
English 1644
1
Mrs. Almudena Diaz
1. Complutense University of Madrid

Threats and Warnings in Dominican Spanish and American English: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatics Study 1645
1 1
Ms. Vicky Hansly , Dr. Federica Barbieri
1. Swansea University

Understanding the Influence of Remote Communication on Social Interaction: Comparison Between


Video Conference and Virtual Reality 1646
1 1 1
Ms. Émilie Lamarre , Prof. Douglas Shiller , Prof. Stefano Rezzonico
1. Université de Montréal

Use of Interactional Metadiscouse in Research Articles Written in English by Native English and Japanese
Writers 1647
1
Dr. Kayo Fujimura-Wilson
1. Yamaguchi University

Vagueness as a manipulative device: a perceptual study of ‘mentre’ in Italian political tweets 1648
1 1
Ms. Serena Coschignano , Mr. Antonio Bianco
1. University of Pavia

Variety preferential pragmatic features in multilinguals in Belgium. 1650


1
Prof. Katja Lochtman
1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel

“God, how attractive I am”: A CMC-based study of Persian self-praise 1651


1 1
Dr. Maryam Farnia , Ms. Narges Mazaheri
1. Payame Noor University

“Insanity Literature” on Chinese Social Network Sites: Metaphorical Talk and Complaint Speech Act 1652
1 1
Ms. Yimeng Shi , Prof. Duoxiu Qian
1. Beihang University

“Is it just sea?” Multifaceted Functions of the Interrogative Form in Corrective Feedback in Finnish Sign
Language Interpreter Training 1653
1
Mrs. Maija Tjukanov
1. University of Helsinki

“Just Like Real Chicken”: Discourse Analysis of News Around Novel Foods in Singapore’s Media 1654
1 2
Dr. Keri Matwick , Dr. Kelsi Matwick
1. Nanyang Technological University, 2. University of Florida

cxvii
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“The benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks… they say”. An empirical study on Facebook comments
on news conveying uncertainty and conflicting opinions about the possible adverse effects of the As-
traZeneca vaccine 1655
1 1 1
Prof. Ilaria Riccioni , Prof. Alessia Bertolazzi , Prof. Ramona Bongelli
1. University of Macerata

cxviii
Plenary Lectures
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Autistic Communication and the Neurodiversity Paradigm

Plenary

Prof. Sue Fletcher-Watson 1


1. University of Edinburgh

Neurodiversity is a simple, incontrovertible scientific fact, and yet the implications of this concept are both
profound and radical. In this talk I will first examine some flaws in our existing models of understanding neu-
rodevelopment. Research in autism and relating to other neurodevelopmental diagnoses has been driven by
“core deficit” paradigms whose assumptions are being undermined by new transdiagnostic data, and participa-
tory research insights.
The neurodiversity paradigm provides us with a new way to think about neurodevelopment. I will define neu-
rodiversity and three core tenets of the neurodiversity paradigm and then directly address some of the myths
around neurodiversity, drawing on the work of prominent neurodivergent scholars to provide a solid basis for
understanding.
Having established these foundational principles, I will go on to review in detail a series of qualitative and
quantitative findings on how autistic people communicate with each other. Deploying creative experimental
methods we have demonstrated that defining autism by core “social and communication impairments” neglects
to consider the interactional nature of social communication and the role that two (or more) people play in
a successful interaction. This phenomenon has been most effectively articulated by Damian Milton’s Double
Empathy Problem.
Specific findings that I will share pertain to: lived experience of autistic-autistic interactions; verbal information
transfer between autistic people; mechanisms and markers of interactional rapport; creativity and alignment
between autistic people; visibility of autism diagnostic status in an interactional context; and application of
these findings to social care settings.
Finally, I will show how this research can be thought of as “neurodiversity-affirmative” and what the implica-
tions are for diagnosis and practice.

2
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse in and about International Sign Language: A Case of


Multilingualism

Plenary

Prof. Christian Rathmann 1


1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The paper deals with the linguistic properties, use and learning of International Sign Language (IntSL). It pro-
poses that IntSL is a global sign language (in the sense of Bloomaert 2010) shared by (deaf) sign language users
worldwide, and that there is such a continuum between cross-signing (see Byun et al. 2018) and International
Sign Language (IntSL) as an global language with rich cultural diversity. The presentation will be structured as
follows: (i) examination of empirical data in two studies, (ii) emergence and stabilization of IntSL, (iii) contact
between IntSL as a global sign language and local sign languages and IntSL as a translanguaging and multimodal
experience, and (iv) globalization of sign multilingualism and its implications.
In the first study (Rathmann 2020), dyadic conversations between signers of Polish Sign Language (PJM) and
German Sign Language (DGS) and between signers of Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and German Sign Lan-
guage (DGS) were collected. PJM signers and Libras signers were divided into two groups (signers with exposure
to IntSL and signers without any exposure to IntSL), while a DGS signer is an experienced IntSL user . They were
asked to retell stories, talk about their hobbies and construct selected lexical concepts. In the second study (Rath-
mann & Quadros 2022), interviews were conducted with seventeen signers from different parts of the world
who have some experience with IntSL. Selected topics in the interviews include interviewees’ experiences as
learners of IntSL and personal insights into IntSL.
Four themes emerged from these empirical findings. The first theme deals with the phonological and lexical
variation of selected signs in IntSL (Rathmann & Quadros under review) and raises a number of issues re-
lated to lexical stabilization and conventionalization. The second issue focuses on language contact between
Libras/PJM/DGS and IntSL and suggests that there is such a language continuum between local sign languages
and IntSL. Between these poles of the continuum are both cross-signing and multilingual & multimodal translan-
guaging practices. The fuse of participants’ linguistic and semiotic resources (see Kusters 2021 and Moriarty &
Kusters 2021) and different kinds of repair strategies (see Byun 2019) play a role for maintaining dyadic conver-
sation. This is often due to different learning experiences as L2 signers. The third theme explores the dynamics
of global multilingualism at the global level and its impact on global discourse among Deaf signers.
Selected references:
Bloomaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge University Press
Byun, K-S. et al (2017). First Ecounters : repair Sequences in Cross-Signing. Topics in Cognitive Science, 10.2.
314 – 334.
Moriarty, E & Kusters, A. (2021). Deaf cosmopolitanism: calibrating as a moral process, International Journal of
Multilingualism, 18.2. 285-302.
Kusters, A. (2021). Introduction: the semiotic repertoire: assemblages and evaluation of resources. Interna-
tional Journal of Multilingualism, 18.2. 183 – 189.
Rathmann, C. (2000). International Sign in Interactions: Revisiting the Concept of ‘Foreigner Talk’. Paper pre-
sented at Abralin on 13 June 2020.
Rathmann, C. & Quadros, R. (2022). International Sign Language: Sociolinguistic Aspects. Azul

3
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatics, learnability and natural concepts

Plenary

Prof. Anna Papafragou 1


1. University of Pennsylvania

Cross-linguistically prevalent semantic distinctions are widely assumed to be easier to learn because they re-
flect natural concepts. Using the case study of evidentiality, we present an alternative, pragmatic perspective
that links both the cross-linguistic prevalence and the learnability of semantic distinctions to communicative
pressures. Across languages, grammatical evidential systems are more likely to encode indirect sources (es-
pecially, reported information) compared to direct sources (e.g., visual perception). On a conceptual account,
this seems puzzling, since humans reason naturally about how seeing connects to knowing. On a pragmatic ac-
count, however, the predominant encoding of the speaker’s reportative compared to visual information sources
can be explained in terms of informativeness (visual access is ubiquitous and potentially more reliable, hence
less marked). I present experimental evidence in favor of this pragmatic account: (a) Adult English speakers
exposed to novel miniature evidential morphological systems consistently showed higher learning rates for
systems with a single indirect (reportative) compared to a single direct (visual) evidential morpheme; (b) This
pattern persisted even when participants were given specific cues to the target meanings and partly extended
to cases where evidential meanings were conveyed through visual, not linguistic, means. (c) This pattern was
robust across multiple learning contexts. As this case demonstrates, the cross-linguistic prevalence of certain
semantic distinctions can have pragmatic origins that also shape semantic learnability.

4
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Presumed (in)abilities and the ‘shape of interaction’ in


classrooms

Plenary

Prof. Julia Snell 1


1. University of Leeds

The starting point for this talk is the educational disadvantage socioeconomically marginalised students con-
tinue to experience at school relative to their more privileged peers (e.g., European Commission 2020; Hutchin-
son et al. 2020; Simon 2021). Spoken interaction has an important role to play in tackling these inequities,
since we know that the kind of talk and interaction children experience at school has implications for their
learning and cognitive development (and thus for their educational success and future prospects). There is evi-
dence, internationally, that children who experience academically robust classroom discussion – or what some
researchers have termed ‘dialogue’ – make greater progress than their peers who have not had this experience
(e.g., Resnick, Asterhan & Clarke 2015). A recent UK-based study found that gains in achievement were greatest
for students on free school meals (used as a proxy measure of low socioeconomic status), thus underlining the
potential for dialogue to act as a lever for educational equity. However, dialogic interaction is rarely enacted
in schools, especially those serving low-income and racially minoritized communities (e.g., Applebee, Langer,
Nystrand, & Gamoran 2003; Kelly 2008).
In this talk I investigate the mechanisms through which some groups of children are denied access to dialogic
interaction at school, and thus to learning opportunities. I focus in particular on a detailed case study of one
school where a ‘hidden curriculum’ (Giroux and Purpel 1983) emphasised strict control of talk, behaviour and
bodies for working-class children perceived by their teachers to be immature and unruly. I argue that these
perceptions are underpinned by widely shared discourses of language, class, and ability, and thus that the ap-
proach to classroom interaction evidenced at this school is representative of a more general pattern. Here, I
shift the focus away from individual teachers and their interactions with students to the broader social and po-
litical context that ‘shapes the institutional listening subject positions that teachers are able to inhabit’ (Flores,
Lewis & Phuong 2018: 23).

5
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Dark Matter of Pragmatics

Plenary

Prof. Stephen Levinson 1


1. Max Planck Institute

Presidential Address on the occasion of the 18th International Pragmatics Conference.

6
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Grand Tug-of-War: Clarity, Economy, and Expressivity


Across the Ages

Plenary

Prof. Laurence Horn 1


1. Yale University

As far back as the first century, rhetoricians have recognized the trade-off between brevity and obscurity (Ho-
race), between the speaker’s goal of “not saying less, but not saying more, than the occasion demands” (Quin-
tilian). Closer to our own era, philologists like Curtius (1870) and Gabelentz (1891) explored the dynamic com-
promises between Bequemlichkeit (economy or least effort) and Deutlichkeit (clarity or distinctness), as oriented
toward the requirements of the speaker and hearer respectively. Among those undertaking the investigation
of the “tug-of- war” (Jespersen 1921) between these pragmatic pressures are Whitney (1875), Paul (1889), Zipf
(1935, 1949), and Martinet (1962). Working in a very different tradition, Grice (1967) developed the twin forks
of his Maxim of Quantity, a key ingredient in the formulation of scalar implicature: “Make your contribution as
informative as is required”; “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”. While Grice’s
two submaxims and their interaction have been directly linked to Zipf’s hearer’s and speaker’s economy re-
spectively in the “Manichaean model” of pragmatics (Horn 1984, 2007; cf. also Atlas & Levinson 1981, Levinson
2000), we lack a the broader view encompassing the development this chapter of intellectual history by philoso-
phers, linguists, and psychologists, redefining and refining the interaction of the principles involved and their
influence on language change and lexical choice.
On stepping back, it becomes clear that the duality between economy and clarity, however significant for de-
lineating the role of efficiency in “the exchange of information” (Grice 1967; Stalnaker 1998), yields a crucially
incomplete account of the overall nature of communication and of linguistic diachrony. Overlaid on the dialectic
between the two sides of the tug-of-war is another factor affecting the expression and development of language
beyond information exchange, a socially motivated goal repeatedly rediscovered and variously identified with
“novelty and fashion” (Darwin 1871), “a playful or artistic sense” (Gabelentz 1891), a “need for expressivity”
(Frei 1929), or “extravagance” (Haspelmath 1999, citing Keller 1994). Just as expressive meaning, in the sense of
Kaplan’s use-conditional analysis of ouch and oops and subsequent elaboration by Potts, Gutzmann, and others,
operates on top of descriptive truth- conditional semantics, so too, as Frei argues, it is the besoin d’expressivité
that turns a static equilibrium into a dynamic impetus for change. This drive and its effects can be detected
in the push and pull of Jespersen’s cycle and Meillet’s spiral of successive strengthening and weakening, in the
treadmill of euphemism, in affectively motivated word order, in the playfulness of expressive morphology, and
in the success of constructions, from lexical clones to “pleonastic” double negation, whose existence seems to
challenge both clarity and economy.

7
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The social shape of language

Plenary

Dr. Mark Dingemanse 1


1. Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University

Language is both quintessentially social and deeply intertwined with action. In this talk I explore some of the
consequences of this, surveying how language is shaped by and for social interaction. The primary empirical
focus is a set of interactional tools that hover just below our awareness even as they occupy up to 20% of our
turns at talk: humble words like ‘m-hm’, ‘huh?’ and ‘oh’. These items, and a few more, help streamline con-
versation and embody the fluidity and reflexivity that make human language unmatched among animal com-
munication systems. I share results from an ongoing research programme that looks into these items from a
number of methodological perspectives. Qualitative work remains unparalleled in its power to uncover funda-
mentals of interactional infrastructure, as I show in a discussion of “liminal signs” (Dingemanse 2020). Insights
from sequential analysis can supplement collocational approaches to corpus data and give us ways to carry out
language-agnostic and even species-agnostic comparison of interactive data. I illustrate this using work on con-
tinuers and repair. Finally, I explore some of the implications of the empirical study of language in interaction
for computational models of pragmatic reasoning and for the design of diversity-aware language technology.

8
Panels
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(A)typical users of technology in social interaction

Panel

Prof. Florence Oloff 1 , Dr. Henrike Helmer 1


1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

This panel aims to reflect on the notion of (a)typicality regarding the use of technological devices and appliances
used for communicating, assisting, moving, inspecting, learning, etc. More specifically, the panel’s objective is
to focus on different types of users of technologies and to investigate their routines, skills, and challenges while
interacting with technology and their co-participants.
In conversation analysis and applied clinical linguistics, the notion of “atypical interaction” relates to so-
cial settings in which some of the participants have been diagnosed with conditions that result in commu-
nicative difficulties (e.g., autism or aphasia, Goodwin 1995, Wilkinson 2019). Here, the usual focus is on
the specific formatting and management of social actions, and technology has not been centrally consid-
ered (but see, e.g., Aaltonen/Arminen/Raudaskoski 2014). While studies on assistive technologies in social in-
teraction have been emphasizing the situated learning processes of participants with “communicative chal-
lenges” (Krummheuer/Raudaskoski 2016: 812, see also Due 2021), research more globally interested in tech-
nology in social interaction usually considers users who do not have specific communicative difficulties (e.g.,
Raclaw/Robles/DiDomenico 2016, Porcheron/Fischer/Sharples 2018, Pelikan/Broth/Keevallik 2020). What all
types of technology users have in common, however, is that they systematically face pragmatic challenges
and disfluencies at some point. Indeed, participants might frequently experience “frustrations in communi-
cation” (Antaki/Wilkinson 2012: 533) when introduced to a new technological tool or practice. In this respect,
novices could be considered as more “atypical” than more expert users, and “(a)typicality” can also be con-
nected to the idea of acquiring strategies, routines and standard procedures involving a specific technological
tool. Digital literacy studies, for instance, looked into (mostly younger) users’ situated appropriation of new
techno-digital skills (e.g., Wolfe/Flewitt 2010, Melander Bowden 2019). These learning processes do obviously
not only concern very young participants (e.g., Flewitt/Messer/Kucirkova 2015, Kucirkova/Zuckermann 2017),
but also elderly persons getting in touch with a tactile interface for the first time (e.g., Weilenmann 2010, Oloff
2021). Conversation analytic studies focusing on first-time encounters between participants and, for instance,
voice-user-interfaces (Porcheron/Fischer/Sharples 2018, Reeves/Porcheron/Fischer 2018) give a glimpse in how
“atypical” users can turn into “typical” users of a given technology. In this respect, a user-centred approach (Am-
rhein/Cyra/Pitsch 2016) and a longitudinal perspective on empirical data (e.g., Deppermann/Pekarek Doehler
2021, Pekarek Doehler/Balaman 2021) can be deemed particularly relevant.
This panel brings together researchers from Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis, Interactional Lin-
guistics and Human-Robot-Interaction who are interested in empirically reflecting on different facets of
“(a)typicality” with regard to technology use in social encounters. The contributors of this panel touch facets
such as: newcomers vs. expert users, “typical” user routines and new challenges, as well as assistive tech-
nologies in “atypical” interactions and their potentials and challenges. The range of technological tools under
scrutiny will include both mundane (e.g., Smartphones, Smart Speakers) and specialised ones (e.g., the Seeing
AI for visually impaired people). Ultimately, we wish to discuss the contribution of human and social sciences
to an interactionally founded understanding of “(a)typicality” for studying technology use and skills in social
interaction.

10
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(A)typicality in narrative forms and practices

Panel

Prof. Neal Norrick 1


1. saarland university

The announced theme of the conference “The shape of interaction: the pragmatics of (a)typicality” provides
the impetus for this panel where contributors develop various perspectives on (a)typicality in narrative forms
and practices: Atypicality as tellability in narrative, (re)telling typical stories, (a)typicality in narrative identity
construction, formulaic narrative structures, the evolution of typical narrative practices in new interfaces, and
diverse approaches to describing typicality such as quantification via corpus linguistic methods. Participants
will address storytelling practices and their reception in such diverse contexts as oral history interviews, radio
call-in shows, ritualized toasts, internet websites, and cinema.
Certain features are typical of narrative at the macro-level: recurrent story types, stories as anticipated re-
sponses and characteristic speech acts such as confessions. On the micro-level, narration typically unfolds se-
quentially in past tense clauses, while breaks in sequential order, tense shifts, and negation are atypical struc-
tures generating inferences. Typical phrases or formulas occur at characteristic junctures such as prefaces and
closings; especially in recurrent “typical” stories, one finds formulaic moves like the climax phrase: “and I said
‘this is it’ ” in near-death stories (Labov), while atypical wordings can achieve novel results.
From an epistemic perspective, the teller typically has knowledge of an event to impart to listeners and bears
responsibility for clear, concise telling; shared background knowledge, co-membership in a community of prac-
tice with “specialised terminology and linguistic routines” (Holmes & Meyerhoff) in common allow recipients
to pose appropriate questions, express doubts and fill in blanks to ensure uptake according to the principle of
“epistemic vigilance” (Sperber et al.).
Typically, tellability is determined by newsworthiness or reportability, but there’s a “dark side of tellability”
(Norrick), where the determining factors are taste, tact and social distance. In some (atypical?) contexts, like
children recounting their daily experiences at the dinner table and the retelling of family stories, newswor-
thiness typically fades, replaced by interest in a child’s developing narrative competence and the rapport of
co-narration respectively.
Typical is a single focalization (Genette), namely internal on the teller-protagonist in personal experience narra-
tives, but a switch to an external (omniscient) perspective can produce comments about unrealized trajectories
and future outcomes; in narratives of vicarious experience focalization is typically omniscient, but it can nar-
row to detail perceptions and feelings of the protagonist and even include play-acting on the part of the teller.
The notion of a typical story from the perspective of face-to-face interaction is now evolving along with the
dynamic interplay of affordances offered by varying platforms, as genres and practices develop through story
sharing, recontextualization and resemiotization on social media (de Fina). Recently the pandemic has further
disrupted traditional production formats for narratives, moving them to online interfaces, which has in turn
affected typical narrative practices and reactions to stories; finally, narrative formats are being used atypically
to envision future developments, as in narratives conceptualizing cell-based and lab-grown foods.

11
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(A)typicality of Japanese ‘sentences’ in conversational


contexts

Panel

Dr. Natsuko Nakagawa 1 , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono 2


1. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 2. University of Alberta

The sentence in Japanese, especially in the Western context, has traditionally been understood to look like the
constructed example in (1), where full NPs (‘Taro’ and ‘five big hamburgers’) are followed by the final verb in
the finite form (tabeta ‘ate’) (Tsujimura 2013:229):
(1) taroo ga kinoo ookii hanbaagaa o itsutsu tabeta
Taro NOM yesterday big hamburger ACC five ate
‘Taro ate five big hamburgers yesterday.’
More pragmatic-based studies, however, have highlighted a variety of examples found in different types of data,
which look rather different from (1). These include the so-called ‘one-word sentence’ (Watanabe 1953) such
as itai! ‘Ouch! (lit. ‘painful’)’, categorized as a sentence perhaps due to its semantic completeness, and clause
chaining (Iwasaki 2013), a sequence of loosely connected multiple clauses, strikingly similar to the ‘neverending
sentence’ in German (Auer 1992), shown in (2) where the speaker narrates a situation where he had trouble
getting into his room (based on Iwasaki 2013:272):
(2)
1 soshite hairenakute ‘…then (I) couldn’t enter (the room) and so’
2 okoshite ‘(I) woke (him) up and’
3 de haittara ‘and (I) entered then’
4 yakkosan moo shikatanai tte na kanji de nee okitekite ‘the guy got up with a disgusted look and’
Most participants in the events described in these utterances are not overtly expressed (called zero anaphora),
and thus are shown in parentheses in the translation. Each line ends with the verb in the non-finite form
(i.e., -te ‘and’ and -tara ‘then’) marking that another clause will follow. Clause chaining ends with a finite verb
completing the sentence, but line 4 ends with the nonfinite -te, indicating that more talk will follow.
Though these past studies give valuable insight into various sentence types, their observations tend to be de-
scriptive and particular to data types (e.g., constructed, written, and narrative), and considerations as to how
these disparate types of examples all represent a ‘sentence’ are generally not given.
We systematically examine various sentence types in everyday conversation, the most fundamental form of
language (Fillmore 1974, Schegloff 1996). Individual presentations focus on one or more sentence types featured
in the literature. We will see if they regularly appear in the data, and if so, how they look structurally and
how they are used in context. We are keen to see if these different types can be characterized as (a)typical
depending on the uses. We will examine further how different types may function together in the data, which
might motivate unifying them as sentences. This prepares us for cross-linguistic studies with languages such
as German and English, where close examinations of the sentence in conversation have already begun (Auer
1992, Miller and Weinert 1998, and Lindström, et al. 2019).
Papers in the panel represent a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, highlighted especially
by important research on this topic being done in Japan, so far published mostly in Japanese. The panel creates
a cross-disciplinary and cross-continental forum by going beyond traditional boundaries ensuring high-quality
discussion and wider dissemination of research.

12
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Im)politeness on written discussion websites: Relational


work in Reddit-esque communication

Panel

Prof. Daria Dayter 1 , Dr. Thomas Messerli 2


1. Tampere University, 2. University of Basel

The study of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) is commonly conceptualised in terms of three
‘waves’. In the first one, researchers approached CMC as an almost monolithic entity to be distinguished from
other modes of language use (‘netspeak’). The second order development has taken us to an understanding of
the role of individual genres and communication types in language online. Finally, the third wave has focused
on contextually dependent discursively negotiated communicative practices that are negotiated by individuals
and communities based, among other things, on the particular affordances they are given (e.g. Androutsopoulos
2006, Herring 2019).
Similarly, politeness theory has undergone a ‘discursive turn’. It took a step from the mitigation-focused theories
to the concept of relational work and an understanding of interpersonal pragmatics whose norms determine
not only marked, but also unmarked non-polite behaviour against which face-threatening, face-saving and face-
enhancing action can be measured (e.g. Locher 2013).
Bringing together both the third wave of CMC and the discursive politeness theory on the particular example
of modern online forums, such as Reddit or 4Chan and similarly structured platforms like Quora or Hive, our
panel wants to explore what relational work norms are being constructed by online communities in these online
spaces. For instance, subreddits, the individual forums that constitute the Reddit platform, combine codified
norms of behaviour with discursively negotiated patterns, with moderators as well as normal users serving as
gatekeepers of politic (polite and non-polite) behaviour.
We understand each of these sites as a communicative space with its own setting and particular participation
structure, in which language use and more generally communication are situated practices that serve transac-
tional as well as interpersonal purposes.
Taking the subreddit r/ChangeMyView as an example, we can see, for instance, that original posters employ par-
ticular conversational moves to construct their own identities as approachable and persuasible, whereas com-
menters include the norms created or reinforced by the posts they respond to in the way they phrase their re-
sponses, which are all attempts at persuasion (Dayter & Messerli 2022). Within this context, impolite responses
appear less likely to be received as successful attempts at persuasion than non-polite or impolite responses.
We invite to our panel other researchers focusing on Reddit and related communicative settings, including the
members of the CopRe research network. Potential contributors include Ylva Biri, Lisa Donlan, Marie Flesch,
Robert Lawson, Sven Leuckert, Lisa Sugiura, Elizabeth Marsden and Alessia Tranchese.
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. (2006). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication: Intro-
duction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4), 419–438. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2006.00286.x
Dayter, Daria, & Messerli, Thomas C. (2022). Persuasive language and features of formality on the
r/ChangeMyView subreddit. Internet Pragmatics, 5(1), 165–195. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00072.day
Herring, Susan C. (2019). The Coevolution of Computer-Mediated Communication and Computer-Mediated Dis-
course Analysis. In Patricia Bou-Franch & Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing Digital Discourse (pp.
25–67). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92663-6_2
Locher, Miriam A. (2013). Relational work and interpersonal pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 145–149.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.014

13
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A contrastive analysis of potentially face-threatening acts in


different linguacultures

Panel

Dr. Weihua Zhu 1 , Prof. Xinren Chen 2


1. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2. Nanjing University

In this panel, we intend to compare the realization, variation, or perception of relatively less explored, poten-
tially face-threatening acts, such as complaining, criticizing, teasing, and verbal assault, in a diverse group of
linguacultures. A lack of knowledge about varying pragmatic norms has the potential to lead to misperceptions
and misunderstandings in intercultural communication. It may be one reason for discrimination and stereo-
typing (e.g., Gumperz, Jupp and Roberts, 1981) which can severely affect people’s lives (Erickson and Schultz,
1982). To promote two-way understanding and develop respect and harmony (Boxer, 2002), a plethora of stud-
ies have been conducted to reveal pragmatic differences in areas such as (in)directness in requests (e.g., Ren
and Fukushima, 2021), (in)formality of address terms (e.g., Bruns and Kranich, 2021), compliment responses
(e.g., Chen, He and Hu, 2013), disagreements (e.g., Zhu and Boxer, 2021), thanking and greeting (e.g., House and
Kadar, 2021b), among others, in different linguacultures. However, many of these studies focus on well-studied
or less potentially face-threatening objects of inquiry. This panel attempts to fill these gaps by including re-
search that examines the pragmatic patterns, variation, or perceptions of under-studied, more potentially face-
threatening acts across languages in various social contexts. Data have been derived from a variety of sources,
such as spontaneous conversation at service encounters, CMC, social media, TV drama, or standup comedy, in
different languages, such as American English, Canadian English, Nigerian English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish,
Greek, and so on. Data triangulation has been employed to accomplish research validity. Data have been an-
alyzed through either qualitative or quantitative methods (House and Kádár, 2021a) and interpreted through
both macro and micro contextual lenses (Zhu, 2019). We hope that our panel can offer new perspectives to
contrastive pragmatics research in terms of the interplay between linguistic practice and pragmatic perception
or contextual effects on face-threats in different linguacultures.
References:

Boxer, Diana. 2002. Discourse issues in cross-cultural pragmatics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 22:
150-167.
Bruns, Hanna, and Svenja Kranich. 2021. Terms of address: A contrastive investigation of ongoing changes in
British, American and Indian English and in German. Contrastive Pragmatics 3(1): 112-143.
Gumperz, John, Tom C. Jupp, and Celia Roberts. 1981. Crosstalk. Southall, UK: The Havelock Centre.
Chen, Rong, Lin He, and Chunmei Hu. 2013. Chinese requests: In comparison to American and Japanese re-
quests and with reference to the “East-West divide”. Journal of Pragmatics 55: 140-161.
Erickson, Frederick, and Jeffrey Schultz. 1982. The counselor as gatekeeper. New York: Academic Press.
House, Juliane, and Daniel Kadar. 2021a. Cross-cultural pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane, and Daniel Kadar. 2021b. Altered speech act indication: A contrastive pragmatic study of English
and Chinese Thank and Greet expressions. Lingua 264: 1-20.
Ren, Wei, and Saiko Fukushima. 2021. Comparison between Chinese and Japanese social media requests. Con-
trastive Pragmatics 2: 200-226.
Zhu, Weihua. 2019. Interaction in Mandarin Chinese and English as a multilingua franca: Context, practice, and
perception. New York: Routledge.
Zhu, Weihua, and Diana Boxer. 2021. Turn-taking and disagreement: A comparison of American English and
Mandarin Chinese. Contrastive Pragmatics 2: 227-257.

14
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Arts of distancing in talk-in-interaction

Panel

Dr. Akira Takada 1 , Dr. Emi Morita 2


1. Kyoto University, 2. National University of Singapore

As the Covid-19 pandemic has been raging worldwide, ‘social distancing’ has become a popular concern across
various media outlets. The concept of social distance was initially advocated by anthropologist Edward T. Hall.
Hall (1966) proposed four main zones of space between individuals, i.e., (1) intimate distance (less than half a
meter), (2) personal distance (about 1 meter), (3) social distance (2 to 3 meters), and (4) public distance (more
than 5 meters). Socio-pragmatically, however, each of these ‘distances’ is defined by more than just the degree
of physical spacing defined above. Since the seminal work of Tuan (1977), the conceptual distinction between
space and place has been accepted in various disciplines. Likewise, studies of pragmatics have taught us how
communicative practices can construct, define, and negotiate the socio-cultural meaning of space as place. Cer-
tain forms of directives are used to indicate vertical distance within institutional settings, for example, while the
use of informal register, specialized vocabulary and dialects are used to co-construct the intimacies of “home”
and the membership of casual and professional “in-group” relationships.
Thus, to understand how social meaning is constructed in place, it is necessary to clarify how various semi-
otic resources are used in talk-in-interaction (e.g. Goodwin & Cekaite 2018). Through the examination of nat-
urally occurring interaction data, this panel aims to investigate how interactionally constructed place (home,
workspace, professional settings) and distance categories (friend/stranger, participant/bystander, etc.) are man-
ifested in everyday talk-in-interaction.
Along line with this purpose, Burdelski and Cekaite explore ways in which preschool children in Sweden and
Japan engage in practices that seek to put social and spatial distance between themselves and other children.
Their analysis suggests that children’s pragmatic acts of social and spatial distancing simultaneously entail social
proximity, including displaying resistance and alignment in forming social relationships.
Morita and Takada examine the use of the Japanese verbal suffix -haru and indicate that this once honorific
verbal suffix for denoting pre-established social distance has now also been pragmaticised as a way to pro-
claim distance one’s own differential measure of agency, social responsibility, and/or intentionality from that
of another in reference to a certain specifically denoted act.
Kawashima et al. attempt to deal with interactional management of “distance” with the fetus during the prenatal
genetic counseling. Their analysis shows that by managing the distance with the fetus interactionally, the clinical
geneticists and parents process their decision-making not only with the objective/medical reasoning but also
personal stance toward the fetus.
Kim explores the interactional meaning of the Korean nominalizing expressions involving the general noun
-ke(s) (‘thing’) and found that - ke(s) plays a key role in rendering these forms interactional resources geared to
implementing “distancing” practices.
Thus this panel approaches the notion of distancing by focusing on specific linguistic forms (Kim; Morita and
Takada), as well as by examining art of distancing in certain institutional settings (Burdelski and Cekaite;
Kawashima) and discuss how people construct and make sense of distancing among participants.

15
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Boko Haram terrorism in Nigeria and atypical discourses

Panel

Dr. Ruth Karachi Benson Oji 1 , Prof. Akin Odebunmi 2


1. Institute of Humanities, Pan-Atlantic University, 2. University of Ibadan

The story of Nigerian terrorism can be traced back to the emergence of Boko Haram (BH) in the country during
the rule of President Goodluck Jonathan, and it is still an ongoing phenomenon in the current political dispensa-
tion under the presidency of General Muhammadu Buhari. The diachronic history of BH terrorism comes with
its own context: its being unprecedented, its mutative nature leading to different manifestations of its nomen-
clatures and operations, and its conspiratorial dynamics. These are shown not only in Boko Haram’s inception
battle against Western education but also in its changing nomenclatural forms from “Boko Haram”, to “ter-
rorists” and to “bandits”; its open brazen recruitment of fighters and (unofficial) recognition by the Nigerian
government and the public; and its continuous integration of “soldiers” and “policemen” into its operations.
Recently, operating pugnaciously alongside Islamic State’s West African Province, with crime perpetrators be-
yond its official group coverage embodying other criminal groups in Nigeria, Boko Haram has been connected
to banditry, which has been focused mainly on kidnapping, armed robbery, and uncontrollable killings. The
operations’ demands of unreasonably huge ransoms are currently marked in the Nigerian political history and
social experiences. These are atypical events which are blatantly opposed to the principles of good governance
and human living in any form but which have become almost a way of life in Nigeria and have birthed new
discourse forms. These forms, with different pragmatic functions, are, at one level, manifest demonstrations of
the threat to life and collapse of the national security system heralded by the emergence of Boko Haram and
its mutations. The high-level conspiratorial nature of the operations and the suspicions of the compromise of
the security intelligence system have, at another level, incited caution and discreteness into the discourses of
Boko Haram. Consequently, what obtains is a mix of direct and indirect communicative resources to describe
and expose the havoc wreaked by BH in the media, on the social media, in public life, and in other avenues
of communication, itself a pragmatic phenomenon embodying face management, pragmatic constraints, and
common ground.
This panel discusses the atypical discourses resulting from the atypical operations of BH and its allied connivers.
In particular, it addresses the diachrony of the nomenclatural and operational mutations of BH, the contexts and
constraints of its operations, its media reportage and its everyday engagements, the ideological configurations
informing its discourses, and the pragmatic orientations associated with the atypicality of the discourses. or
comparative purposes, the panel is also interested in the atypical discourses emerging from the operations of
related organisations such as ISIS, ISWAP and several other terrorist groups found in many places of the world

16
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Children’s language creativity, emergent performativity and


heteroglossia in multilingual settings

Panel

Prof. Ann-Carita Evaldsson 1 , Prof. Amy Kyratzis 2


1. Department of Eucation, Uppsala University, 2. Department of Education, University of California

The aim of this panel is to gain new insights into children’s emergent language creativity and the multilingual
peer group as a central socializing agent. Language creativity is a novel gateway into exploring the dynamic
and culturally contingent dimensions of language use (Carter 2016). Creative play with language is a pervasive
feature of children’s everyday language practices linked to children’s ability to engage in socially nuanced and
novel actions and sensitize them to conventions for language use in various socio-cultural contexts (Duranti &
Black 2012). Children’s everyday language practices in peer group play also provide a site for them to explore
adult roles and registers (Paugh 2018), learn new language structures and take critical stances. For example,
through translanguaging, that is, engaging in fluid bilingual or multilingual discourse practices, they can “re-
sis[t] the historical and cultural positionings of monolingualism or of additive bilingualism” (García & Leiva
2014: 204). It is in multilingual peer groups that children have opportunities to engage in playful interactional
practices and use innovative/transgressive language forms such as language-play, play with word forms, pre-
tend play, language-crossing, verbal improvisations, joking, and teasing (Goodwin & Kyratzis 2011) that are
unlikely to occur in more asymmetrical interactions with adults. Notably, there is a wealth of sociolinguistic
research on how youth in multilingual interactions orient to, take stances on, and exploit linguistic diversity
along with ethnic divisions and race stratifications (Rampton 2017). This panel adds to previous research by
exploring children’s creative language use and heteroglossic verbal practices (Bakhtin 1981), that is, their use of
multiple codes and registers, and the larger socio-political meanings and ideologies that are negotiated through
those linguistic forms (Kyratzis, Reynolds & Evaldsson 2010). It emphasizes how children in everyday interac-
tion play with and juxtapose linguistic features and their social and cultural meanings (Maybin & Swann 2007),
forming their own associations between linguistic codes, social values, persons and places (Bailey 2007). By
attending to the plurality of language practices, values, identities and groupings that children are exposed to
and exploit in everyday interactions, the panel will contribute knowledge on children’s creative language use
and spontaneous play in situ, as it emerges in multilingual and culturally heterogenous communities.
Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Duranti, A & Black, S. (2012) Socialization and Verbal Improvisation. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin (eds).
Handbook of Language Socialization, pp 443-463. Wiley Blackwell.
García, O. & Leiva, C. (2014) Theorizing and Enacting Translanguaging for Social Justice. In A. Blackledge & A.
Creese (eds), Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy: Educational Linguistics, 29: 199-213. Springer.
Goodwin, M.H. & A. Kyratzis, (2011) Peer language socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin (Eds.),
Handbook of Language Socialization, pp 365–390. Malden, NJ: Wiley- Blackwell.
Kyratzis, A., Reynolds, J. & Evaldsson, A.-C. (2010). Heteroglossia and Language Ideologies in Children’s Peer
Play Interactions, Pragmatics, 20(4): 457- 466
Maybin, J. & Swann, J. (eds) (2007) Creativity in everyday language. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

17
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Clause combining at the discourse-grammar interface:


Answers from coordination, subordination and
insubordination

Panel

Prof. Liesbeth Degand 1 , Mr. Víctor Royo Viñuales 1 , Dr. An Van linden 2 , Dr. Wout Van Praet 1
1. UCLouvain, 2. Université de Liège

As previous research has pointed out (Haiman and Thompson 1988, Bybee and Noonan 2002), speakers’ strate-
gies of clause combining in contexts of natural language may be more diverse than hitherto accounted for. From
assessing different degrees of syntactic integration (Evans 2009) and different levels of dependence (Mithun
2008, Verstraete & D’Hertefelt 2016) to exploring the (non)discreteness of the categories of coordination and
subordination (Croft 2001), scholars have developed an interest in new accounts for the diversity of clause com-
bining relations and strategies observed in speakers’ discourse.
In the same vein, this panel aims to better understand the nature of the discourse-grammar interface –conceived
as the linguistic space where speakers create, share and conventionalize new uses– by bringing together current
research exploring how different patterns of clause combining (i.e. coordination, subordination and insubor-
dination) can be found to receive new uses in discourse. More precisely, the contributions to our panel will
provide accounts on (i) how new, language-specific uses of different clause combining strategies arise in dis-
course; on (ii) how such innovative uses are reflected by morpho-syntactic and prosodic marking; on (iii) which
semantic-discursive functions such innovative uses fulfil; on (iv) how such types of use can be traced in histori-
cal data so as to understand their diachronic development; and finally, from a more theoretical perspective, on
(v) how such innovations affect category boundaries between different clause combining patterns.
On the basis of a widely diverse range of languages (Indo-European, Japonic, Semitic, Trans-Himalayan and
Uralic), and using a broad variety of methodological approaches, the contributions to this panel include histor-
ical (both diachronic and synchronic) accounts of different clause combining strategies, investigations about
distinct degrees of (in)dependence and their linguistic correlates, studies about the interaction between clause
combining patterns, semantics and discursive features, and various specific accounts of the phenomenon of
insubordination from a variety of perspectives (namely studies on nominalization as a case of insubordination,
contrastive approaches to insubordination, and language-specific explorations of how insubordination arises
in discourse).
References:
Bybee, J. L. & Noonan, M. (Eds.). (2002). Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra
A. Thompson. John Benjamins Publishing.
Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford University
Press.
D’Hertefelt, S., & Verstraete, J. C. (2014). Independent complement constructions in Swedish and Danish: Insub-
ordination or dependency shift?. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 89-102.
Evans, N. (2007). Insubordination and its uses. In Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations. Oxford
University Press.
Haiman, J. & Thompson, S. A. (Eds.). (1988). Clause combining in grammar and discourse (Vol. 18). John Ben-
jamins Publishing.
Mithun, M. (2008). The extension of dependency beyond the sentence. Language, 69-119.

18
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Cognitive and interactional perspectives on conversational


humour

Panel

Prof. Michael Haugh 1 , Dr. Béatrice Priego-Valverde 2 , Mr. Amir Sheikhan 1


1. The University of Queensland, 2. Aix-Marseille University

Conversational humour, which broadly encompasses (sequences of) utterances that are designed to ‘amuse’
participants or are treated as ‘amusing’ by participants across various different kinds of social interaction, has
been the object of study in pragmatics and related fields for a number of decades. Two main schools of re-
search about conversational humour have emerged over that time: cognitive-pragmatic approaches that model
how participants understand humour in interactional contexts, including the inferential and conceptual bases
for recognizing and resolving incongruities; and discourse-pragmatic approaches that focus on describing the
forms and interactional practices by which conversational humour arises and its associated social functions
(Haugh and Priego-Valverde, forthcoming). As Attardo (2020) notes, however, apart from a few notable excep-
tions (Langlotz 2015; Tabacaru 2019; Thielemann 2020), there has been little cross-fertilisation between these
two strands of research, a situation which mirrors the divide between theoretical pragmatics and socioprag-
matics in the field of pragmatics more broadly.
The aim of this panel is to bring together scholars working from broadly cognitive and interactional perspectives
in order to consider how we might develop a more comprehensive, empirically-grounded. and theoretically-
sound account of conversational humour across different language and cultures. Papers in this panel focus
on key questions that arise in undertaking such an endeavour, such as whether the traditional distinction be-
tween humour competence and humour performance can be maintained when theorising conversational hu-
mour, what makes conversational humour ‘funny’ and the role of incongruity therein, the role of common
ground, shared knowledge and the epistemics of conversational humour, and the extent to which there are
universal cognitive or sequential mechanisms underpinning conversational humour across languages and cul-
tures, as well as attributions of humourous intentions and inferences about humour. Using cognitive, corpus-
based,interactional, and neurolinguistic approaches to conversational humour, the papers in this panel explore
different forms of humour in a range of contexts including in talk shows, digital spaces, classroom settings and
naturally occurring interactions.
References
Attardo, Salvatore (2020). The Linguistics of Humor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Langlotz, Andreas (2015). Creating Social Orientation through Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haugh, Michael and Béatrice Priego-Valverde (forthcoming). Conversational humour. In Thomas E. Ford,
Władysław Chłopicki, and Giselinde Kuipers (eds.), Handbook of Humor Research. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tabacaru, Sabina (2019). A Multimodal Study of Sarcasm in Interactional Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thielemann, Nadine (2020). Understanding Conversational Joking. A Cognitive-Pragmatic Study based on Russian
Interactions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

19
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Communicative practices in online dating

Panel

Ms. Elisabeth Andersen 1 , Prof. Will Gibson 2 , Dr. Riki Thompson 3


1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. UCL, Institute of Education, 3. University of Washington

Dating Apps have fundamentally changed the communicative practices of dating with 413 million adult users
of dating apps worldwide at the end of 2022. This panel brings together studies of textual interaction among
dating app users, analysing in detail the interactional features of these encounters.
Drawing particularly on Conversation Analysis and cognate areas, the panel explores a diverse but interrelated
set of issues describing communicative practices in online dating. Such issues may involve but are not limited
to the ways that users use location information and orient to place to generate topics and to organize offline
meetings, the negotiation of gender norms and practices associated with online dating, and the relationship
between education, age, and forms of talk.
The analyses in the panel pay attention to the distinctive textual features of these chats, including the role of
profile information in structuring conversations, and/or the use of particular communicative practices such
as emoji. Together, these papers provide an important advancement on existing studies of face-to-face dating
(Korobov 2011; Stokoe 2010; Turowetz & Hollander 2012), and a critical contribution to the small but growing
body of work on online dating and language (Kavroulaki 2021; Licoppe 2020; Mortensen 2017; Thompson 2022),
showing how modern technologies are radically altering the ways that people manage dating.
References
Kavroulaki, E., 2021. “Congratulations ! You just won the title for ‘worse Tinder opening line ’ ” Inappropriate
behaviour and impoliteness in online dating. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 9, 1.
Korobov, N., 2011. Mate-Preference Talk in Speed-Dating Conversations Mate-Preference Talk in Speed-Dating
Conversations. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 44, 2, p.186–209.
Licoppe, C., 2020. Liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture . A comparative study of contrasted
interactional patterns in the main uses of Grindr and Tinder. Journal of Cultural Economy, 13, 1, p.73–90.
Mortensen, K.K., 2017. Flirting in online dating Flirting in online dating : Giving empirical grounds to flirtatious
implicitness. Discourse Studies, 19, 5, p.581–597.
Stokoe, E., 2010. “Have You Been Married , or …?”: Eliciting and Accounting for Relationship Histories in Speed-
Dating Interaction. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 40, 3, p.260–282.
Thompson, R. 2022. More than the selfie: Online dating, non-monogamy, normativity, and linked profiles on
OkCupid. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 11, 1, p.1–30.
Turowetz, J. & Hollander, M.M., 2012. Assessing the experience of speed dating. Discourse Studies, 14, 5, p.635–
658.

20
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Complex syntax for interaction

Panel

Prof. Yael Maschler 1 , Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler 2 , Prof. Jan Lindström 3
1. University of Haifa, 2. University of Neuchâtel, 3. University of Helsinki

Recent developments in linguistics have seen the emergence of a radically alternative understanding of the
grammar of natural languages: Grammar is no longer understood as an autonomous system of abstract rules,
but as a locally sensitive, temporally unfolding resource for social interaction (Hopper 1987, 2011, Auer 2009).
Accordingly, grammar is studied in its natural ecology, i.e., talk-in-interaction, and in relation to embodied
semiotic resources, such as gaze, gesture, and the moving body (see, e.g., Keevallik 2013, Pekarek Doehler et al.
2021). Based on the thriving research in the field of interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018),
we have to date robust evidence of how specific linguistic constructions function as interactional resources for
accomplishing precise social actions in a growing number of languages.
In this panel, we seek to deepen our understanding of the socio-interactional workings of grammar as it in-
terfaces with other semiotic resources (gaze, gesture, posture…) by focusing on a domain that has received
comparatively little attention in interactional linguistics, namely, complex syntax (i.e., structures beyond a sim-
ple clause; see, e.g., Laury & Suzuki 2011, Maschler et al. 2020). We set out to explore how patterns of complex
syntax are implicated in the production and coordination of actions within social interaction. Focusing on the
temporal and locally emergent nature of grammar, the papers brought together in this panel examine three
key-facets of complex-syntax-for-interaction: They investigate (a) how structures that post-hoc appear formally
as clause-combining patterns are in fact patched together on the fly, in ways that respond to interactional con-
tingencies; (b) how formally dependent structures, such as ‘if’-clauses or ‘because’-clauses, can be used as so-
called insubordinate clauses (Evans 2007, Maschler 2018, Lindström et al. 2019, Günthner 2020) for precise
interactional purposes; (c) how what formally might appear as part of canonical clause-combining patterns
(e.g., complement-taking predicate structures such as ‘I don’t know’, initial parts of pseudo-clefts) are used as
independent marker-like elements fulfilling interactional functions (e.g., Lindström et al. 2016, Pekarek Doehler
2019, Maschler & Pekarek Doehler 2022).
Based on audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interactions in a variety of settings, and drawing
on conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the contributions document routinized grammatical for-
mats of social action involving (pieces) of what canonically appear as complex clausal structures. They study
these across several languages, including, English, Estonian, German, French, Hebrew, Italian, Mandarin, and
Swedish. They share the aspiration to shed further light on the role of grammar within a larger ecology of in-
teractional resources, and how participants deploy these in real time to organize and coordinate their mutual
actions. Taken together, the papers deepen our understanding of how grammar contributes to action forma-
tion in interaction, how interactional exigencies shape grammatical resources, and how grammar interfaces in
complex ways with bodily conduct such as gaze, gesture, or posture.

21
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conflict talk in Spanish digital interactions

Panel

Dr. Lucía Fernández-Amaya 1 , Dr. María de la O Hernández López 1


1. Pablo de Olavide University

In recent years, violence and hostility has increased exponentially within the realm of digital discourse (Khos-
raviNik and Esposito 2018). This fact has made many scholars turn their attention to conflict as a common
phenomenon in digital media (Esposito 2021). Some of the digital contexts in which conflict has been exam-
ined include discussion fora (Mancera 2009; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2018), online email communities (Graham
2003, 2005, 2007), YouTube (Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014), social media such as Facebook (Bou-
Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2018, 2019) or Twitter (del Valle 2018; Bou-Franch 2021), and instant messag-
ing tools such as WhatsApp (Fernández-Amaya 2019, 2020; García-Gómez 2018, 2020; among others). However,
conflict in Spanish digital interactions has received considerably less attention (but see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
2020 for the most recent critical overview of studies dealing with impoliteness and conflict in Spanish). This
panel aims to contribute to filling this gap by presenting a number of papers in which renowned specialists an-
alyze conflict in Spanish digital interactions from a variety of angles. The relevance of this panel lies on the fact
that the presenters examine corpora gathered in different digital environments, such as YouTube, Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram and consumer sites in which users can post online consumer reviews and interact with sell-
ers or other users. What these global platforms have in common as part of the 2.0 culture is that users can
produce content and contribute to each of the websites not only to provide information, but also to complain,
denounce, or vent negative feelings that may cause offense, conflict or negative reputation. This panel, there-
fore, includes different methodological perspectives and theoretical approaches in order to gain deeper insight
into the phenomenon of digital conflict in Spanish-speaking contexts.

22
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Convergent and divergent information in multimodal and


multisensorial communication

Panel

Prof. Paul Bouissac 1 , Prof. Ellen Fricke 2


1. University of Toronto, 2. Chemnitz University of Technology

Research in multimodality has studied the ways in which congruency is achieved through the functional or
“appropriate” combination of various modalities and information channels converging toward intended prag-
matic goals. In artifactual multimodal messages such as television advertisements or personal profiles on line,
the combination of multimodal information is designed in a way that ensures convergency and congruency as
a semiotic and rhetorical strategy (e.g., Hiippala 2016). However, in natural social interactions and in the inter-
pretation of multimodal environmental phenomena convergency and congruency cannot be taken for granted.
There are many cases in which different channels convey dissonant, discrepant , or even contradictory informa-
tion. Research on the social meaning of the smile, for instance, has drawn attention to the differences between
genuine and contrived smiles based on the analysis of divergent facial information that can be observed in face
to face conversations in combination with verbal utterances. [In scientific inquiry, observed lacks of congru-
ency in multimodal data prompt experiments designed to account for the truth of counter-intuitive knowledge
that can be defined as trans-modal]. The theoretical approach proposed in this panel will aim at developing a
theory of dysfunctional multimodal communication such as identifying mismatches and discrepancies between
functional design and identity design (e.g., van Leeuwen 2022); the forensics of failed marketing strategies, po-
litical campaigns, or software projects (e.g., Kaisler, Money, and Cohen 2021); and the potential undermining
of multimodal rhetoric by the interfering power of discrepant visual, acoustic, haptic, and olfactory signals.
This may apply also to human-machine interaction and the different sensors used in hybrid group settings. To
address some aspects of these pragmatic dysfunctionalities, it is necessary to take into consideration not only
cultural constraints and their social semiotics dimensions but also the relative weight in human interactions
of signals that have evolved in staggered manner over evolutionary time and variously impact decision mak-
ing. Sensitivity to contact and to various molecules in the proximal or distal environment, or the processing
of acoustic input predate the emergence of vision as a comparatively recent adaptation. Along the same logic,
we may ask whether images are bound to override the power of words either spoken or written. Both social
semiotics considerations and evolutionary theoretical perspective could help design experiments to investigate
how the interplay of multimodality and multi-sensorial information are negotiated in human interactions. This
panel will accept both theoretical papers and case studies.

23
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Corpus linguistic approaches to epistemic and evidential


marking in talk-in-interaction

Panel

Prof. Johanna Miecznikowski 1 , Dr. Jérôme Jacquin 2


1. Università della Svizzera italiana, 2. Université de Lausanne

This panel brings together corpus linguistic contributions on epistemicity (Boye 2012) in spoken language in an
interactional perspective.
The question of how knowledge is negotiated among speakers is crucial for the study of talk-in-interaction. This
has been suggested by research about epistemic stance-taking in conversation analysis and in interactional
linguistics, which has investigated its role in the formation, ascription and sequential organization of actions
and in the construction of identities and social relations. After seminal works such as Heritage’s study about
‘oh’ as a change of state token (1984) or Pomerantz’ work about source-giving (1984a,b), that research has been
developed significantly in the last two decades (Heritage & Raymond 2005; Stivers & Rossano 2010; Mushin
2012; Stivers, Mondada & Steensig 2011; Heritage 2012; Levinson 2012; Sidnell 2012; Lindström et al. 2016),
more recently considering multimodal aspects as well (Mondada 2013; Kendrick 2019; Pekarek Doehler 2022).
CA research mainly presents detailed qualitative analyses of single cases or sequence collections. Still other
methods have been adopted in typological and functional linguistics, which usually focus on individual gram-
matical or lexical markers of epistemic modality and of information source or on paradigms of such markers.
In these fields, the specific question of epistemicity in spoken language has attracted scholarly attention only
recently. The existing studies have mainly adopted a corpus linguistic/pragmatic approach (Aijmer & Rühle-
mann 2014), i.e. are based on oral corpora, resort to systematic annotation in various stages of analysis and
take into account the quantitative distribution of phenomena. Meeting the tradition of linguistic research on
discourse markers, they treat epistemic and evidential marking both in a semasiological perspective (Cuenca
& Marín 2012; Cornillie & Gras 2015; Jacquin et al. 2022) and in an onomasiological perspective (Pietrandrea
2018; Miecznikowski 2022).
From the viewpoint of interactional linguistics, that body of research raises a series of issues: In which sequen-
tial positions do epistemic and evidential markers and constructions tend to occur? How are they combined
with, or do alternate with, paraverbal means (gaze, facial expression, gesture, body posture)? How should the
classes of actions for which they are relevant be defined? Which role does the situational context play, especially
as a source of perceptual evidence? What is the relation of epistemic and evidential marking with practices that
organize larger portions of discourse, such as story-telling or argumentation? How does it vary across activity
types and discourse genres?
To answer these questions, detailed qualitative analysis can fruitfully be combined with methods that allow to
treat larger amounts of oral data. The panel therefore includes contributions on the topic that adopt corpus
linguistic/pragmatic and collection-based approaches and will explicitly address the methodological challenges
raised by the use of such methods.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Digital play as socio-pragmatic practice

Panel

Dr. Hiloko Kato 1


1. Department of German Studies University of Zurich / Game Design Zurich University of the Arts

Since the advent of Tennis for Two in 1958, digital games have evolved into an everyday activity for people of
all ages. Especially during the Covid-19 crisis, socially engaging in digital play has been brought to a new level:
The gaming industry’s campaign “#PlayApartTogether”, for instance, strongly encouraged players to follow the
WHO’s health guidelines. Furthermore, in 2021, digital games were for the first time promoted to be displayed at
the Olympics in Tokyo. In the fields of Esports, games like Counter Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends and
Dota 2 amass large fan-based communities that help to raise prize pools at international events up to several
million US dollars. Ultimately, digital games have reached the status of a cultural asset, being collected, for
example, at the Literaturarchiv Marbach in Germany or at the MoMA.
However, digital games are far more than just an area where digitalization is visibly shaping the every-day
lives of new generations. What makes digital games relevant is that they are a highly dynamic field of exper-
imentation where new forms of socio-pragmatic practices are devised and intensively explored. In research,
this is mirrored by some very intriguing publications especially in the field of multimodal interaction and eth-
nomethodological and conversation analytic informed approaches (Reeves/Greiffenhagen/Laurier 2016). Addi-
tionally, digital games are explored using broader linguistic approaches to digital game discourse (Ensslin 2019)
or pragmatic approaches to digital games in general (Bogost 2011). As this field of Game Studies is evolving at a
rapid pace, qualitative research on digital play as socio-pragmatic practice has become a subject of increasing
interest.
The data discussed in this panel focuses on digital games with this qualitative socio-pragmatic approach for an
in-depth exchange on the state-of-the-art research concerning digital play.
References:

Bogost, Ian (2011): How to do things with videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ensslin, Astrid/Balteiro, Isabel (eds.) (2019): Approaches to Videogame Discourse: Lexis, Interaction, Textuality.
London: Bloomsbury.
Reeves, Stuart/Greiffenhagen, Christian/Laurier, Eric (2016): Video gaming as practical accomplishment: eth-
nomethodology, conversation analysis, and play. In: Topics in Cognitive Science 9 (2), 308–342.

25
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse and disfluencies in cognitive and speech disorders

Panel

Dr. Ludivine Crible 1 , Dr. Christelle Dodane 2


1. Ghent University, 2. Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3

This panel gathers researchers adopting a discourse-analytic approach to a range of cognitive and speech dis-
orders, including Autism Spectrum Disorder, aphasia, Alzheimer’s disease and stuttering. The term « discourse
analysis » is here taken in a broad sense and encompasses quantitative and qualitative studies that investigate
the pragmatics of (atypical) interaction, in a functional, context-bound approach to empirical data. The focus
therefore lies on linguistic phenomena such as disfluencies (pauses, repetitions, truncations, etc.), gestures, co-
herence markers or any other devices reflecting discourse-structuring or discourse-representational processes.
These pragmatic devices are particularly prone to be impacted by various disorders (e.g., Dipper & Pritchard,
2017) because of their high frequency, optionality and relative freedom of movement. They also reflect mecha-
nisms of interaction management and discourse structure, processes which have been described as particularly
challenging for atypical speakers (Merrison & Merrison, 2005).
Such a focus on the pragmatics of atypical speech is in line with the current momentum for mixed approaches,
after a long prevalence of purely quantitative, formal and relatively decontextualized studies in the field. This
panel will thus shed some light on the micro- and macro-level features that characterize the discourse level in
cognitive and speech disorders, a step which is in turn crucial to better describe these populations in general
and to understand their specificities with respect to (neuro-)typical speakers.
References

Dipper, L. T., & Pritchard, M. (2017). Discourse : Assessment and Therapy. In Advances in Speech-language
Pathology. IntechOpen.
Merrison, S., & Merrison, A. J. (2005). Repair in speech and language therapy interaction : Investigating prag-
matic language impairment of children. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 21(2), 191�211.

26
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse-pragmatic markers of Chinese origin in East Asian


languages

Panel

Prof. Seongha Rhee 1 , Prof. Reijirou Shibasaki 2 , Prof. Wenjiang Yang 3


1. Mahidol University & HUFS, 2. Meiji University/University of British Columbia, 3. University of Macau

This panel addresses some sets of compounds of Chinese origin used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and
investigates the issue whether they have grammaticalized into discourse-pragmatic markers (DMs, hereafter, as
an umbrella term) from their earlier lexical expressions either similarly across these languages or distinctively
in language-specific ways.
It is well known that some compounds derived from the same Chinese characters are used as DMs in these
languages (e.g., Rhee et al. 2021); therefore, one natural question is whether those DMs were borrowed from
Chinese to Japanese and Korean as Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean words, respectively. In fact, the higher bor-
rowability of DMs in contact situations is reported in a wide range of works (e.g., Matras and Sakel 2007). If DMs
had not been borrowed from donor to recipient languages, another possibility is ‘replica grammaticalization,’
namely, the process that a grammaticalization process in one language is realized based on a model process
in another language (Heine and Kuteva 2005). Furthermore, some particular meanings of a form may have
their own potential to operate grammaticalization independently from language contact and regional areas
(e.g., ‘fact,’ ‘result,’ ‘issue,’ to name a few; see Heine et al. 2021 and Higashiizumi and Shibasaki in preparation
for details).
Typically, DMs are used in spoken discourse. Therefore, if a DM is borrowed from one language to another, it
would imply borrowing through spoken contact (e.g., you know in Clyne 2003). On the other hand, the heavy
lexical borrowing of Chinese words into Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese almost exclusively through written
texts is different from those typical cases (Norman 1988; Sohn 1999; Alves 2007; Irwin and Zisk 2019). Fur-
ther, Fedriani and Sansò (2017: 16) point out that “the pool of sources from which grams originate is limited…
[snip] when dealing with a given class of DMs it is more difficult to identify similar restricted pools of sources.”
Fortunately, East Asian languages have a massive amount of materials for the central issue of this panel.
Since contact linguistics is a thriving field (e.g., Grant 2020), what is addressed in this research project would
thus deserve attention as a point of departure for offering a good opportunity to extend our knowledge on the
issues from the perspective of DMs in East Asian languages.
This panel, consisting of three 90-minute sessions, features eight thought-provoking analyses of DMs that devel-
oped from the borrowed lexemes from Chinese, by the researchers on Asian languages, e.g., Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese and a comprehensive discussion.
Selected references

Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenboeck, Tania Kuteva and Haiping Long. 2021. The rise of discourse markers. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2005. Language contact and grammatical change. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Rhee, Seongha, Reijirou Shibasaki, and Xinren Chen (eds.). 2021. Special issue, Grammaticalization of discourse
markers in East Asian Languages, East Asian Pragmatics 6.3.

27
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourses of identity: Placing self in the public sphere

Panel

Prof. Jenny Cook-Gumperz 1 , Prof. Elena Raymond 1


1. University of California Santa Barbara

Our contemporary life is marked by one of the largest migrations of people due to global economic and political
crises. In these circumstances, the need to adjust daily routines to new situations presents many challenges, as
not only are people required to communicate for their personal needs in languages and places that differ from
their previous life, but there may be changes in the communicative medium through which these critical needs
can be met. This can require articulation of identity and new dynamic situational realizations of self (Gumperz
& Cook-Gumperz, 2007).
In this panel, we will look at identity as choosing a sense of personal self through speaking activities, conversa-
tions and discussions with others, both close and intimate as well as through interactions with strangers. Social
identity from this perspective follows Auer (2007) who, in his discussion of linguistic heterogeneity and iden-
tity, differentiates the constitutive discourse practices of social identity from the study of collective identities.
He argues that the construction and management of social identity in interaction attends to the “categoriza-
tion of participants in an interactional episode as social personae […] not to the definition and delimitation of
collectivities” (Auer, 2007:3).
Kroskrity (2001), in his discussion of identity, points out that such processes also typically occur in smaller com-
munities or social groups between people who know each other in so many roles that they must interactionally
establish which identity is situationally relevant. The panel’s framework rests on the assumption that identity,
as a dynamic aspect of social relationships, is forged and reproduced through language and is inscribed within
the agency/structure dyad (Giddens, 1984). While broader structures of power, ideologies, and global cultural
forces exercise important constraints on identity work, local practices of agency, resistance and style are inter-
woven in the process of individual and group (re)workings of identity. People may look globally for cultural
identifications, but it is in local communities of practice that they audition, embody and adapt these identities in
order to make them meaningful. Therefore, despite the widespread conceptions of cultural homogenization and
the elimination of geographic boundaries under globalization, locality remains paramount in people’s lives. The
meetings between the global/structural and the local/individual can lead to a mutual struggle for coexistence,
and at times hybridization.
We tackle this problem through an interdisciplinary approach in this session. There will be five papers cov-
ering a range of public discourse domains: police encounters with the public, political interviews, requests for
help in specific institutional settings, and adult and teenage discussions of gender and social identity in daily
conversations.
Auer, P. (Ed.). (2007). Style and social identities: Alternative approaches to linguistic heterogeneity (Vol. 18).
Walter de Gruyter.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitutions of society. Cambridge: Polity Press
Gumperz, J.J. & Cook-Gumperz, J. (2007). Style and identity in interactional sociolinguistics. In P. Auer (Ed.) Style
and social identities: Alternative approaches to linguistic heterogeneity (pp. 477-501). Walter de Gruyter.
Kroskrity, P.V. (2001). Identity. In A. Duranti (Ed.) Key Terms in Language and Culture, (pp. 106-109). Mas-
sachusetts: Basil Blackwell

28
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Doctor-child communication: Insights from pragmatics

Panel

Prof. Ilse Depraetere 1 , Dr. Vikki Janke 2


1. University of Lille, 2. University of Kent

This panel features pragmatic analyses of interactions between healthcare providers and paediatric patients.
The medical literature provides guidelines about appropriate vocabulary to use with children but neglects other
aspects of communication that affect how a child participates during the process. Tates & Meeuwesen (2001)
report that the contributions of children range from 2 to 12%, a figure that needs to rise if increasing a child’s
agency is taken seriously. Attention to this aspect of care is important as a calm child co-operates more readily
(Toledo del Castillo et al 2019), facilitating a smoother procedure. But the relevance of their emotional state ex-
tends further because heightened anxiety increases pain perception (Dionigi & Gremigni 2016), worsens health
outcomes, and remains in the child’s memory for years (Poot et al 2023). Thus, exposing optimal communica-
tion methods is vital. This workshop discusses the multifaceted nature of successful interactions, demonstrating
how they increase the child’s agency.
The papers analyse clinical encounters and address questions pertaining to some or all of the following: relative
participation of participants, management of turn-taking, alignment and facework, anxiety-reducing commu-
nicative strategies, directness/indirectness and gesture/gaze. The context for three of the presentations (1/6,
3/6, 5/6) is a single case study: a consultation in which the pediatrician prepares a young child for an invasive
procedure. The first serves as a general introduction, setting out the aims of the qualitative case study and
showing the video on which it is based. The third and fifth relate the communication within the consultation
to participation frameworks and facework strategies. The second presentation (2/6), examines the impact of
social distance within a number of clinical pediatric settings, including interactions between doctors, parents
and children. The fluid nature of social distance is demonstrated by the range of clinical contexts examined.
The fourth presentation (4/6) focuses on communicative interactions between a child with anarthria and his
mother. Crucially, dynamic repair-like phenomena occur through gaze, providing an essential conversational
structure to dialogue. The final paper (6/6) examines the discourse used with elderly clients in care homes. Con-
cerned with increasing opportunities for creative practices, it identifies how discourse departing from routine
sequences constitute creative practice, which help redress the power imbalance in the care relationship. Since
presentations 1, 3, 5 focus on one doctor-child-parent consultation, participants interested in this strand should
attend the first presentation which shows the relevant video clip.
Dionigi, A., & Gremigni, G. (2016). A Combined Intervention of Art Therapy and Clown Visits to Reduce Preop-
erative Anxiety in Children. JofCN, 26 (5-6): 632–640.
Poot, C., et al (2023). How to use participatory design to develop an eHealth intervention to reduce preprocedural
stress and anxiety among children visiting the hospital: The Hospital Hero app multi-study and pilot report.”
Frontiers in Pediatrics 11
Tates, K. & Meeuwesen, L. (2001). Doctor–parent–child communication. A (re)view of the literature. SSM, 52,
839-851.
Toledo Del Castillo, B. et al (2019). Reducing the pain in invasive procedures during paediatric hospital admis-
sions: Fiction, reality or virtual reality? Anales de Pediatría 91 (1): 80-87.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Dude food and chick beer: Linguistic and semiotic


perspectives on nutrition as a gendered cultural practice

Panel

Prof. Theresa Heyd 1 , Dr. Sofia Rüdiger 2 , Prof. Janina Wildfeuer 3


1. University of Greifswald, 2. University of Bayreuth, 3. University of Groningen

Food and drink, and consumption more generally, is deeply linked to cultural practice, and to the negotiation of
social status and other aspects of social identities. This connection is entrenched in classical sociological theory
(Veblen; Bourdieu), and has been increasingly explored in linguistics in recent years. Thus linguistic approaches
to food practices (Rüdiger and Mühleisen 2020; Tovares and Gordon 2020) have highlighted how social status
and categories of belonging are talked into being around practices of food and drink consumption (e.g. Silver-
stein 2003 on wine talk and status anxiety; Cotter and Valentinsson 2018 on bivalent class indexing in specialty
coffee discourse; Mapes 2020 on palatable eliteness; Schneider 2020 on third wave coffee and cosmopolitan
discourse).
However, the gendered dimension of food and drink talk has so far received less attention. In cultural and
social theory, approaches such as Contois’ (2018, 2020, 2021) work on food and masculinity have pointed to
these connections: ideologies of gender are cast upon practices of eating and drinking, from gendered product
ranges and eating places to gendered assumptions and regimes of un/healthy eating, dieting and cooking (see
also Bouvier & Chen 2021).
In a similar vein, foodie culture and practices have been shown to perpetuate the performance of stereotypi-
cal, classed femininities and masculinities, while also allowing an escape from them, particularly for women
(Cairns, Johnston and Baumann 2010). Dichotomous gendered eating practices have also been observed in the
context of fitness magazines (Fuller, Briggs and Dillon-Sumner 2012). In addition, cookbooks authored by fe-
male chefs emphasize aspects of hegemonic femininity such as care for self and others, while concurrently
offering competing discourses of self-fulfillment and independence (Matwick 2017).
In this panel, we provide further perspectives on the nexus between gender and food-and-drinks talk, with a
particular focus on discursive, multimodal, material and embodied ways of doing gendered food talk: How are
products made, packaged, marketed and sold? How are eating and drinking spaces discursively styled towards
gender binaries? How are gendered characterological figures inscribed into cooking and eating practices? What
linguistic and semiotic repertoires are used to construct male and female bodies in the context of eating and
drinking? How are gendered food identities of the self discursively constructed and how do these emerge in
interactions? These and related questions are the scope of our panel.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emancipatory pragmatics: Interactional modality from the


perspective of Ba-theory

Panel

Dr. Scott Saft 1 , Dr. Sachiko Ide 2 , Prof. Yoko Fujii 2


1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, 2. Japan Women’s University

By placing a focus on non-western languages that include ǀGui, Hawaiian, Japanese, Kilivila, Korean, Libyan
Arabic, Mandarin, Persian, and Thai, the perspective of Emancipatory Pragmatics (EP) has helped expand our
understanding of the diverse ways that language is used in social interaction. Emerging from EP research is
an approach to context termed ba-theory that underscores the dynamic relationship among language, social
interaction, and human beings. Deriving from the Japanese concepts of ba and basho (both most frequently
translated as “place” or “field”), ba-theory centers on the ideas of mutual dependency, impermanence, and
non-separation, and thus provides an alternative to western approaches that assume a separation between the
individual and the surroundings. With all aspects of contexts starting in a state of non-separation, ba-theory
allows researchers to explicate how taken-for-granted distinctions such as self-other and mind-body emerge
from and sometimes dissolve through social interaction.
This panel further explores ba-theory as a dynamic approach to language and social interaction by introducing
the concept of interactional modality, which builds on the already existing idea of discourse modality. Discourse
modality highlights the fact that speakers employ language to express not only propositional content but also
their own attitudes toward the content and their addressees, and interactional modality takes this a step fur-
ther by emphasizing that such attitudes are highly ephemeral and constantly in flux as interaction unfolds. In
short, interactional modality intends to describe, as interaction emerges from a state of non-separation, how
participants employ various interactional practices, including linguistic forms and also non-linguistic acts such
as gestures, head nods, and silence (i.e., refraining from speaking and leaving something unsaid), that con-
tribute to the construction and dissolution of boundaries between people. Indeed, the concept of interactional
modality recognizes the possibility that the modality–not the proposition–may be the most important aspect of
interaction since it plays such a significant role in creating and negotiating human relationships.
The panel seeks to explore interactional modality through the examination of interactional practices across di-
verse languages. Presentations may feature the usage of aspects of language that include but are not limited
to pronouns, deixis, verb-morphology, sentence final particles, and honorifics, and they may also focus on non-
verbal practices. The panel also encourages analyses that compare interactional practices across languages.
What, for example, can a comparison of head nodding by speakers of similar languages like Japanese and Ko-
rean tell us about how people in Japan and Korea merge their perspectives together in ba? Likewise, how may
an analysis of pronouns in structurally different languages such as Thai and Hawaiian inform our understand-
ing of the means through which speakers construct a sense of personhood in relation to others? By seeking
answers to such questions through analyses adopting a ba-theory perspective on context, this panel will move
the perspective of EP forward in its goal of heightening our ability to “see” the roles played by language and
social interaction in the organization of our social world.

31
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Embodied and linguistic repair practices in atypical


child-adult Interaction

Panel

Prof. Minna Laakso 1 , Prof. Barbara A. Fox 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Colorado, Boulder

The panel focuses on repair organization in child-adult interaction involving children with challenges in lan-
guage development. Regarding language development, children may have challenges in learning their first
language (L1), or a second language (L2). Both mono- and multilingual children are included.
Repair organization provides a powerful mechanism for handling problems of mutual understanding, and there
is evidence for its universality across languages and cultures. Generally speakers self-repair their own speech,
and recipients other-initiate repair on the speech of others, so that there is a preference for self-repair (Sche-
gloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977; Schegloff, 2007:100-106). This means that if we notice that our speech is not
understandable to others, we clarify it, and if the recipients do not hear or understand what we say, they ask
for clarification, and we clarify. Besides linguistic means, multimodal embodied practices can be used for clar-
ifying (e.g., pointing at a referent one cannot label), and for seeking assistance from others (e.g., gazing at a
co-participant), during repair sequences. Usually repair is a swift operation in which the problem is quickly
solved, and after which the main line of conversation proceeds. In atypical adult interactions, e.g., in connec-
tion with aphasia, repair operations have been found to be less swift or efficient. Repair sequences may prolong
and the participants use embodied resources extensively. On the other hand, in child-adult interaction the adult
contribution in repair operations has been found emphasized. Adults may e.g. directly other-correct or expand
children’s expressions.
The dyadic child-adult interactions in focus of this panel present asymmetric competencies in language use
between child and adult participants. Linguistic asymmetries potentially cause problems in intersubjective
understanding between the interlocutors, which makes the study of repair organization central. The panel will
explore whether the universal self- and other-initiated repair practices described in previous adult-focused
research are preferred and used similarly, or, whether they differ in child-adult interactions. Comparisons can
be made e.g. by looking at the distributions of self- and other-initiated repair operations between child and adult
participants, as well as comparing interactions involving neurotypically developing children and children with
challenges in language development.
Comparative analyses have the potential to reveal how participation in social-interactive repair operations
adapts to interactions in which there are asymmetric roles (adult vs. child) or competencies in language use.
Furthermore, we find it essential to examine both linguistic and embodied actions in order to understand the
full range of participation in child-adult interactions. Comparisons of embodied actions in connection with typ-
ical L1/L2 acquisition as well as with connection with developmental language disorders may reveal whether
adaptations differ depending on the nature of asymmetry, and whether embodied actions compensate for chal-
lenges in language use.
In the panel, comparative analyses of repair will be explored through a brief introduction by the organizers,
three empirical papers, and a concluding summary on the combined findings, presenting also a methodology
for quantifying the distributions of repair practices in different data sets.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emerging otherness in social interactions: Multimodal and


multicultural approaches

Panel

Dr. Keiko Tsuchiya 1 , Dr. Valentina Fantasia 2


1. Yokohama City University, 2. Lund University

Engaging in social interactions is a fundamental human practice (Enfield, 2017). Social interactions are con-
strue through the coordination of actions and meanings by those participating in them. As argued by EMCA
(ethnomethodological conversation analysis) theoreticians (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970), people contribute – and
are perceived to do so – to jointly construct meaning and make sense of common knowledge by means of overt,
systematic deployment of multimodal resources, such as behaviours and language (Goffman, 1974), by estab-
lishing common ground (Clark, 1996). This panel explores closely what happens in those interactional systems
when people succeed or do not succeed in trying to make sense of each other, particularly in multicultural
settings.
Multiculturality in this panel includes broad contexts, e.g., intercultural communication among individuals with
various ethnic and linguacultural backgrounds, and interdisciplinary professional interactions between those
who belong to different sub-groups in an institution. Multicultural (or non-monocultural) attitudes are also
applied to the interpretation of social interactions. Alterity and intersubjectivity, for example, are two central
aspects of social engagements on which Western theories have long draw attention to, assuming individual
interactants as ego-centric agents (Duranti, 2010). In the ba-theory in the Eastern cultures (Hanks et al., 2019),
on the other hand, everything is submerged in a context in primary ba, and the Self and Other distinction
emerges in secondary ba.
Social interactions involve both intersubjectivity and alterity, which are “opposing forces” in “a single, inte-
grated, dialectal system” and should not be discussed in isolation (Wertsch, 2000, p. 27), and contribute to both
social interactional and individual processes (Vygotsky, 1991[1966]). In some cases, alterity could reside within
an individual, i.e., the practice of pretence, which could be jointly realised by encouraging other interactants to
respond “the pretense” in interactions (Tollefsen, 2005).
This panel explores the dynamism of emergent alterity in social interactions in multicultural settings, describing
interactants’ use of multimodal semiotic resources in the process, e.g., gaze behaviours and pointing gestures for
joint attention (Carpenter & Tomasello, 1995). Drawing on multimodal and multicultural, or non-monocultural,
approaches, this panel addresses three questions: (1) how and by whom alterity is framed and negotiated for
grounding in interactions to establish intersubjectivity in a multicultural setting, (2) what multimodal semiotic
resources are exploited in the process, and (3) how and with what theoretical framework alterity and intersub-
jectivity are interpreted and discussed by the analyst/researcher.
The panel includes contributions by researchers investigating interactions among individuals with autism,
local communities and the government social welfare policies in England (Kyoko Aizaki); the acoustic char-
acteristics of speakers’ voice and its influence on recipients’ decision-making in social interaction (Jonathan
Caballero); anaesthetists’ gaze behaviours in surgical team simulation in Japan (Keiko Tsuchiya); the diversifi-
cation of interactional resources in L2 Spanish learners of English (Victor Garre Leon); the interconnections of
bodies, languages and objects in migrant students’ interactions in Brazil; and pretend play interactions among
kindergarten children with different cultural and linguistic background (Valentina Fantasia).

33
18th International Pragmatics Conference

English address terms in a globalized world: Socio-cultural


impact on recent language variation and change

Panel

Prof. Svenja Kranich 1 , Dr. Anke Lensch 2


1. Universität Bonn, 2. Universität Koblenz

Present-day English address terms range from more informal variants, such as first names (e.g. Lilian), kinship
terms (e.g. Dad) and endearment terms (e.g. sweetie) to more formal variants, such as last names combined with
title (e.g. Ms Miller), or the use of title only (e.g. Sir) (cf. Bruns & Kranich 2022). Generally speaking, diachronic
change affecting English address terms has been well investigated (cf. e.g. Brown & Ford 1961; Ervin-Tripp
1978; Jucker 2020; Buyle 2021). Yet, relatively little is known about the effects of more recent developments
such as globalization, the advent of the internet and social media, the subsequent increase in global connectivity,
democratization and colloquialization on the use of address terms in English-speaking speech communities and
communities of practice across the globe.
Previous studies have shown that inter- and intra-variety variation in the use of address terms prevails, despite
the increasing degree of interconnectedness through globalization (cf. e.g. Bruns & Kranich 2022). Thus, to
this day in South Asian varieties of English, such as Indian English and Sri Lankan English, the address terms
Madam and Sir still appear to be the default, while they are almost considered archaisms in British English and
American English, where especially younger generations appear to be prone to choosing informal variants over
more formal ones (cf. Bernaisch 2015: 126f.; Bruns and Kranich 2022: 129).
This panel has the aim to provide a better understanding of the determinants of recent change affecting En-
glish address terms, with a particular focus on the impact of the relatively recent sociocultural developments
connected to globalization listed above. The contributions to this workshop are based on state-of-the-art empir-
ical research that establishes on-going trends affecting the use of address terms, which can transgress national
borders and social constraints in the wake of globalization.
References
Bernaisch, Tobias (2015). The Lexis and Lexicogrammar of Sri Lankan English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Bruns, Hanna, & Kranich, Svenja (2021). “Terms of address: A contrastive investigation of ongoing changes in
British, American and Indian English and in German.” Journal of Contrastive Pragmatics, 3(1), 112-143.
Brown, Roger, and Marguerite Ford (1961). “Address in American English”. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology 62/2: 375-385.
Buyle, Anouk (2021). “Dear, my dear, my lady, your ladyship: Meaning and use of address term modulation by
my”. Pragmatics 31(1). 33-61.
Ervin-Tripp, Susan (1972). “On Sociolinguistic Rules: Alternation and Co-occurrence.” Directions in Sociolin-
guistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Eds. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Holt, Rheinhart
and Winston. 213-250.
Jucker, Andreas (2021). Politeness in the History of English. From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Cambridge,
CUP.

34
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Experimental and corpus perspectives on (socio)pragmatics

Panel

Prof. Anne Bezuidenhout 1 , Prof. Andreas Jucker 2


1. University of South Carolina, 2. Universität Zürich

Linguists interested in pragmatic variation use a variety of methods to investigate the social and cultural factors
influencing the language choices made by conversationalists in verbal communication, including observational,
experimental and corpus-based methods. In this panel we focus in particular on recent developments in the
experimental and in the corpus-based methods. On the experimental side, the traditional methods of discourse
completion tasks and role plays have seen significant modifications and improvements over recent years. They
have been supplemented by a range of methods from experimental psychology, with a focus on comprehension
tasks and a broader appreciation of the interaction between conversationalists. Corpus pragmatics has seen
an equally significant development of tools and methods driven by the unprecedented growth of the availabil-
ity of new corpora and their sizes. Corpora that have recently become available include specialized corpora
of texts drawn from social media sources, corpora containing several decades of spoken language or corpora
that include pragmatically tagged units. These exciting developments offer a broad range of possibilities for
innovative research questions and new insights into the use of language across different social contexts, differ-
ent cultures, and different time periods. In this panel, we showcase the application of such newly developed
experimental and corpus-based methods in the study of socio-pragmatic topics, such as im/politeness, social
identity-construction, interaction in professional settings, and so on.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring the body as the source of meaning-making in sign


language interaction

Panel

Dr. Emily Shaw 1 , Dr. Alysson Lepeut 2


1. Gallaudet University, 2. Université de Namur

Since Stokoe et. al’s (1965) groundbreaking work on American Sign Language, five decades of research on sign
language (SL) have remained heavily focused on syntax and the lexicon at the expense of other, less conven-
tionalized practices. Initially limited by technology (i.e., filming equipment and the means of processing and
analyzing videos, most SL studies relied on field observations or elicited data “from small numbers of signers,
monologic retellings and/or spontaneous narratives” (Hodge et al., 2019).
Today, scholars record and analyze signing via video. However, with a few exceptions (e.g., de Vos et al., 2015;
Manrique, 2016; Mesch, 2016; Ferrara, 2020), little work has been conducted on pragmatic and interactional
mechanisms of signed discourse, particularly in face-to-face conversations. As raised by Baker and van den
Bogaerde (2012), some “aspects [of signed interactions] have not been studied at all […]. It will be a challenge
of the next decade to broaden our knowledge in this area” (p. 490).
This panel responds to the call to broaden our knowledge of SL interactions by shifting focus away from single-
signer datasets. It will feature studies that consider the semiotic diversity of language in interaction via diverse
methods (from corpus linguistics to ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA)). In addition, contri-
butions will focus on interactional practices that regulate the flow of signed conversations, including (but not
limited to) these questions:

• What embodied practices regulate turn-taking in signed discourse (e.g., the active participation of ad-
dressees through backchannels or repair sequences)?
• What joint actions do participants engage in when overlapping signing?
• What methodological tools can be drawn from EMCA to further pragmatic analyses of multimodal data?
How can we expand transcription methods to include multimodal data?
• How does the study of SL interaction in diverse contexts advance our understanding of language writ
large as a pluri-semiotic phenomenon?

Selected references
Baker, A., & van den Bogaerde, B. (2012). Communicative Interaction. In: R. Pfau, M. Steinbach, & B. Woll (Eds.),
Sign language. An international handbook (pp. 489-512). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton
de Vos, C., Torreira, F., & Levinson, S.C. (2015). Turn-timing in signed conversations: coordinating stroke-to-
stroke turn boundaries. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(268).
Ferrara, L. (2020). Some interactional functions of finger pointing actions in signed language conversations,
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, pp. 1-44.
Hodge, G., Schembri, A., Johnston, J., & Cormier, K. (2019). Semiotic diversity in signed utterances: evidence
from conversations in the British Sign Language Corpus, Paper presented at the 6th European and 9th Nordic
Symposium on Multimodal Communication, 9-10 Sept. 2019, Leuven, Belgium.
Manrique, E. (2016). Other-initiated repair in Argentine Sign Language. Open Linguistics, 2(1), pp. 1-34.
Mesch, J. (2016). Manual backchannel responses in signers’ conversations in Swedish Sign Language. Language
& Communication, 50, pp. 22-41
Stokoe, W., Casterline, D. & Croneberg, C. (1965). The dictionary of American Sign Language on linguistic princi-
ples. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press. Revised 1978, Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring “image work” in Chinese communication

Panel

Prof. Xinren Chen 1


1. Nanjing University

This panel explores how Chinese people perform various types of “image work” by discursive means in a vari-
ety of communicative context. By “image work”, it is meant to refer to any discursive effort (Chen, 2022; Chen
& Jin, 2022; Jin & Chen, 2022; Locher, 2004), serious or jocular, that communicators make for the purpose of
(dis)claiming, constructing, maintaining, or beautifying the image of a person (the speaker, the hearer, or a
third party), a social group or an institution, a region or a country; on the negative side, it can also be used
to denote any discursive effort, serious or jocular, that is intended to belittle, harm, or uglify the image of any
entity mentioned above. The reported studies in the panel on “image work” in Chinese communication are all
grounded on both constructionist and pragmatic approaches to the notion of image: 1) image is not a static
thing “out there” but a dynamic “thing” (Chen & Jin, 2022) such that it is subject to construction, modification
and deconstruction in discourse (cf., Goffman, 1959; Lakoff, 1989; Schlenker & Pontari, 2001; Tracy, 2001); 2)
it can be discursively represented and explicated (cf., van Dijk, 2000); 3) it is negotiable and contestable (Chen,
2022); 4) it can be a pragmatic resource deployable for illocutionary and interpersonal purposes (Chen, 2020,
2022). Various types of image work enacted through an array of pragma-linguistic strategies across a wide
range of communicative contexts, interpersonal, institutional and public, are presented and discussed in rela-
tion to communicative goals and contextual correlates. All the studies in the panel are conducted on the basis of
naturally-occurring data in real-world life or on social media, employing qualitative analyses with or without
quantitative analyses. It is hoped that the panel can contribute to existing scholarship on image research in
general and dynamic discursive approach to image in particular.
Major References:
Chen, X. 2020. Identity Work and Politeness Evaluation. Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages, 43(2):1-
10.
Chen, X. 2022. Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Chen, X. & Jin, Y. 2022. Image construction: Its connotations, types and discursive practices. Foreign Language
Learning Theory and Practice.
Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Jin, Y. & Chen, X. 2022. Image management in officials’ radio-mediated responses to call-in complaints. Foreign
Language Teaching, (4).
Lakoff, R. 1989. The limits of politeness: Therapeutic and courtroom discourse. Multilingua-Journal of Cross-
Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 8(2-3):101-130.
Locher, M. A. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Schlenker, B. R. & Pontari, B. A. 2000. The strategic control of information: Impression management and self-
presentation in daily life. In A. Tesser, R. B. Felson & J. M. Suls, (Eds.). Psychological Perspectives on Self and
Identity (pp.199-232). Washington: American Psychological Association.
Tracy, K. 2002. Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities. London: The Guilford.
van Dijk, T. A. 2000. Ideology and Discourse. A Multidisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage.

37
18th International Pragmatics Conference

First-order pragmatics: How lay people talk about speech


(inter)actions

Panel

Prof. Klaus Schneider 1


1. University of Bonn

The distinction between first- and second-order concepts, i.e. between lay interpretations and expert defini-
tions, was first fruitfully introduced to pragmatics in politeness research (e.g. Eelen 2001). It was argued that
theories should not be based on scholarly constructs (alone), but (also) take into account how lay persons under-
stand politeness and related phenomena. Such lay concepts can be examined by analyzing the use of relevant
metapragmatic expressions, e.g. polite, rude, courtesy. Culpeper’s 2011 corpus-based book-length study is a
prime example of this approach.
The present panel is aimed at broadening the scope of this field of first-order pragmatics in more than
one way. The contributions to this panel, which are all corpus-based, examine not only metapragmatic
expressions used for discussing (im)politeness, they also explore the meta-illocutionary lexicon (Schneider
2022) employed to discuss speech acts, e.g. apology, and meta-rhetorical labels such as understatement. The
contributions concentrate on one language (e.g. German) or contrast languages (e.g. English and Japanese).
In several studies, comparison is made across varieties of the same language (e.g. German, Austrian, and
Swiss German; British, Kenyan, and Hong Kong English). While the focus is predominantly on present-day
language, historical language is also considered (e.g. Early Modern English). The presentations in this
panel thus contribute to variational metapragmatics (Schneider 2021), and also to contrastive metapragmat-
ics and historical metapragmatics. These fields of inquiry may be considered subfields of first-order pragmatics.

Key questions addressed in this panel include (1) in which contexts, constructions and functions metapragmatic
expressions are used by lay people in spoken and written discourse, (2) what such uses reveal about first-order
conceptualisations of speech (inter)actions, and (3) how these conceptualisations may differ from technical
definitions provided by scholars in language philosophy and linguistics.

References
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness. CUP.
Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. Jerome.
Schneider, K.P. (2021). Notes on variational metapragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 179, 12–18.
Schneider, K. P. (2022). Referring to speech acts in communication: Exploring meta�illocutionary expressions
in ICE�Ireland. Corpus Pragmatics 6(2), 155–174.

38
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gesture in spoken and signed-to-spoken language interpreting

Panel

Dr. Sílvia Gabarró-López 1 , Prof. Alan Cienki 2


1. Pompeu Fabra University & University of Namur, 2. VU Amsterdam

Gestures have been frequently observed in interpreted discourse, either when spoken language interpreters
work in the booth and are not visible, as in (simultaneous) conference interpreting [e.g. 1, 2], or when they are
“visible” to the audience, as in community interpreting. Signed language interpreters do not work in a booth,
as they need to be visible to the audience when they interpret into the signed language. Depending on the
type of service, they are also visible to the audience when interpreting into the spoken language (e.g. in liaison
interpreting) or at least to the deaf person who is being interpreted to (e.g. in a conference, the interpreter sits
in the first rows of the audience). Regardless of the modality of the source discourse (spoken or signed) and of
whether they are seen or not, interpreters do gesture in their spoken target production.
The study of gesture and interpreting can shed light on how interpreters structure their discourse and on how
their bodily actions construct meaning. This incipient interdisciplinary approach of researching interpreters’
gestures with their speech may uncover specificities of interpreting that have been overlooked: previous re-
search focused only on sign or speech, but not on the combination of the different semiotic resources available
to interpreters. Despite the promising applications that such research may have in the quality of interpreting
services and interpreters’ training [2], this topic has largely been overlooked in research. So far, only a few
accounts describe gesture in spoken or signed-to-spoken language interpreting [e.g. 1, 2, 3].
This panel aims to contribute to this incipient field of study by gathering scholars who work on gesture in in-
terpreted discourse including different language pairs and modalities. Accepted contributions cover a variety
of topics such as gestural alignment, the role of gesture during disfluencies and in the management of cognitive
load, the comparison of gesture in interpreted vs. non-interpreted discourse and in simultaneous vs. consec-
utive interpreting, and the use of gesture in constructed dialogue and reformulation structures. These studies
draw on different datasets (elicited and naturalistic interpreted data, non-interpreted data), include one or two
modes of interpreting (simultaneous and consecutive) and are recorded in different settings (conference, liaison
interpreting, on-site and video remote interpreting). The diversity of the contributions, which is representative
of the field of interpreting, will set the scene for the discussion and collaboration between participants of the
panel.
References
[1] Cienki, Alan, & Iriskhanova, Olga. K. 2020. Patterns of multimodal behavior under cognitive load: An analysis
of simultaneous interpretation from L2 to L1. Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 1, 5-11.
[2] Galvão, Elena Z. 2020. Gesture functions and gestural style in simultaneous interpreting. In: Salaets, Heidi,
Geert Brône (eds.), Linking up with Video: Perspectives on Interpreting Practice and Research, 151–179. Amster-
dam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
[3] Meurant, Laurence, Aurélie Sinte & Sílvia Gabarró-López. 2022. A multimodal approach to reformulation.
Contrastive study of French and French Belgian Sign Language through the productions of speakers, signers
and interpreters. Languages in Contrast 22(2).

39
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Getting close in a ‘formal context’: Ideologies and styling


practice in Japanese

Panel

Dr. Haruko Cook 1 , Dr. Momoko Nakamura 2


1. Univery of Hawaii at Manoa, 2. Kanto Gakuin University

This panel is composed of discourse analysis research of the Japanese language exploring how speakers’ styling
practice constructs contexts (Duranti & Goodwin 1992). Specifically, the goal of the panel is to analyze how
speakers create closeness and solidarity in a formal context, which calls for linguistic politeness according to
social norms.
Studies of sociolinguistics and pragmatics have tended to focus on interactions in either a formal or informal
context, presupposing that the formality and informality produce distinctive types of interaction. For example,
typically, institutional talk is regarded as a formal context, and family conversation, as an informal context.
In languages with a rich system of honorifics such as Japanese, typically a formal context is tied to the use of
honorifics, and an informal context, to the non-use of honorifics. The research of style shift based on naturally
occurring data in Japanese, however, has uncovered that the association of formal context with honorifics and
that of informal context with non-honorifics is too simplistic (e.g., Cook 1996, 2008; Geyer 2008; Ikuta 2008; Jones
and Ono 2008). In practice, honorifics index multiple social meanings, and the distinction between ‘formal’
and ‘informal’ contexts is not always straightforwardly equated with the use and non-use of honorifics. For
example, in a formal setting of a teachers’ meeting in a middle school, the teachers sometimes shift to the plain
form (Geyer 2008), while in an informal family conversation, the family members at times shift to the addressee
honorifics (Cook 1996). These studies suggest that the simple dichotomy of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ contexts is a
static ideological construct. The research on style shift in Japanese, however, narrowly focuses on the addressee
honorific, desu/masu form and its non-honorific counter-part, the plain form. There are linguistic and non-
linguistic resources other than honorifics and the plain form that can construct so-called ‘formal’ and ‘informal’
contexts. This panel goes beyond the style shift research and explores in detail how speakers go against the norm
of ‘formal context’ and interactionally incorporate an ‘informal’ context within a ‘formal context’. Specifically,
the panel addresses the following research questions:

• What kinds of linguistic and non-linguistic resource(s) is/are mobilized to construct a close relationship
in a ‘formal context’?
• What changes does the construction of a close relationship make in ‘footing’ and ‘participation frame-
work’ (Goffman 1981)?
• What is interactionally accomplished by creating closeness and solidarity in a ‘formal context’?

By problematizing the language ideologies of distinctive formal/informal contexts, the panel intends to intro-
duce a new perspective to the field of discourse analysis that captures the intricate and complex styling practice
of speakers and to demonstrate how the situated practice constitutes and shifts the formality and the informality
of a situation. The panel analyzes various ‘formal contexts’, including institutional, mediatized, and pedagogi-
cal situations.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Going viral, cinematic and media perspectives: New studies


on iconic communication and fictional discourse in a shared
world.

Panel

Dr. Monica Cantero-Exojo 1 , Dr. Eduardo Urios-Aparisi 2


1. Drew University, 2. University of Connecticut

This panel continues the investigative approach that began in a similar fashion at the 15th IPrA conference
(Belfast 2017) and continued at the 17th IPrA (Winterthur 2021). Within the conference (2023) main theme of
the pragmatics of (a)typicality, this panel explores how the communication of knowledge during atypical events
(health crises, natural disasters, terrorist attacks etc.) is perceived, learned, shared and used by the individual
and/or social groups with diverse backgrounds across separated geographies. This panel uses two main frame-
works: (1) Iconic communication proposed by Barker and Yazdani (2000) that defines types of communications
that occur mainly in social media; and (2) the Pragmatics of Fiction (Miriam A. Locher & Andreas H. Jucker,
2017), that studies pragmatics within fictional context(s).
One of the takeaways from these two approaches is that within these relationships and interactions with the
fictional/non-fictional context(s) is that individuals who may or not share the same socio-cultural background
or geographical space still find shared experiences embedded in the verbal-visual fictional/non-fictional dis-
course(s).
The panel welcomes presentations on the study of iconic communication and the pragmatics of fiction from a
diversity of theoretical perspectives including, Systemic Functional Perspectives (O’Halloran 2004), Semiotic Ap-
proaches (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001), Conceptual Metaphor theory (Lakoff 1980, 1984; Kövecses, 2010, 2020)
and Tele-cinematic and Media discourse(s). In this context, the panel is open to research taking any perspective,
but it would like to focus on one of the following points:
- the interaction between images and words or other modes of communication in social media/cinema.
- the present impact of social media and iconic communication in catastrophic events (health crisis, natural
disasters, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, etc.)
- the relationship of iconic communication to the increase of online communication through different platforms
in the context of the CoVid-19 pandemic and social movements: MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Global Warming
and Climate Change.
-How cinema, television and the visual arts reflect on and disseminate discourses of social change/or the oppo-
site, conspiracy theories.
-How cinema and media are used as frameworks of learning to cope.
Cited works
Barker, Philip G., and Masoud Yazdani (Eds.) (2000) Iconic Communication. Vol. 199. Intellect Books.
Forceville, Charles and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (2009) Multimodal Metaphor, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kress, Gunther R., and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary
communication. London: Arnold.
Lakoff, G. (2009). The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. Saint Lucia:
Penguin Books.
Locher, Miriam A., & Jucker, Andreas H. (2021). The Pragmatics of Fiction. Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Locher, Miriam A., & Jucker, Andreas H. (Eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction. Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
O’Halloran, K. (Ed.). (2004). Multimodal discourse analysis: Systemic functional perspectives. A&C Black.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Semino, E., Demjén, Z., & Demmen, J. (2018). An integrated approach to metaphor and framing in cognition,
discourse, and practice, with an application to metaphors for cancer. Applied linguistics, 39(5), 625-645.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Health and life events. (A)typical modalities and challenges to


interaction

Panel

Prof. Stef Slembrouck 1 , Prof. Melissa Moyer 2


1. Linguistics, Ghent University, 2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Atypical life events affecting people’s health such as those experienced from birth (deafness, blindness, or cere-
bral palsy), or those acquired during the course of one’s life (such as aging processes, the recent covid-19 crisis,
or a traumatic brain injury) bring to the forefront various ways in which the interactional dynamics of commu-
nication is challenged.
There are several key social, policy, and linguistic issues concerning the analysis of interactions in health-related
matters. Social categorizations (Blaxter 2004) and stigmatization (Goffman 1963) are closely connected to the
way people who are affected by a health issue talk about it but also it affects the way professionals and policy
makers use of language to represent and communicate about atypical life events with relevant stakeholders. In-
teraction is connected to the way we construct meaning, represent our identity, or exercise agency but in those
cases where a person’s speech, writing or interactional space is compromised on account of a life altering event,
alternative ways of understanding and participating in interaction (Goodwin 2003) and the adoption of alter-
native modalities and representations for expressing meaning (Kress 2009) become crucial. Earlier research
has focused on individual interactants and the dynamic negotiation of meaning in face-to-face encounters (e.g.
Gumperz 1992; Erikson 2004), but aspects of physical visibility and embodiment fundamentally shape the way
communication can take place. The relative (non)disclosure about health matters becomes a focus point of
subjectivities, categorizations, control and regimentation on the part of health authorities and nation-states (cf.
Piller et al. 2020 on the recent pandemic).
The panel addresses the interstices of language, interaction and meaning making strategies in a multimodal
perspective together with the way communicative practices relate to wider social processes where identity,
exclusion, agency, control, risk, and security in relation to health and atypical life events are involved. Contri-
butions to the panel that help to understand what can go on “beyond” the face-to-face interaction in an era of
social media and the digital management of personal data and lifeworld will provide valuable insights on some
of the ways in which power, control, entitlement and agency currently play out in our contemporary world.
We anticipate inviting Rodney Jones (UReading), Jonathan Crichton (U of South Wales), Irene Walsh (Trinity
College), Dana Kovarsky (U of Rhode Island), Lesley Stirling (UMelbourne), Melissa Moyer (UABarcelona), Stef
Slembrouck (Ghent U), Gema Rubio (UABarcelona), Ignasi Clemente (CUNY), Candy Goodwin (UCLA), Jeff Beze-
mer (UCLondon).
References
Blaxter, M. 2004. Health. Polity Press.
Erickson, F. (2004) Talk and Social Theory. Polity Press.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma. Prentice Hall.
Goodwin, C. (2003). Conversation and Brain Damage. OUP.
Gumperz, J. 1992. Contextualization and understanding. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (Eds.)
Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. CUP, pp.229-253.
Kress, G. (2009) Multimodality. A Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of
the covid-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39:5, 503-515.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hierarchies of knowledge in online health communities

Panel

Prof. Barbara De Cock 1 , Dr. Carolina Figueras 2


1. UC Louvain, 2. Universitat de Barcelona

Social support has been found to be a critical factor in improving patients’ well-being and overall quality of
life. Feeling understood and supported by others with similar health experiences seems to reduce stress and to
increase compliance with treatments and clinical interventions (Shigaki et al., 2008; Wright & Bell, 2003). With
the advent of the Internet, there has been a widespread proliferation of web-based platforms that facilitate
patients’ access to social support, ranging from asynchronous mediums, like online forums or blogs, to more
interactive synchronous social networking sites and live chats.
The availability of a variety of online platforms for supportive communication is
particularly valuable for individuals who live with long-term conditions or with mental issues that are not
widely understood or for which a treatment is difficult or not completely successful (Coulson, Buchanan, &
Aubeeluck, 2007; Mo & Coulson, 2008). In these contexts, online social support incentivizes the opportunities
for building and sharing knowledge among caregivers and patients.
The focus of this panel is to examine the types of knowledge shared in these online platforms, and to identify
the interactional processes invested in knowledge creation and transmission that are characteristic of online
supportive communications, through the following questions:

1. How is knowledge created and shared among participants in online health support groups?
2. Are there different types of knowledge that are primarily constructed according to the type of health
condition?
3. How do the participants interact to bring about knowledge about the condition and its treatments, and
how do they transmit and (re)construct this knowledge over time?
4. How do participants co-construe authoritative knowledge coming from a range of distinct sources (med-
ical literature, health care professionals, lived experiences of patients, alternative health providers)?
5. How are hierarchies of knowledge in online health support communities being built?
6. What territories of knowledge, in terms of Heritage (2012), operate in each site and in each health con-
dition?

References
Coulson, N. S., Buchanan, H., & Aubeeluck, A. (2007). Social support in cyberspace: A content analysis of commu-
nication within a Huntington’s disease online support group. Patient Education and Counseling, 68(2), 173-178.
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. ROLSI, 45(1),
30-52.
Mo, P. K. H., & Coulson, N. S. (2008). Exploring the communication of social support within virtual communities:
A content analysis of messages posted to an online HIV/AIDS support group. CyberPsychology and Behavior,
11(3), 371-374.
Shigaki, C. L., Smarr, K. L., Yang Gong, Donovan-Hanson, K., Siva, C., Johnson, R. A., Musser, D. R. (2008). Social
interactions in an online self-management program for rheumatoid arthritis. Chronic Illness, 4(4), 239-246.
Wright, K. B., & Bell, S. B. (2003). Health-related support groups on the Internet: Linking empirical findings to
social support and computer-mediated communication theory. Journal of Health Psychology, 8(1), 39-54.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

If you see what I mean: Comparative-contrastive analyses of


implied meanings across populations, contexts and texts

Panel

Prof. Sara Gesuato 1 , Prof. Emanuela Sanfelici 1 , Dr. Elena Pagliarini 1 , Prof. Francesco Vespignani 1
1. University of Padua

A central question in linguistics is how textual and contextual information contributes to the meaning of an
utterance. This is shaped, among others, by previous discourse, the speaker’s beliefs and attitude, and salient
situational entities/individuals and events. Therefore, being understood and understanding requires not only
packing and unpacking the literal “content” of expressions, but also being aware of their hidden content – the
notions presupposed, entailed, implicated; the scenarios activated; the connotations evoked; the interpretive
key adopted; the relevant alternatives.
These phenomena span from the syntax-semantics interface, as in scope ambiguities and information structure;
through the semantics-pragmatics interface, as in scalar implicatures and presuppositions (Horn 1972; Gazdar
1979); to the discourse-syntax interface, as in discourse particles (Zimmermann 2011) and word order variation
(Bianchi, Bocci, Cruschina 2016); to the semantics-prosody interface, as in presupposition (Féry 2013).
Inferential comprehension is not an in-built capacity – it develops over time, as cognitive skills grow, and
through practice, through socialization into communicative practices. It therefore builds upon a variety of
“props” and strategies such as: familiarity with the topics and goals of given genres; developing adequate work-
ing memory (Alptekin, Erçetin 2010); building models of interpretation (Hammadou 1991); making educated
guesses based on context and world knowledge (Baldo 2010). In addition, participants’ expectations or require-
ments about what is ideally to be taken for granted because plausibly/easily retrievable – and thus left unex-
pressed – may vary across texts, contexts, and communities of practice. Consequently, communicative effec-
tiveness and comprehension may achieve different levels of accuracy, depending on the participants’ encoding
expertise and inferencing skills.
The papers in this panel explore oral and written manifestations of implied meaning-making (e.g. the conversa-
tional role of dysfluencies, the expression of suggestions, expressive pragmatic skills) and meaning retrieval (e.g.
inferential skills, metaphor comprehension, sentence processing, judgements of informationally-redundant ut-
terances) through a comparative-contrastive approach (e.g. in typical- and atypical-developing children and
adults; among native and nonnative speakers; with regard to different types of implied meanings such as im-
plicatures, presuppositions and entailments). These studies contribute to our understanding of the exchange
and handling of indirect communication.
References
Alptekin, C.; Erçetin, G. (2010) The role of L1 and L2 working memory in literal and inferential comprehension
in L2 reading, Journal of Research in Reading 33(2): 206-219.
Baldo, A. (2010) Lexical inferencing in L2, CUNY Academic Commons, 16, no pagination.
Bianchi, V., Bocci G.; Cruschina, S. (2016) Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures, Semantics
& Pragmatics 9(3): 1-54.
Féry, C. (2013) Focus as prosodic alignment, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 31(3): 683-734.
Gazdar, G. (1979) Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York: Academic Press.
Hammadou, J. (1991) Interrelationships among prior knowledge, inference, and language proficiency in foreign
language reading, The Modern Language Journal 75(1): 27-38.
Horn, L. (1972) On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. UCLA dissertation.
Zimmermann, M. (2011) 76. Discourse particles. In K. von Heusinger, C. Maienborn, P. Portner, Handbooks of
Linguistics and Communication Science (2012-2038). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Imitation and simulation for instructing and learning Kata: A


multimodal analysis of Japan-style transmission of practical
skills

Panel

Dr. Seiji Nashio 1 , Dr. Ikuyo Morimoto 2 , Dr. Yasuharu Den 3


1. Hiroshima University, 2. Kwansei Gakuin University, 3. Chiba University

This panel aims to suggest a new approach to studying instructing–learning interaction, which is inspired by
methods of transmitting practical skills from instructors to learners in Japanese traditional arts.
The panel’s organizers have analyzed instructing–learning interactions in Geido, a form of Japanese martial and
musical arts, and have described the multimodal processes where particular practical skills are acquired via
Kata—stylized sequential patterns of bodily motions that have been developed and refined over time. Kata is
referred to as a “container” of not only forms of bodily conduct but also as an indescribable inner sense and
intelligence necessary to improve and acquire skills. This panel focuses on specific manners of instructing and
learning Kata—imitation and simulation—widely adopted in Geido training, and attempts to elucidate the ways
in which language and bodily conduct are intertwined to organize such manners. Given the analyses, we discuss
how this method contributes to the Japan-style transmission of practical skills.
The recent rise of multimodal analyses in pragmatics, conversation analysis, gesture studies, etc. (e.g., Streeck,
Goodwin, & LeBaron 2011, Haddington, Mondada, & Nevile 2013) has provided us with novel insights into the
organization of language and body in daily activities. This line of research has drawn particular attention to
the processes of teaching and learning practical skills, such as driving and cooking lessons.
To contribute to the body of multimodal research, organizers have conducted panels focusing on instructing–
leaning interactions in Geido, where Kata is considered medium for transmitting intelligence from experts to
novices. The question is how Kata works as a useful medium for transmitting intelligence in the instruction
and learning processes. Thus, this panel specifically focuses on two mannerss of practicing Kata: imitation and
simulation. Imitation refers to intercorporeal (Meyer, Streeck, & Jordan 2017) assimilation among participants,
especially between instructors and learners. Simulation refers to how practitioners learn practical skills under
the type of physical and mental pressure experienced in real situations. While these processes are significantly
incorporated into Geido training, such Japan-style transmission has also been adopted in other Japanese social
activities.
The presenters in this panel have analyzed video-recorded interactions in the Japanese context, including some
Budo (Karate, Taido and Jiu-jitsu) and other activities (Sado/tea ceremony, Manzai/comedic performance and
pottery making). We hope to deepen the discussion about not only what imitation and simulation have achieved
in instructing and learning practical skills but also identify other fields in which those methods can be applied
for transmitting skills.
Haddington, P., Mondada, L., & Nevile, M. (Eds.) (2013). Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in
Motion. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., & LeBaron, C. (Eds.) (2011). Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material
World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, C., Streeck, J., & Jordan, S. (Eds.) (2017). Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction. New York:
Oxford University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Impoliteness in Chinese social media

Panel

Prof. Yongping Ran 1


1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

With the increasing dominance of digitally mediated communication, online discussion boards, WeChat, blogs,
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other online platforms become inseparable from our daily life and work, even
problem solving or trouble management can be done online. And in online settings dissatisfaction, opposition,
anger or other negative emotions tend to be expressed directly, and it is easy to find speeches of offence, ag-
gression and abuse with negative interpersonal or social outcomes. This means that online interaction is much
more likely to cause impoliteness, offensiveness or unwelcome effects in varying degrees, the management of
both interpersonal and social issues is therefore of great importance (Culpeper 2011).
Due to the above background, this proposed panel aims to explore how online impoliteness is different from
offline impoliteness with supportive evidence from Chinese social media, and further considers whether and
how existing models of (im)politeness fit new modes of interaction from the perspectives of both interpersonal
pragmatics and sociopragmatics, since (im)politeness is a multidisciplinary field of study (Culpeper 2011). Al-
though (im)politeness is mainly interpersonal, it can also become a social or public issue in the public sphere of
social media, due to the fact that the online participation framework is different from the offline ones in many
aspects (Dynel & Chovanec 2015), and online acts or speeches are most likely to arouse relevant responses or
comments from side participants, including readers, watchers or overhearers, thus online impoliteness and its
evaluation are also sociopragamtic (Haugh et al. 2021).
This panel is planned to invite and accept contributions that address issues of impoliteness in internet-based
Chinese social media, especially those culturally informed ones with interactional evidence of conflict, incom-
patibility, aggressiveness, offensiveness or some forms of derogatory language uses, through which we can see
how and why interpersonal and social norms or orders are challenged and maintained in online social prac-
tices. Besdies, the panel is also interested in studies about online evaluation of impoliteness with evidence
from comments and their responses made by online side participants, including readers or watchers, since
impolite or inappropriate behaviors can also be dynamic and discursive in social media. The overall aim is
to provide insights into what leads to impolitenes in Chinese social media, and how negatively evaluated in-
terpersonal and social behaviors can therefore be managed and restored. This panel hopes to offer insights
into (im)politeness norms, maintenance of social orders, social or interpersonal relationship (de)construction
in online public spaces, and further helps to understand relevant East-West debates (Spencer-Oatey & Kádár
2016).
References:
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: CUP.
Dynel, M. & J. Chovanec. (2015). Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions. Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins.
Haugh, M. (2013). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics 58: 52-72.
Haugh, M., et al. (2021). The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
Spencer-Oatey, H. & D. Z. Kádár. (2016). The bases of (im) politeness evaluations: Culture, the moral order and
the East-West debate. East Asian Pragmatics 1(1): 73-106.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Institutional incongruity: When the practitioner is doing the


right thing at the wrong time

Panel

Prof. Gonen Dori-hacohen 1 , Dr. Bracha Nir 2


1. University of Amherst, 2. University of Haifa

Rational: Interactions in institutions are constrained by structures at the sequential level (e.g., Drew and Her-
itage, 1992) as well as at the level of the overall structural organization (Robinson, 2012). Thus, participants in
such interactions not only perform their part as interlocutors but also perform their institutional parts. Both
structural levels direct the participants to routinely follow particular actions and processes. However, the multi-
layered participation in interaction can lead to incongruity in the performance of such routines – the issue at
the heart of this panel.
We follow Goffman’s (1959) view namely that different orders exist in social life to focus on possible incon-
gruities between them. The panel aims to highlight cases where incongruity emerges between the institutional
(or technical in Goffman’s terms) order and the interactional one. Specifically, the panel focuses on situations
where the practitioner follows the routines of the institutional interaction; however, they do not follow the mo-
ments of the exchange itself. Thus, they perform an action that is correct from an institutional perspective but
is misplaced or mistimed at the specific interaction.
Scope: The overall aim of the panel is to bring together scholars who investigate the complexity of institu-
tional interactions from various approaches – highlighting aspects of pragmatics and communication alongside
linguistically-motivated analyses and conversation analysis to illustrate how the incongruity between institu-
tional and interactional orders may create problems for the other participant(s) in the interaction. Similarly,
these incongruities illustrate the functional flexibility of various actions. Thirdly, we aim to discuss the harmful
potential these incongruities have on the remainder of the interaction and the participants’ relations.
The panel will rely on insights from data that allow the analysis of incongruities from various institutional
settings. The panel invites contributions that focus on face-to-face in either mediated or non-mediated settings,
including but not limited to Speech-Language-Therapy interactions, doctor-patient interactions, television game
shows, and talk shows. Each setting will focus on specific actions, such as questions or evaluations, typically rou-
tines to that setting, and will explore the various conditions under which these routines are employed counter
to the interactional constraints. The analyses will take into account the interaction of grammatical restrictions
and conventions of usage across comparable contexts. For example, welcomed contributions will point to what
can be perceived as failures of the specific agents to follow the here-and-now and instead to follow the pre-
conceived structure. As such, the panel follows the pioneering work of Zimmerman, Whalen, and Zimmerman
(1988) while conceptualizing this path using the concept of incongruity.
Aims: The panel aims to look into several questions that, to date, have not been systematically considered with
respect to institutional discourse:

• Which interactional actions are susceptible to the constraints of the institution?


• Which incongruities emerge as a result of the aims of the institution?
• What can violations of the pragmatic constraints on a given action tell us about these actions?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Integration of conversation analytic and other linguistic


methods

Panel

Mr. Yida Cai 1 , Dr. Erika Sandman 1


1. University of Helsinki

The panel focuses on the integration of conversation analysis (CA), a central method used in Interactional Lin-
guistics (IL; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018), and other methods for describing and explaining linguistic phe-
nomena in talk-in-interaction from a wider perspective. In Interactional Linguistics, CA is often used as the
sole method with only a secondary use of other methods for analyzing certain linguistic phenomena. However,
depending on research questions, CA may not provide enough tools for explaining, for example, the motiva-
tion of the interactional functions of a particular linguistic resource or how conversational structures function
across languages. On the other hand, making use of CA in different types of linguistic frameworks has started
to increase.
Many researchers have started to integrate CA to other linguistic approaches for explaining the use of linguistic
resources, including usage-based linguistics (e.g. Zeschel & Proske 2015), construction grammar (e.g. Fischer
2015), linguistic typology (e.g. Dingemanse, Torreira & Enfield 2013) and descriptive field linguistics (e.g. Gip-
per 2020; Sandman & Grzech 2022). On the other hand, efforts of a closer combining of CA and IL with other
methods, such as cognitive grammar, have been made (e.g. Etelämäki & Visapää 2014), and by complementing
sequential analysis of CA and IL with tools for semantic analysis (Interactional Semantics; Deppermann 2011).
All these studies demonstrate that intergrating CA and other linguistic methods can be of benefit in providing
a deeper understanding of using linguistic resources in social interaction, including their frequency and usage
in certain sequential contexts in both well-documented and lesser-studied languages, as well as their cross-
linguistic patterns of use.
The panel aims at enhancing discussions on methodological integration of CA and other linguistic approaches,
including cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics, descriptive field linguistics, corpus linguistics and compu-
tational linguistics as well as considering the possibilities, advantages and limitations of integration for solving
linguistic research questions.
References
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, Margret 2018: Interactional linguistics. CUP.
Deppermann, Arnulf 2011: The study of formulations as a key to an interactional semantics. – Human Studies
34: 115–128.
Dingemanse Mark, Torreira Francisco & Enfield, N.J. 2013: Is “Huh?” a universal word? Conversational infras-
tructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items. PLoS ONE 8 (11): e78273.
Etelämäki, Marja & Visapää, Laura 2014: Why blend Conversation Analysis with Cognitive Grammar? – Prag-
matics 24 (3): 477–506.
Fischer, Kerstin 2015: Conversation, construction grammar, and cognition. – Language and Cognition 7 (4) s.
563–588.
Gipper, Sonja 2020: Beyond committing and presupposing in Yurakaré conversations: Investigating the interac-
tional functions of epistemic markers through their sequential distributions. Folia Linguistica, 54 (2): 371–404.
Sandman, Erika & Grzech, Karolina 2022: Egophoricity and evidentiality: different categories, similar discourse
functions. Insights on conversational data from the Tibetan Plateau and the Amazonian Foothills. – Interactional
Linguistics, 2 (1): 79–109.
Zeschel, Arne & Proske, Nadine 2015: Usage-based linguistics and conversational interaction. A case study of
German motion verbs. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 3 (1): 123–144.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interaction in clinical and non-clinical settings with children


and adults with communication disorders

Panel

Mrs. Paméla McMahon Morin 1 , Prof. Carole Anglade 1 , Prof. Stefano Rezzonico 1 , Prof. Claire Croteau
1

1. Université de Montréal

Communication disorders, for example, developmental language disorder in children or aphasia in adults,
might alter the interactions a person will have with his/her communication partners, may they be family mem-
bers, teachers, friends, or non-familiar people in the community (clerks, waiters, etc.). The first block of lectures
will explore how social interactions in clinical settings can differ from the interactions in non-clinical commu-
nication settings (for example, in the classroom, in the community). A second section of the panel will discuss
how speech-language pathologists/therapists and other communication specialists can strive to develop inter-
ventions that will enhance and facilitate social interactions in daily life settings. Different tools and methods
were developed to assess and prompt more natural interaction in clinical settings, for example, communication
partner training or interventions that focus on the interaction itself rather than on the communication disor-
der. In addition, the clinical settings can be redesigned to embrace this need for authenticity in the interaction
while being in intervention with a speech-language pathologist/therapist. Although challenging, normalising
interventions in natural environments, like in the classroom, in the family, or in the community is a relevant
step to support people with communication disorders in achieving pragmatic improvement in their daily inter-
actions. Finally, the panelists and the audience will be invited to discuss the question of the social acceptance of
atypical interactions in daily life. This question is calling on a shift in perceptions, from the “atypical” pragmatic
behaviors that persons with communication disorders should try to “correct” to reach a certain “normativity”,
to an acknowledgement of this “atypical” pragmatic as something that can be valuable in itself.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interaction in nursing: Conversation and multimodal


analytical studies

Panel

Prof. Esther González Martínez 1 , Dr. Evelyne Berger 2


1. Department of social sciences, University of Fribourg, 2. La Source School of Nursing, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences
and Arts Western Switzerland

Based on recordings of naturally occurring interaction, conversation and multimodal analysis are well estab-
lished approaches for the study of healthcare activities such as primary-care doctor-patient consultations, psy-
chotherapy sessions and surgical interventions in operating rooms. However, nursing and nursing practices
have been relatively neglected both by these analytical and methodological approaches and also more widely
in language and social interaction research. Recent studies are however beginning to redress this imbalance,
which goes hand in hand with the expansion of nursing activities to novel areas, the academization and pro-
fessionalization of nursing, and increased acknowledgment of nurses’ importance in healthcare. The panel
provides an opportunity for conversation and multimodal analysts of interaction in nursing and healthcare ac-
tivities to meet, present and discuss research findings, and identify possible areas of collaboration. The papers
will focus on the situated organization of speech and body behavior as nursing students, nurses and related
healthcare professionals undergo training, provide care, and interact with coworkers, activities that require
constant mutual adjustment of communication practices. In contrast to the traditional image of the nurse in-
teracting mainly with patients by their bedside, the panel places special emphasis on communication between
professionals in planned work interactions (handovers, discharge meetings and psychoeducation interventions)
as well as unscheduled ones (corridor encounters). Relying on conversation and multimodal analytic research,
the studies to be presented will provide detailed descriptions of the healthcare professionals’ linguistic and em-
bodied conduct when engaged in professional practice and, on this basis, will have the potential for informing
training activities and on-the-job interventions. The panel will also aim to foster comparisons across clinicians’
interactional practices in different institutional settings, countries and languages.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interaction in video-mediated settings in higher education

Panel

Prof. Sabine Hoffmann 1 , Dr. Margarethe Olbertz-Siitonen 2 , Prof. Götz Schwab 3


1. University of Palermo, 2. University of Jyväskylä, 3. Ludwigsburg University of Education

Professional and/or institutional meetings are increasingly taking place online (cf. among others Due and Li-
coppe 2020). The Covid pandemic has certainly accelerated this trend to a great extent. Such meetings usually
take place using video conferencing tools, e.g. Zoom or WebEx, or on platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack,
or the like, which provide a wide range of communication channels and thus offer numerous opportunities for
collaboration and exchange.
Parallel to the increasing use of videoconferencing, there has also been an increase in research in the field,
which is usually interdisciplinary in nature. In addition to quantitatively oriented studies, e.g. in business con-
texts, there are also conversation analytic works that can be assigned to the research field of workplace studies
or deal with corporate communication in the field of applied linguistics (see overview in Asmuß and Svennevig
2009). Methodologically, a fairly general distinction can be made between discourse and conversation analytic
procedures, which have been expanded in recent years by multimodal procedures (Asmuß 2015, Schwab and
Schramm 2016).
While conversation analytic research in this area is growing rapidly, video-based interaction in the specific con-
text of higher education is still marginalized. That is why our panel “Interaction in Video-Mediated Settings in
Higher Education” is focusing specifically on conversation analytically, especially multimodally processed video
data from university/tertiary contexts. These can come from the areas of teacher training, university commu-
nication or from the teaching/learning context. The focus could be on individual aspects of such meetings, e.g.
the formal/informal structures, the different phases and transitions (cf. e.g. Mondada 2010), instructions and
assignments (cf. Hoffmann and Kasper 2021) as well as the role of the moderation, the chosen language(s), or
the emergence and role of hierarchies and asymmetries.
References:
Asmuß, B. (2015), Multimodal Perspectives on Meeting Interaction. Recent Trends in Conversation Analysis, in
The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science, J.A. Allen et al. (Eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
277-304.
Asmuß, B., Svennevig, J. (2009), Meeting Talk: An Introduction, Journal of Business Communication, 46, 2009, 1,
3-22.
Due, B.L., Licoppe, C. (2020), Video-Mediated Interaction (VMI): Introduction to a Special issue on the multimodal
accomplishment of VMI Institutional Activities, Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies in Human Sociality, Vol.
3, Issue 3, 1-20.
Hoffmann, S., Kasper, G. (2021), Arbeitsanweisungen zu Videomitschnitten in digitalen Lehrendenbildungskon-
ferenzen. Interaktionsforschung in DaF/DaZ (ZIAF), Bd. 1, Heft 1, 143-167.
Mondada, L. (2010), Eröffnungen und Prä-Eröffnungen in medienvermittelter Interaktion: das Beispiel
Videokonferenzen, in Situationseröffnungen. Zur multimodalen Herstellung fokussierter Interaktion, L. Mon-
dada, R. Schmitt (Eds.), Narr, Tübingen 2010, 277-334.
Schwab, G., Schramm, K. (2016), Diskursanalytische Auswertungsmethoden, in Forschungsmethoden in der
Fremdsprachendidaktik. Ein Handbuch, D. Caspari et al. (Eds.), Narr, Tübingen, 280-297.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interactionally troublesome exchanges: Accounts, evaluation,


and antagonism

Panel

Dr. Melisa Stevanovic 1 , Dr. Mervyn Horgan 2


1. Tampere University, 2. University of Guelph

Social interaction may sometimes have unsatisfactory, bothersome, or unsettling outcomes, both in rankling
and disturbing a person after the incident, and in disrupting the accomplishment of local social order. Abusive
behaviors such as sexual assaults, racial harassment, and bullying at work or school are examples of seriously
problematic interactions with long-acknowledged devastating psychological consequences for the target. Some-
times problematic interactions may deal with seemingly trivial matters, but still include violations of the ritual
order of interaction. Existing research discusses such situations as interactional vandalism or failed ritual, such
as uncivil inattention or uncivil attention. Interactionally problematic situations might involve impositions of
engagement and intimacy, insensitivity to hints, or subtle violations of expectations with respect to someone’s
epistemic and deontic rights and obligations.
People’s experiences of interactionally troublesome exchanges (ITEs) typically become apparent when people ac-
count for these experiences in retrospect. The accounting situations constitute interactions of their own, which
are subject to cultural norms and expectations with respect to the content and composition of the accounts.
Research on ITE accounts may thus take various directions.
This panel focuses on (1) empirical presentations that draw on conversation analysis or discursive and narra-
tive approaches and use data from audio or video recorded interactions, single-person/focus-group interviews,
or written texts, and (2) conceptual papers that seek to bridge approaches broadly connected to pragmatics with
other disciplines, including but not limited to psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, etc. with a view
to identifying confluences, complementarities and contradictions between various disciplinary approaches.
The main goal of the panel is to discover systematic patterns and practices in how accounts of interactional
trouble are produced and/or socially dealt with in various contexts, including institutional encounters, work-
place meetings, and everyday interactions among family members and friends. While it is both critical and
challenging to counter overtly abusive behavior, we maintain that also ITEs with more implicit problematic
behaviors may color people’s social experiences in significant ways. In both cases, accounts of the problematic
experiences are key to all attempts to address them.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intergenerational encounters and old age

Panel

Dr. Kaarina Hippi 1 , Prof. Camilla Lindholm 2


1. University of Oulu / University of Helsinki, 2. Tampere University

The panel focuses on older adults and their language use in interaction with the younger generation. The panel
sheds light on age-specific positions, perceptions on (older) age (that the younger or the older adults themselves
possess), and different views on constructing understanding in interaction between older and younger inter-
locutors.
As earlier studies show, interlocutors can construct meanings and identities of (old) age explicitly (Coupland,
Coupland & Grainger 1991; Nikander 2009), and the exploration of everyday encounters can also reveal im-
plicit attitudes on age (Heinrichsmeier 2018). In addition, linguistic biographies can show how multilingual
older adults’ identification with languages influences their transmission of languages to younger generations
(Mononen & Straszer 2017). On this basis, we will further discuss the concept of old age and language use in
relation to other age groups.
The panel will approach the theme from different viewpoints, discussing, e.g., perceptions on language use and
differences between generations in interaction, ageing talk, multilingual older adults as well as preferences
of address forms. The variety of perspectives aims to give a deeper insight into language use in older age,
and of particular interest are descriptions of grassroot intergenerational encounters, and here, mainly outside
institutional care. The methods used in the papers of the panel are qualitative, such as discourse analysis, and
for example re-interviewing is discussed as a method in one presentation.
References
Coupland, Justine, Coupland, Nikolas & Grainger, Karen 1991: Intergenerational discourse: contextual versions
of ageing and elderliness. – Ageing & Society 11 (3), 189–208.
Heinrichsmeier, Rachel 2018: Tired, but not (only) because of age: An interactional sociolinguistic study of
participants’ variable stances towards older-age categorial explanations in everyday hair-salon talk. – Journal
of Ageing studies 46, 45–57.
Mononen, Kaarina & Straszer, Boglárka 2017: Monikieliset ikääntyvät ihmiset ja monimuotoiset kielten reper-
tuaarit: miten kielivalintoja ja suhdetta kieliin kuvataan kielellistä elämäkertaa valaisevassa haastattelussa?
[Multilingual aging people and many-sided linguistic repertoires: how are linguistic choices and relationship to
languages described in an linguistic biographical interview?] – AFinLA Yearbook (75), 133–160.
Nikander, Pirjo 2009: Doing change and continuity: age identity and the micro–macro divide. – Ageing and
society, 29 (6), 863–881.

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Internet memes of everyday life

Panel

Dr. Loukia Lindholm 1 , Prof. Tuija Virtanen 1


1. Åbo Akademi University

A key element and form of digital participatory culture, internet memes are both products and driving forces
of online social practices (Xie, 2020). Memes in various forms, such as image macros, GIFs, phrasal templates,
and online videos, are prototypical instances of user-generated multimodal digital humor and creativity (e.g.,
Piata, 2020; Vásquez & Aslan, 2021). The multimodal features of memes and meme practices among online
users have attracted considerable research interest from various theoretical and methodological viewpoints
(e.g., Dynel, 2021; Jiang &Vásquez, 2020; Scott, 2021; Yus, 2019). Yet, there is still ample scope to explore the
form and function of internet memes in various sociocultural settings and local discourse contexts, especially
when it comes to everyday experiences as a source and target of memes.

Focusing on internet memes in context, this panel explores the interactional dynamics of memes and how online
users creatively mobilize the mimetic dimensions of form, content, and stance (Shifman, 2013) for ‘cyberselfing’
purposes (Virtanen, 2021) and meaning-making in online exchanges across different social media platforms. Of
particular interest to the panel is how users deploy memes to enact personal and collective identities, negotiate
shared understandings of everyday experiences, and in doing so, construct relatability in online social spaces.
Panel contributions examine the interactional dynamics of memes in online exchanges, their humorous
meaning-making potential and semiotic trajectories in local contexts, and their function concerning online
identity construction and community building. These studies address memes and memetic practices in a va-
riety of digital affinity spaces and communities of practice and across different languages (English, French,
Finnish, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese). The contributions adopt approaches spanning (semio)pragmatics,
multimodal discourse analysis, construction grammar, CA-informed discourse analysis, social semiotics, and
digital ethnography.
Camilla Vásquez (University of South Florida) will serve as discussant.
References
Dynel, M. (2021). COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks. Discourse
& Society 32(2).
Jiang, Y. &Vásquez, C. (2020). Exploring local meaning-making resources. Internet Pragmatics 3(2).
Piata, A. (2020). Stylistic humor across modalities. The case of Classical Art Memes. Internet Pragmatics 3(2).
Scott, K. (2021). Memes as multimodal metaphors: A relevance theory analysis. Pragmatics Cognition 28(2).
Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication, 18(3).
Vásquez, C. & Aslan, E. (2021). “Cats be outside, how about meow”: Multimodal humor and creativity in an
internet meme. Journal of Pragmatics 171.
Virtanen, T. (2021). Fragments online: Virtual performatives in recreational discourse. Acta Linguistica Hafnien-
sia, 53(1).
Xie, C. (2020). Internet memes we live by (and die by). Internet Pragmatics 3(2).
Yus, F. (2019). Multimodality in memes: A cyberpragmatic approach. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos
Blitvich (eds.), Analyzing digital discourse (pp. 105-131).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

It’s not what you are like, it’s what you like: Appraisal, stance
and evaluation in online fandom

Panel

Dr. Thomas Messerli 1 , Prof. Miriam Locher 1


1. University of Basel

Fan-related practices online have amplified fandom from a niche phenomenon into an important aspect of
mainstream consumer culture (Bednarek 2017). Social media in general can be understood as embedded in a
Like-economy (Gerlitz 2013) or culture of evaluation (Herrmann et al. 2022) – and sharing likes and dislikes is
of particular importance to fan communities. It is a constitutive aspect for these communities what they are
fans of, i.e. the object of stance they collectively orient to.
Some of the typical objects of fandom are telecinematic artefacts (Androutsopoulos & Weidenhöffer 2015;
Bednarek 2017, Locher and Messerli, 2020), which are part of public discourses around popular culture. Fans
of television series engage in a range of practices that can be described as community-building – from the ex-
pansion of fictional diegetic worlds through fan fiction, to the sharing of recommendations and criticisms in
reviews, to the expression of emotive stance in pseudo-synchronous text-based practices (Messerli and Locher
2021). Their evaluative practices include motivational evaluation (Heydebrand and Winko 1996) – starting from
the choice of the object of fandom that is constitutive for the the fan group, but also including particular aspects
of the telecinematic artefact itself and/or surrounding discourses, the in situ construction of values and value
systems to which they orient, and specific ratings of aspects along the activated scales.
In short, evaluation has been shown to be an important part of TV reception in particular (e.g. Buschow et al.
2014), and it is also key to online discourses in general (e.g. Zappavigna 2017). Nevertheless, little research has so
far specifically approached the pragmatics of fandom practices through an evaluative lens, applying appraisal
theory (Martin and White 2005), evaluation (e.g. Hunston et al. 2001) or stance (Du Bois 2007) to online fan
interaction.
In our research on fan interaction on Viki, we have found fansubtitles to be a vehicle for fans to share expertise
and facilitate communal negotiation of meaning. We have also found that viewer comments employ evaluations
and opinions to construct communality. In both cases, stance taking is a crucial aspect of individual and collec-
tive fan identity construction and community building: Fans laugh and complain together; they develop shared
understandings and evaluations of episodes, genres and cultures; they look for others with shared common
ground, even across linguistic borders.
Focusing on the broad range of fan practices online, our panel explores the specific role evalua-
tion/stance/appraisal play in online discourse communities (Dayter 2016), digitally based communities of prac-
tice (Hössjer 2013) and other communities that can be understood as fan communities. The variation that online
communities exhibit in terms of such factors as anonymity, social distance, shared enterprise, common ground,
mutual engagement, and other community-relevant aspects, is likely tied to an equal variation in terms of eval-
uative practices that are part of parcel of the communicative patterns of situated language use each of them
exhibit.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language aggression and conflict in post-digital societies

Panel

Prof. Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich 1 , Prof. Maria Sifianou 2


1. University of North Carolina, Charlotte, 2. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Conflict and language aggression in post-digital societies


Not long ago, Paglia (2010) lamented that, despite the undeniable centrality of different types of conflict and
aggression in human daily life, scholarship in linguistics and related fields (with few exceptions, see Grimshaw
(1990), White (1990), Tannen (1998), Lakoff (2000)), had tended to explain those away as peripheral oddities,
and not as central (and often essential) to communal life.
Attitudes, in this sense, started to change in the mid-2000s when, amongst others, subfields of pragmatics such
as impoliteness research experienced unprecedented growth (Bousfield, 2008; Bousfield and Locher, 2008;
Culpeper, 2011). This mirrored a similar, bourgeoning interest in the social sciences regarding conflictual phe-
nomena (Hamilton, 2012). Academics’ beginning to systematically look beyond cooperation, solidarity, and
harmony coincided with the widespread use of digital technologies and, crucially, with the launching of the
major social media sites (among others, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2009, and Instagram in
2010) which highly contributed to relocating conflict and aggression from back to front stage, no longer to be
ignored.
It was also in the mid-2000s that the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (JLAC) was launched. The jour-
nal aimed to provide a dedicated space for the study of conflict and aggression phenomena (from disagreements
to hate speech) mostly realized through discourse and to help coalesce an incipient field. In 2023, coinciding
with IPrA 18th, JLAC will celebrate its tenth anniversary.
By convening this panel, and taking stock of the last ten years, we propose to look forward by bringing together
specialists’ views on whither conflict and language studies are faring. As a common thread, we suggest a focus
on theoretical conceptualizations and empirical approaches that situate conflict and aggression in the off/online
nexus of post-digital societies, whereby “both ‘zones’ – the online and the offline – can no longer be separated and
must be seen as fused into a bewildering range of new online-offline practices of social interaction, knowledge
exchange, learning, community formation and identity work” (Blommaert, 2019, p. 1). Consequently, on/offline
conflict and aggression are inseparable, synergetic, and thus mutually co-constituting.
We will be looking into private – and often polymedia mediated (Androutsopoulos, 2021) realizations of con-
flict; the potential conflictual role of different types of on/offline surveillance; algorithmic activity and bias
and how these can be conducive to harmful content and hate speech; the offline outcomes of online grooming
practices; the fueling of offline polarization activism via online conspirational discourses; the key functionality
of on/offline conflict in the creation and construction of social identities; the understanding of conflict from
a critical and social justice perspective; the role of conflict in on/offline linguistic landscapes; online red flags
indicating potential offline criminal behavior; and the conceptualization of online spaces as moralizing and
evaluative sites where manifestations of conflict and aggression are subjected to discursive struggle.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language and geopolitics: On the linguistic consequences of


Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Panel

Prof. Helena Halmari 1 , Prof. Arto Mustajoki 2


1. Sam Houston State University, 2. University of Helsinki

Ukrainian and Russian are two closely related East Slavic languages, with a lot of shared vocabulary and struc-
ture; however, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has upset the relatively stable linguistic status
quo between these two languages. Typically, extralinguistic events—such as wars, migrations, and changes in
social and political power relations—have separated or brought together speakers of different languages. Lan-
guage contact leads to language change, but language separation also does. Some of the world’s languages have
grown to resemble one another more under prolonged and amicable contacts; on the other hand, formerly
mutually intelligible dialects have also split into mutually non-intelligible languages when contact has been
severed by concrete barriers (rivers, oceans, and mountain ranges) or psychological barriers (social distance or
simple dislike of the speakers of the other language). An obvious (albeit distant) example is the split of Proto-
Indo-European into several different language families because of geographical distance, migrations perhaps
triggered by a search for survival. A more recent example is the diversification of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian,
Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin during and after the Yugoslav Wars.
In this panel, we bring together linguists to address various aspects of the following question: What are the
linguistic consequences (pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and structural) of the February 2022 Russian invasion of
Ukraine? Within this larger question, the panelists address questions such as the following:

• How has the war changed Ukraine’s language-political situation? How are the language choices changing
in Ukraine? Are people shifting to more use of Ukrainian? Are Ukrainian and Russian now diversifying
because of the war? Have the Ukrainians started to emphasize the features of their language that sepa-
rate it from Russian? During the crisis in Ukraine, what is the role of the contact registers of Ukrainian
and Russian, referred to as surzhyk (Ukrainian: су́ржик)?
• What kinds of global changes in language practices are taking place because of the Russian invasion of
Ukraine? Have the attitudes toward Ukrainian and Russian (both locally and globally) changed? Has the
world’s interest in learning Ukrainian increased? How has the war affected the writing and pronuncia-
tion of proper names (e.g., Volodymyr vs. Vladimir; Kharkiv vs. Kharkov)?
• How have different countries responded to the language needs of the Ukrainian evacuees? How have
these countries answered, in terms of their language practices, to the challenge of the Ukrainian dias-
pora?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language creativity in everyday Japanese discourse

Panel

Prof. Andrew Barke 1 , Prof. Momoyo Shimazu 1


1. Kansai University

This panel assumes a social-constructivist perspective as it empirically explores how linguistic resources are
selectively chosen and utilized by Japanese speakers and/or writers in creative and dynamic ways in their ev-
eryday discourses.
According to Boden (2001), ‘Creativity’ is the “ability to come up with new ideas that are surprising yet intelligi-
ble, and also valuable in some way” (p.95), and in discourse, language creativity involves a speaker’s or writer’s
employment of orthographical, phonological, morphological, syntactic and/or lexical features of a language
in dynamic and often unexpected or socio-pragmatically marked ways to, among other things, reconfigure or
reshape social relationships (Jones 2016). It can include ‘language play,’ which involves the manipulation of
language forms “as a source of enjoyment, either for ourselves or for the benefit of others” (Crystal 1998:1), but
it can also involve the strategic use of formulaic or prosaic utterances, or even silence, in order to mean more
than what is said (Jones 2016).
From the social-constructivist perspective, the creativity of interlocutors plays a critical role in the construction
of social reality (Archakis & Papazachariou 2008) and language is seen as an important tool in that process
that interlocutors manipulate in creative, dynamic and indexical ways in their moment-to-moment interactions
(Cook 2005).
Focusing on examples of creative language use in everyday situations has the potential to reveal the complex,
dynamic, and innovative nature in which speakers use language to manage their social relations with others.
Although there have been a number of studies related to language creativity in Japanese literature (e.g. Maynard
2007) and online written discourse (e.g. Robertson 2022), discourse analysis studies that focus on the creative
use of Japanese linguistic resources in everyday interactions remain few.
Contributers to this panel include Xiangdong Liu (Western Sydney University), Yoko Yonezawa (The University
of Sydney), Yun Meng (Niigata University), Todd Allen (Kansai University), Momoyo Shimazu (Kansai University)
and Andrew Barke (Kansai University). Topics covered include creativity in internet naming practices, political
speech strategies, intercultural workplace communication, interpersonal pub talk, linguistic landscapes, and
use of honorifics.
References:
Archakis, A., & Papazachariou, D. (2008). Prosodic cues of identity construction: Intensity in Greek young
women’s conversational narratives 1. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(5), 627-647.
Boden, M. A. (2001). ‘Creativity and knowledge’ in A. Craft, B. Jeffrey, and M. Leibling (eds.). Creativity in Edu-
cation. London: Continuum.
Cook, H. C. (2005). Reanalysis of discernment from a social constructivist perspective: Academic consultation
sessions in Japanese universities (Research Note #42). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, National Foreign Lan-
guage Resource Center.
Crystal, D. (1998). Language Play. The University of Chicago Press.
Jones, R. H. (2016). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity. Routledge.
Jones, R. H. (2016). ‘Creativity and discourse analysis.’ In Jones, R. H. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language
and Creativity. Routledge (pp.61-77).
Maynard, S. (2007). Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse: Exploring the Multiplicity of Self, Perspective, and
Voice. John Benjamins.
Robertson, W. C. (2022). ‘Ojisan gokko shiyo![Let’s pretend to be old men!]’: contested graphic ideologies in

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Japanese online language play. Japanese Studies, 42(1), 23-42.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language diversity and homogeneity

Panel

Dr. Kazuko Tanabe 1 , Dr. Yuko Iwata 2


1. Japan Women’s University, 2. Meiji University

Language is not permanent. It is neither stable nor fixed. It has been and remains one of the most volatile
features of human society (cf. Fischer 1999). In the past two decades, the rapid progress of globalization has
engendered an increase of diversity in societies, cultures, and languages around the world. Vertovec (2007,
2010) takes the view that we have moved from an era of multiculturalism into a new era of ‘super-diversity’ due
to the integration by immigrants since the early 1990s:
‘Super-diversity’ is characterized by a tremendous increase in the categories of migrants, not only in terms of
nationality, ethnicity, language and religion, but also in terms of motives, patterns and itineraries of migration,
processes of insertion into the labour and housing markets of the host societies, and so on (cf. Vertovec 2010,
Blommaert and Rampton 2016).
Meanwhile, Fischer (1999), considering the future of languages, claims that unprecedented language change is
certain to occur in the next two centuries. He also states that the few dialects and languages that will survive
will also be homogenized and leveled, ultimately resulting in the realization of a global society. This will be
evidenced by the emergence of an International Standard English devoid of characteristic features.
This study employs an empirical approach and analyzes the language diversity and homogeneity in various
languages including Japanese, by investigating the data. The leveling phenomenon is occurring in various
languages around the world, causing each to lose some of their most distinctive features. The declining use of
kinship terms in Japanese is an example. Japanese kinship terms often reflect gender and age differences, such
as onī-chan (elder brother) and onē-chan (elder sister). For many years, Japanese kinship terms were regarded
as typical in that appellations used within the family are chosen from the standpoint of the youngest member
of the family (Suzuki 2019), but this pattern has gradually become atypical in the contemporary era.
One example of a speech variety which has gained prestigious status after decades of stigmatization is dialects
in Japanese. Since the Meiji era (1868〜1912）, the Japanese government had been promoting the standard
Japanese speech as one of the strategies to modernize the country after centuries of the feudal times. This
language policy required Japanese people to master the standard Japanese at schools and upgraded the status
of the standard variety while the dialects was stigmatized as inferior to the standard one. The spread of the
standard Japanese language was further facilitated by the ‘new’ media, the television, in the 1960’s, through
which Japanese people became familiar to the standard Japanese. When almost all the Japanese residents have
acquired the standard variety, the dialects have become rare because not everyone can speak it and become
paradoxically prestigious due to its authenticity.
It seems fair to say that language change is always driven by conflicting movements. In this panel, while ex-
amining examples of language diversification and homogenization, we will argue that the distinction between
typical and atypical is in fact very fluid. (499 words)

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Learning and teaching Chinese as a foreign language: A


cross-cultural pragmatic perspective

Panel

Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Daniel Kadar 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3


1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3.
University of Hamburg

The aim of this panel is to explore the area of learning and teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) through
the perspectives of cross-cultural pragmatics. Over recent years, Chinese has gained prominence in foreign lan-
guage learning and teaching, and both pragmatics and applied linguistics has witnessed a surge of research
focusing on CFL. Yet, we believe that more research needs to be dedicated to the cross-cultural pragmatics of
CFL. Cross-cultural pragmatics can help researchers to investigate language learning and teaching from new
angles due to its bottom-up and strictly language-anchored nature, which allow the analyst to observe CFL
without relying on sweeping overgeneralisations and cultural stereotypes that have unfortunately gained mo-
mentum in this area (e.g. “Chinese students struggle to realise a certain pragmatic phenomenon due to their
face-sensitivity”).
Here we distance ourselves from the strong contrastive hypothesis that linguacultural differences automatically
trigger L2 learning difficulties. Still, we believe that contrastive pragmatic differences between Chinese as an
L2 and the learners’ L1 should not be neglected if one wishes to examine the understudied issue why and how
Chinese pragmatic phenomena may puzzle speakers of other languages who learn Chinese as a foreign language.
For instance, as House et al. (2022) argued in a recent study dedicated to the learning how to realise the speech
act Greet in a foreign language, if one expects the other to utter a greeting and the greeting fails to come, or one
is greeted when no such greeting is expected, gut feelings of irritation may emerge. A contrastive pragmatic
analysis of Chinese and learners’ L1 may help us understand cross-cultural differences of pragmatic conventions
which may trigger such instances of foreign speaker puzzlement in CFL.
In the proposed panel we aim to dedicate special attention to the learning (and teaching) of the realisation of
speech acts. We will use the speech act typology proposed in Edmondson and House (1981) and Edmondson et
al. (2022) as a methodological anchor in the panel. We intend to invite Professor Wei Ren as a discussant and
recruit experts of CFL as speakers by advertising the panel both in international and Chinese mailing lists.
References
Edmondson, Willis, and Juliane House. 1981. Let’s Talk and Talk About It: An Interactional Pedagogic Grammar
of English. Munchen: Urban & Schwarzenberg.
Edmondson, Willis, Juliane House, and Dániel Z Kádár. 2022. Expressions, Speech Acts and Discourse: An Inter-
actional Pedagogic Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane, Dániel Z. Kádár, Fengguang Liu, and Shiyu Liu. (2022). Greeting in English as a Foreign Lan-
guage: A Problem for Speakers of Chinese. Applied Linguistics.

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Let the face respond: Conversational functions of facial


gestures in turn-beginnings of responsive actions

Panel

Dr. Alexandra Groß 1 , Dr. Carolin Dix 1


1. University of Bayreuth

Aiming at investigating the responsive face this panel takes up previous multimodal CA research on responding
in conversation as well as on the conversational functions of facial gestures (positions and movements of eyelids,
lips, tongue, cheeks, nose, forehead). We put the focus on the use of facial resources as pre-beginning elements
(Schegloff 1996: 92-93) and in turn-beginnings of responsive actions among different sequence types.
In this respect, the panel brings together two research strands: Firstly, it follows the growing EMCA research
on multimodality (e.g. Mondada 2016). Besides manual gestures (e.g. Stukenbrock 2014), gaze (e.g. Auer 2021)
and interpersonal touch (e.g. Li 2020), the conversational use of facial gestures has been put into focus over
the last years. Multimodal CA studies analyze them in their local conversational contexts as part of multimodal
practices (e.g. Goodwin & Goodwin 1986, Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori 2006, Kaukomaa, et al. 2015), some of them
put emphasis on responsive actions (e.g. Gudmundsen & Svennevig 2020, Dix & Groß, subm.).
Secondly, the panel takes up research on conversational practices of responding in conversation. Here, the
relevance of pre-beginning elements (Schegloff & Lerner 2009) as well as turn-beginnings have been highlighted
(e.g. Heritage 2018). Whereas the use of verbal and vocal practices of responding in conversation – especially
responses to questions – have been extensively investigated (e.g. Stivers 2022, Raymond 2010, Deppermann, et
al. subm.), i.e. in terms of epistemic domains (Heritage & Raymond 2012) and preference (e.g. Robinson 2020),
it still remains a desideratum to systematically take into consideration how facial gestures contribute to the
formation of responsive actions, i.e. how they comply with conversational demands and how they shape the
quality of the upcoming conversational path.
The presentations of the panel take up some of these open questions by looking at how facial gestures are used
in face-to-face and screen-mediated settings and by comparing their responsive use in spoken languages and
sign languages. Besides the main focus on responsive actions, the presenters will also address the status of
facial gestures as embodied discourse markers in a more general sense, and discuss the combined use of facial
gestures and verbal response particles (such as oh, Heritage 1998). We will further target some methodological
questions such as the automatic tagging of facial gestures by the use of KI.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Magical speech acts

Panel

Dr. Carsten Levisen 1 , Dr. Nico Nassenstein 2


1. Roskilde University, 2. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Some words are magical. They have the special capacity of bringing change to the world, and to bring this world
into contact with invisible worlds and spheres, from divine realms to rituals of deep history and cosmology.
Magical words can bless, heal, and unite. They can prevent, predict and protect. But there’s also a dark side to
it: Magical words can curse, cause harm, they can cause division, death and misfortune – upon individuals, and
entire communities. Magical words have power, and are linked to concealing practices and unveiling secrets
at the same time. Across linguacultural traditions, we find a variety of words and ways of speaking that have
a such transformative potential, sometimes in the form of linguistic formulae, speech routines, secret registers
of language, manipulated forms and structures, mimetic performances, or entire magical languages.
This panel brings together scholars engaged in research on “magic” in anthropological linguistics and linguistic
pragmatics. Magical speech acts are in a sense, the “ultimate type of speech acts”, i.e., people are truly “doing
things with words” when they are altering reality through agentive speech, manipulating the world, causing
things to happen, and transforming people and places, for better or for worse. Exploring the practices and
effects of magical speech acts, we focus in this panel on experience-near realities and the emic perspective that
allows us to ask questions such as “what do people take themselves to be doing?”, or “what is the world like
to people?”. We acknowledge that the words “magic” and “magical” are not without flaws, especially when
contextualizing them in the older anthropological literature. Along with other English terms such as “sorcery”,
“witchcraft”, “occultism” these are often not doing justice to the emic perspective, and often contain readings
of ostracism and Orientalism. For this reason, language-specific concepts, including speech act verbs and
hard-to-translate vocabularies in the magical domain are of special interest to the panel. At the same time,
the panel also takes an interest in the development of pragmatics as a discipline, and in expanding it from its
modernist, Anglocentric (Eurocentric) moorings. Paving the way to new intersections of knowledge creation in
question spaces of contention and contraction, i.e., secular and postsecular, colonial and postcolonial, modern
and postmodern, we will use “magical speech acts” as our heuristic starting point for a joint exploration, and
as a metaphor for a long-neglected meeting place between pragmatics and anthropological linguistics with a
topic that has a long tradition in anthropology, but must be revisited, too.

The panel is of special interest to pragmaticists working in frameworks such as cultural pragmatics, postcolo-
nial pragmatics, historical pragmatics, as well as anthropological linguists broadly conceived. The panel also
welcomes historians of magic, and contributions from literary studies, religious studies.

Topics may include:

blessing and cursing; divine invocations; rituals and formulaic speech; magical discourses and narratives; word
avoidance and taboo; indexicality of magic words and practice; magic-like cultural concepts and keywords; lit-
erary and historical magic; healing discourses, wellbeing and protection; secret repertoires, secret languages

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Meaning-making in the family: Crossing methods and


disciplines

Panel

Prof. Luk Van Mensel 1 , Prof. Eline Zenner 2


1. XJTLU - UNamur - KU Leuven, 2. KU Leuven

This panel aims to (re-)generate a discussion on meaning-making in family interactions by bringing together
scholars working from different disciplines and applying different methodologies.
How family members interact has been of interest for decades to a wide range of (discourse) scholars, with
research varying in terms of disciplinary framework, scope, linguistic focus, and methodology. First, concern-
ing framework, researchers have studied family language from the perspective of pragmatics, interactional
sociolinguistics, developmental sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, linguistic ethnography, conversation
analysis, discourse analysis, and subdomains such as language socialization or family language policy. Second,
in terms of scope, we see that family discourse has been studied sui generis (e.g. parenting, sibling talk), but also
as a specific locus for speech events more generally (e.g. conflict talk, praise), or as a window into broader socio-
linguistic phenomena (e.g. language maintenance, (de)standardisation). Third, in terms of linguistic focus, we
see that most research has been conducted in monolingual settings, though the past decades reveal a substantial
(and growing) amount of research on multilingual family interactions (understanding ‘multilingual’ as a com-
bination of ‘named’ languages, sometimes including sign languages, see also the work on code-switching and
translanguaging). Additionally, research has been conducted on multivarietal/multivernacular (intralanguage)
family discourse, and on the multimodality and multisensoriality of the discourse constellation, including on-
line communication or communication with non-human entities. Finally, in terms of methodology, the variety
of approaches has evidently led to a wide range of qualitative but also quantitative and mixed-methods studies.
This wealth of approaches and perspectives on family discourse reveals the strong potential of the family for
linguistic studies, yet has also made it challenging to find synergies and obtaining a clear overall picture of the
current state of the art. This panel includes contributions that together juxtapose different takes on the study
of family discourse, and look into:

• the conceptualization of the notion of ‘family’ itself, the impact of lifespan change within the family, and
the relation to the outside world (cf. the ‘porosity’ of family talk);
• the contribution of heteroglossic perspectives on family discourse, including a wider range of modalities
in family discourse, also attending to the impact of new technologies;
• methodological challenges in data collection particular to family language studies, such as biased sam-
pling and ecological validity, and the importance of mixed methodologies in studying family language
discourse.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Membership categorisation and interpersonal relationships


in social interaction

Panel

Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute 1 , Ms. Andrea Rodriguez 1


1. The University of Queensland

Interpersonal relations are at the core of social interaction and crucial to how we construct meaning. By exam-
ining interactional management of relationship categories that become visible through (embodied) actions, we
can observe how members of society organise their social knowledge and orient to social orderliness (Hester
& Francis 2004). Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) (Sacks 1992; Hester & Eglin 1997) offers analytical
tools to explore such phenomena, as it studies “the commonsense routine workings of society” (Fitzgerald et
al. 2009:47), how members of society “proffer their category work as common, cultural knowledge” (Stokoe
2012:283, emphasis original) and in what ways categories “make sense in their [members’] everyday lives and
social interaction” (Idevall Hagren 2000).
The purpose of this panel is to explore, using Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), how social categories
and relationships are co-constructed by members of society in their interactional practices. This panel aims to
address the following key questions:

• How do members show the normative and moral character of categories and the recognisability of
category-implicative actions?
• In what ways do members reflect or deviate from the obligations, rights and motives regarded as appro-
priate for the relationship categories of which they are incumbents?
• In what contexts and in what ways do relationship categories invoke accountability and remedial action?
• How do members orient to multiple layers of categorization work?

This panel brings together researchers that use Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to examine various
aspects of social interaction – casual and institutional, face-to-face or digitally-mediated – in their analysis of
interpersonal relationship categories. Precisely, the talks explore such data sets as doctor-patient conversations,
friends and family talk, public encounters, job interviews and letters to editors. The topics covered in the talks
include (but are not limited to):

• Action ascription
• Accountability
• Epistemics
• Identity
• Morality
• (Im)politeness
• Socialisation

References
Fitzgerald, R., Housley, W., & Butler, C. 2009. Omnirelevance and interactional context. Australian Journal of
Communication 36(3):45–64.
Hester, S., Eglin, P. (Eds.). 1997. Culture in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis. International
Institute for Ethnomethodology and University Press of America.
Hester, S., Francis, D. 2004. An invitation to ethnomethodology: Language, society and interaction. Sage.
Idevall Hagren, K. 2000. Membership categorisation analysis. In Handbook of Pragmatics 23, pp. 41-55. Ben-
jamins.

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Sacks, H. 1992. Lectures on conversation, (ed. Jefferson G.). Blackwell.


Stokoe, E. 2012. Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis.
Discourse Studies 14(3):277–303.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Miscommunication and repair in interaction with voice


agents and social robots

Panel

Dr. Wyke Stommel 1 , Dr. Saul Albert 2


1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 2. Loughborough University

Voice agents and social robots are increasingly used across interactional settings including homes, healthcare,
and semi-public or commercial spaces. While survey evaluations of voice agents in these settings are gener-
ally positive, a recent review of the state of the art highlighted that “no system is able to lead a half-decent
coherent conversation with a human” (Kopp & Krämer, 2021). In fact, miscommunication in interaction with
virtual agents and social robots is recurrent, multilayered and highly intertwined with its specific context and
the shortcomings of the underlying infrastructure and theoretical assumptions of language technologies (e.g.,
Stommel et al., 2022). This means that fundamental interactional structures like repair are not yet available to
conversation designers to build into their voice/virtual assistants. Can conversation analysis be of any help in
understanding and resolving these major, proliferating flaws across systems?
EMCA has a long tradition in the examination of human-machine interaction, but the field seems to be somewhat
scattered (cf. Mlynar et al., 2021). This panel brings together recent conversation analytic studies of interaction
with voice agents/virtual agents/social robots in often complex settings to understand members’ orientations
and strategies to deal with trouble in (multimodal) interaction with various systems. This panel also aims to
discuss:

• methodological questions inherent to studying voice agents and social robots as partici-
pants/participating in interaction;
• CA’s relationship with conversational design (cf. Stokoe et al., 2021);
• what clues these analyses can give us as to the missing pieces of language technology infrastructure that
might be required to emulate repair procedures.

Kopp, S., & Krämer, N. (2021). Revisiting human-agent communication: The importance of joint co-construction
and understanding mental states. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.580955
Mlynář, J., Liesenfeld, A., Topinková, R., Stommel, W., De Rijk, L., & Albert, S. (2021). An artificial turn in social
interaction research?, Copenhagen Multimodality Day 2021, October 1st, 2021, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Stokoe, E., Albert, S., Parslow, S., & Pearl, C. (2021, June 3). Conversation design and conversation anal-
ysis: Where the moonshots are. Medium. https://elizabeth-stokoe.medium.com/conversation-design-and-
conversation-analysis-c2a2836cb042
Stommel, W., de Rijk, L., & Boumans, R. (2022). “Pepper, what do you mean?” Miscommunication and repair in
robot-led survey interaction. 2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Com-
munication (RO-MAN), 385–392. https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN53752.2022.9900528

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mobility disabilities in interaction: A research agenda within


atypical interaction

Panel

Prof. Gitte Rasmussen 1 , Dr. Brian Due 2


1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. Copenhagen University

This panel presents papers that deal with so-called atypical interaction but wish to expand the understanding of
‘typicality’ and ‘atypicality’ from being, usually, an issue of language and cognition to also include other forms of
sensory and bodily impairment displayed in interaction. The papers deal with impairments that cause mobility
disability which is a topic for pragmatics as the (in)ability to produce action and perceive actions is the forefront
of these encounters.
Research in the established field of atypical interaction pursues, overwhelmingly, interests in how speech, lan-
guage, and communication disorders impact interaction that involves co-participants with speech, language-
, communication, hearing, and cognitive impairments (Wilkinson et al. (2020). Methodologically, it applies
thorough Conversation Analytic findings to investigate if and how disorders influence the organization of e.g.,
turn-taking and repair-organization.
An interest in a slightly different approach to atypical interaction is gaining ground (Rasmussen, (under re-
view)). It focuses on interactions that involve other kinds of impairments, including sensory and mobility dis-
orders (see e.g., Robillard, 1996 and Due & Lange, 2018), and moreover, it approaches the area with an eth-
nomethodological conversation analytic (EMCA) approach to multimodality. As EMCA research in normalized
interaction (see e.g. Broth & Mondada, 2013), it investigates interaction with interests that go beyond, but by no
means exclude, descriptions of an (a)typical conversational ‘machinery’ (Sacks et al., 1974).
This panel pursues interests in the question of if and how the presence of sensorial and mobility impairments
may impact multimodal interaction and how the impairments are accountable in social interaction.
References
Broth, M., & Mondada, L. (2013). Walking away: The embodied achievement of activity closings in mobile inter-
action. Journal of Pragmatics, 47(1), 41–58.
Due, B. L., & Lange, S. B. (2018). Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s
uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas. Semiotica, 2018(222), 287–312.
Rasmussen G ((under review )) The relevance of EMCA studies in multimodal interactions involving blindness
and visual impairment to Atypical Interaction research. In: Due B (ed) The Practical Accomplishment of Blind
People’s Ordinary Activities. Routledge.
Robillard, A. B. (1996). Anger In-the-Social-Order. Body & Society, 2(1), 17–30.
Sacks H, Schegloff E and Jefferson G (1974) A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for
Conversation Language 50(4 ): 696–735.

Wilkinson R, Rae J and Rasmussen G (2020) Atypical Interaction: The impact of communicative impairments
within everyday talk. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Modelling cultural and contextual influence: Patterns,


templates and schemas in utterance interpretation

Panel

Dr. Elke Diedrichsen 1 , Prof. Frank Liedtke 2


1. Technological University Dublin, 2. University of Leipzig

In communicative situations, interlocutors rely on context in order to successfully process linguistic utterances.
Models of the context dependency of utterance meaning have been proposed in semantics and pragmatics
(Fetzer 2022), including relevance (Sperber and Wilson), Austinian proposition (Récanati), core and emergent
common ground (Clark 1996, Kecskes and Zhang 2009).

For utterance-context integration, interpreters rely on standardised patterns (Carston 2002). Situation-bound
utterances (Kecskes 2010) are highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units tied to standardised com-
municative situations.
Mey (2001, 2010) observes that pragmatic acts and the speech acts accompanying them are situated acts. By
playing within the limits of the situation, pragmatic acts establish, confirm, and recreate its setting. Pragmemes
are general situational prototypes of pragmatic acts.
The situated nature of utterances involves the cultural background shared by societies or smaller groups of
people. A cultural perspective on pragmatics is warranted and highly topical, as the availability or absence
of shared cultural knowledge affects communicative interactions (Kecskes 2014). Sharifian (2017) offers a cul-
turally based outlook on pragmemes, in which a cultural pragmatic schema is presented as the overarching
culturally acquired cognitive influence on speech acts, pragmemes and practs. Goddard and Wierzbicka (2004)
define a cultural script as a cluster of established practices, guiding the understanding of interactional moves.
In order to capture the utterance-context-relation systematically, pragmatic templates have been introduced as
holistic clusters of pairings between utterances on the one side and elements of a proper utterance situation
on the other (Liedtke 2013). Van Dijk (2008) suggests context models incorporating influences that are relevant
for participants in producing and interpreting utterances. Mazzone (2009) models utterance interpretation as
a case of pattern recognition in context. The relation between form and meaning of utterances is modelled
as constructions in Construction grammar (Goldberg 1995) and constructional schemas in Role and Reference
Grammar (Van Valin 2005). They are adjusted to account for cultural and situational factors that apply in the
production and comprehension of language (Diedrichsen 2022, Nolan 2022).
The contributions to this panel explore ways of systematically modelling utterance-context-pairings as part of
the pragmatic competence of speakers and hearers. We are bringing together approaches that address cultural
and/or contextual/situational influences on utterance production and interpretation, their complex dynamics
and interdependence, and their effect on linguistic choices in a variety of communicative settings.
References (Selection):

Diedrichsen, Elke. 2022: Common ground in linguistic theory and internet pragmatics: Forms of dynamic, mul-
ticultural interaction. In Kecskes, Istvan (ed.): The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 245–273.
Fetzer, Anita. 2022. Role of context. In Kecskes, Istvan (ed.): The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural
Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 139–163.

Liedtke, Frank. 2013. Pragmatic templates and free enrichment. In Liedtke, Frank and Schulze, Cornelia (eds.):
Beyond Words. Content, context, and inference. Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 183-205.

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Kecskes, Istvan. 2014. Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mazzone. Marco. 2009. Pragmatics and Cognition: Intentions and Pattern Recognition in Context. International
Review of Pragmatics 1, 321-347.

Nolan, Brian. 2022. Language, culture, and knowledge in context. A functional-cognitive approach. Sheffield,
Bristol: Equinox.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multilingual pragmatics. A focus on pragmatic awareness in


multilingual instructional settings

Panel

Prof. Pilar Safont 1 , Dr. Laura Portolés 1


1. Universitat Jaume I

Pragmatic instruction has received a great deal of attention in the last three decades (Kasper and Blum-Kulka,
1993; Bardovi-Harlig, 2013; Taguchi, 2019). Several individual variables have been identified (Alcón, 2018;
Sánchez-Hernández and Alcón, 2018, Taguchi, 2012) and the intercultural nature of learners’ pragmatic be-
haviour has been raised (Kecskes, 2014; McConachy, 2019). Nevertheless, the analysis of multilingual learners
from a multilingual perspective remains a challenge. Most studies dealing with multilingual pragmatics have
considered pragmatic production (Alcón, 2012; Martí and Portolés, 2019; Portolés and Safont, 2016; Safont, 2021)
but raising learners’ pragmatic awareness is regarded as a fundamental teaching strategy (Halenko and Jones,
2011; Portolés, 2015; Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor, 2020) that contributes to their pragmatic development. In
fact, a number of experimental and exploratory studies show the benefits of instruction for increasing prag-
matic awareness (Atabekova et al, 2021; Derakshan and Shakki, 2020; Lin and Wang, 2020; Timpe-Laughlin,
Green and Oh, 2021). Within instructional settings, learners’ motivation also seems to positively correlate with
pragmatic awareness (Zarrinabadi and Rezazadeh, 2022). However, the role that learners’ multilingualism,
their attitudes to languages or their translingual practices play in increasing their pragmatic awareness de-
serves further attention. For this reason, we shall devote the present symposium to the analysis of multilingual
learners’ and teachers’ pragmatic awareness and its relationship with multilingual instructional contexts.
On that account, the contributions to this panel cover some of the above reported needs. The studies included
here deal with the pragmatic awareness of students in multilingual instructional settings and they tackle the role
of gender, age, sociolinguistic status of languages involved, school language programs, translingual practices or
language attitudes. The panel shall elicit fruitful discussion and offer a chance to exchange findings that help us
explain the effect of specific variables on the development of multilingual pragmatic awareness in instructional
contexts.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal and prosodic markers of information structure


and discourse structure

Panel

Prof. Pilar Prieto 1 , Prof. Frank Kügler 2


1. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2. Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Human communication is a multimodal system in the sense that the sounds, words and utterances are usually
accompanied by prosodic and body signals such as co-speech gestures (e.g., McNeill 1992). Spoken language has
generally been investigated as a unimodal phenomenon and more work is needed in the assessment of how
visual and prosodic cues jointly contribute to the construction of meaning in discourse. From a multimodal
perspective, it is well-established that manual co-speech gestures are strongly connected to speech from
three different perspectives, namely semantic, pragmatic, and phonological (Kendon 1980; McNeill 1992).
Indeed, according to McNeill’s (1992) three “synchrony rules”, gestures are co-expressive with the semantic
and pragmatic meaning expressed in speech, and prominent phases of co-speech gesture (i.e., the stroke)
occur just before or simultaneously with pitch accented (or prosodically prominent) syllables in speech. Even
though work in the last decades has highlighted how prosodic and gestural features of language contribute in a
systematic way to the marking of discursive and interactional functions in discourse (e.g., Kendon 1995, 2004,
Swerts & Krahmer 2021, Brown & Prieto 2021, Debrelioska & Gullberg 2020, among others), more precise work
is needed as to know in which ways they jointly signal information and discourse structure across languages
and thus help construct discourse meaning.

This panel will discuss a variety of work from different labs that are currently assessing the multimodal en-
coding of information structure or discourse structure from different perspectives and in different languages.
Presentations will assess how multimodal markers encode information structure, sentence types, discourse
structure and/or speech acts, both in signed and non-signed languages. Our panel is intended to contribute to
advance our knowledge on how multimodal markers help encode discourse meaning, and more generally help
forging a paradigm in which pragmatic theories are based on language as a multimodal phenomenon.

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Multimodal stancetaking – the (a) typical case of taking a


stance?

Panel

Prof. Cornelia Müller 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

This panel offers a cross-disciplinary space for discussion and sharing of research on the multimodal shape of
stancetaking. Despite a rich and diverse literature on stance and stancetaking (Du Bois 2007; Englebretson 2007;
Dancygier 2012), the role of gesture, posture, and prosody, as aspects of this communicative activity remain only
scarcely studied. Although Du Bois’ paper on the stance triangle mentions gesture several times as one of the
expressive forms that contribute to stancetaking and suggests speaking of stancetaking as an activity rather
than of stance as a phenomenon of lexical semantics and textlinguistics his insight did not foster a systematic
inclusion of gesture, speech, and body movement in the study of stancetaking. Some of the few exceptions come
from anthropology and conversation analysis (Goodwin et al. 2012; Ochs & Schieffelin 1989), gesture studies
(Bressem & Müller 2017), including shrugs and head tilts (Debras & Cienki 2012) and prosody (Freeman 2015).
More recently, and in a plea to integrate conversation analytic and interactional perspectives on stance with
the usage-based approach of cognitive linguistics, Feyaerts, Brône, and Oben (2017) lay out the significance of
multimodal aspects of stancetaking specifically with regard to alignment. Dancygier’s (2012) cognitive linguistic
work highlights the semantic complexity of stance which becomes further complexified by the interplay of sev-
eral modalities and by considering stance as an interactional activity, rather than as a process of an individual
speaker. Against this backdrop, the panel presents contributions from different theoretical and methodological
backgrounds to jointly explore the shape of stancetaking as a dynamic orchestration of gesture, posture, speech,
and prosody in the multimodal activity of taking a stance.
References
Bressem, J. & Müller, C. (2017). The “Negative-Assessment-Construction” – A multimodal pattern based on a
recurrent gesture? In: Linguistics Vanguard. A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences. Special Issue
„Towards a Multimodal Construction Grammar“, 3(s1).
Dancygier, B. (2012). Negation, stance verbs, and intersubjectivity. In E. Sweetser & B. Dancygier (Eds.), View-
point in Language. A Multimodal Perspective (69-96). Cambridge: CUP.
Debras, C. & Cienki, A. (2012) Some Uses of Head Tilts and Shoulder Shrugs during Human Interaction, and
Their Relation to Stancetaking. In Proceedings of the ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing,
932-937.
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The Stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse (139-182). Amster-
dam: Benjamins.
Englebretson, R. (2007). Stancetaking in discourse: An introduction. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in
Discourse. Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (1-25). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Feyaerts, K., et al. (2017). Multimodality in interaction. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of
Cognitive Linguistics (135-156). Cambridge: CUP.
Freeman, V. (2015). Prosodic features of stance acts. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 138(3),
1838-1838.
Goodwin, M. et al. (2012). Emotion as Stance. In M.-L. Sorjonen & A. Perakyla (Eds.), Emotion in Interaction
(16-41). Oxford: OUP.
Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text, 9, 7-25.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodality, metaphor, magic: Typical and atypical


narratives across cultures, pre- & post-pandemic

Panel

Prof. Rukmini Nair 1 , Prof. Laura Downing 2


1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, 2. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Researchers have long stressed the centrality of ‘atypical’ events in the structuring of narrative interaction.
Events that depart from the baseline of tellers’ and hearers’ everyday experience tend, that is, to have both
short-term and long-term cognitive impacts (Chafe 1977; Briggs and Mantini-Briggs, 2016; Nair, 2003, 2021). Or,
as Labov (1972) put it, it is always relevant to say ‘I saw a man fall off the bridge today’. The recent pandemic is
etched into cultural memory precisely because it comprises multiple iterations of such ‘danger of death tellables’
on a global scale. Narrative, of course, is a creative, causal discourse universal that encompasses both fictional
and factual imaginings. In doing so, it affectively – and often ‘magically’ - links past and present anxieties with
future hopes. Thus, it has served as a robust communicative anchor in our current crisis-prone, pandemic-
shadowed age.
In addition, technologically enhanced modes of communication have ensured that multimodal convergences
are increasingly common in the public as well the private spheres. On this panel, we consider narratives that
multimodally combine written messages with visual images at different cultural sites in Asia and Europe. Since
such an impetus towards interactional – and, in this case, interactional - multimodality is apparent in both pre-
Covid and post-Covid narratives, we further focus on two specific time periods: the first comprises the period
2015-2020 when there was no pandemic but the world was nevertheless beset with worry (climate change,
depressed global markets etc.). This immediately preceding period provides with us a temporal baseline against
which we can place the second ‘post-pandemic’ period that dates from mid-2021 on.
A crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic seems to throw into sharp relief the longstanding symbiotic relationship
between the genre of narrative and the rich tropes of metaphor and metonymy. This panel seeks to explore this
deep linguistic affinity through the metaphorically laden, technologically support multimodal modes of commu-
nication that gained so much traction during the pandemic. Institutions of government, education and finance
in almost every country, relied fundamentally on such virtual multimodal means, while individuals widely used
social media tools to keep in touch with friends and family. Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched to argue that
the multimodal metaphors, such as the ‘war’ metaphors, that came into being during the pandemic created in-
novative pathways towards developing new, often subversive, narratives of community that researchers will
analyse for years to come. Typically, prismatic and future-oriented ‘metamagical themas’ (Hofstadter, 1985)
also characterise these once ‘atypical’ virtual metaphors.
Unlike monomodal metaphors that ‘are I…predominantly rendered in one mode’, multimodal metaphors ‘are
metaphors whose target and source are each represented… in different modes’. (Forceville 2009: 23-24). On this
panel, we are concerned with decoding this key distinction within Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Discourse
Studies (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Hidalgo-Downing and Kraljevic Mujic 2020), that appears so reflective of our
times. Overall, our aim is to understand typical and atypical uses of narrative multimodality and metaphor use
in current g/local contexts.

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Narrative, argumentation and multimodality in (post-)Covid


science mediation

Panel

Prof. Geert Jacobs 1 , Ms. Sofie Verkest 1 , Mr. Seppe Goddaert 1


1. Ghent University

This panel explores how science is discursively mediated in today’s highly digitized and networked post-Covid
mediascape. Lockdown and teleworking, for example, have accelerated ongoing processes whereby in-person
experience and face-to-face interaction are complemented with or even substituted by virtual platforms and
audiovisual media. The dramatic rise of video and podcasts and how this impacts organizations’ long-standing
relationships with legacy media provide just one, much-publicized illustration of this development. While some
of this is by no means new, and major technological affordances have been in place for over a decade now to cope
with issues of reduced mobility and security, the recent pandemic has definitely been a catalyst in promoting
radical transformation.
Following up on previous scholarly work on collaborations in science, media, education, and politics, this panel
investigates how the changes described above play out in mediational practices in science. In particular, the
panel dives into new and emerging organizational practices for disseminating and mediating scholarly insights.
This includes:
- Documenting novel ways of mediating science and examining if and how they bring out and, possibly, promote
shifting underlying conceptualizations (or reconfigurations) of the essential nature of the scientific enterprise.
- Unraveling the potentially complex discursive processes of negotiating boundaries of science with other disci-
plines and of managing scholars’ fluid, dynamic identities as these new mediation formats take shape.
- Analysing new practices of participation, collaboration, and engagement as they emerge in and around science.
We define science in the broad sense of the word, not only including the exact sciences but covering a wide
range of academic disciplines.
The panel’s prime interest is in the discursive dimension of science mediation, which can be operationalized
as the wide range of discourse features of the toolbox used by scholars as well as in alternative organizational
practices for disseminating scholarly insights to enhance the encounter between the public and the content.
Following Declercq et al (2021) we approach mediation as a form of engagement and collaboration.
Methodologically, we opt to integrate text, practice, and interaction, and assign an active role to the language
user. This includes but is not restricted to linguistic ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, and (multi-
modal) discourse analysis.
In our view, science mediation includes both formal and informal, verbal as well as non-verbal, visual, and
embodied/physical interaction, hence the opportunities for a distinctly multimodal perspective that embraces
non-verbal semiotic modes.
In exploring novel mediational practices in science, we set out to draw on Thomas’s (1999) distinction between
narrative and argumentative mediation, which implies exploring not just the structure but also the contexts, in-
teractions, and processes of narrative and argumentation as they are embedded in specific institutional settings
(Rocci & Pollaroli 2018).
The following will be contributing to the panel: Charles Briggs; Colleen Cotter; Miguel Ruiz Garrido and Juan
C. Palmer-Silveira; Seppe Goddaert; Pieter Maeseele and Jonas Nicolaï; Stef Slembrouck; Sofie Verkest; Ulrike
Vogl and Ursula Vogl.

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Narratives on COVID-19 experiences in the digital age

Panel

Dr. Kazuyo Murata 1


1. Ryukoku University

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically transformed our everyday lives. In response, there has been an in-
creased research interest towards narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic, asking what strategies the general
public has generated in order to cope with this challenging situation. A majority of these studies address pan-
demic narratives of politicians and mass media, examining ideology and the social construction of meaning
while delving into the ways in which discourse transmits and produces power reference (Jones, 2021; Lee, 2021).
Yet, pandemic narratives by the general public still await investigation.
This panel addresses the question of “what” and “how” the general public narrates the COVID-19 experience
amid the quotidian transformations of the pandemic, attending to the voices of digital natives. Papers in this
panel employ both quantitative and qualitative research methods, drawing insights from multiple approaches
under the framework of interaction studies, including narrative study, discourse analysis, interactional soci-
olinguistics, and critical discourse analysis.
Regarding disaster narratives by the general public, Iwasaki (1997) has pointed out the common use of specific
grammar and vocabulary in disaster narrative; empirical findings considering the content of disaster narrative
have been applied systematically to the field of disaster education, disaster prevention, and urban planning
(Ishihara, 2020). However, the majority of studies tend to center on disaster in the past. This panel seeks to fill
the missing piece by examining narratives of an ongoing disaster, drawing a comparison between narratives
on COVID-19 and disasters of the past.
There are six presentations in the panel. The five presentations analyze the same data set in Japanese, and
the last presentation deals with different data in English. The first presentation quantitatively analyzes 30
pairs of Japanese youth narratives on Covid-19 by employing text mining techniques. The second presentation
analyzes the same data set qualitatively and shows that various types of social divisions are being constructed
dynamically and collaboratively by the participants. Using the concept of positioning theory and small story, the
third presentation will shed light on the ways in which empathy and exclusion are constructed in the narratives.
The fourth examines the story recipient’s affiliative response in troubles-telling sequences with conversation
analysis approach. In the fifth presentations, strategic-style shift in narratives will be analyzed qualitatively
from a relational perspective. The final presentation explores how COVID Long-haulers are legitimizing their
experiences with post-COVID syndrome through looking at social media and survey and interview data.

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Navigating a conversation with a stranger through laughter

Panel

Prof. Shoichi Iwasaki 1


1. UCLA

Since the foundational study by Jefferson (1979, 1985), laughter in conversation has attracted consistent interest
among researchers who seek to understand the system of interaction. Recently, Glenn and Holt (2013) have ad-
vanced our understanding of this phenomenon greatly from a variety of perspectives. According to the authors,
laughter is an indexical sign pointing to a ‘laughable’ which can be located in the environment of the interaction.
Though ‘laughter’ may seem an uncontroversial category, it is actually a complex array of phenomena cover-
ing different shapes (hi, ha, he etc.), repetition patterns (hehe, hihihihihi etc.), and degrees of intensity (from an
‘equivocal’ to a ‘hearty laughter’ and in between) among other formal characteristics. From an interactional
point of view, the sequential positioning of laughter is especially important as it can occur at the turn initial or
final positions as well as concurrently with a turn and an utterance. Laughter may work to manage turn taking,
and to signal a speaker’s psychological states such as amusement and nervousness.
With this growing sophistication of laughter research as a background, our panel proposes to advance the re-
search on laughter by analyzing a newly acquired set of data under the “Multilingual Covid-19 Conversation
Project,” in which five to thirty conversations in six languages (Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Thai
and English) were recorded on Zoom over one and a half year period since June, 2021, and more are be-
ing recorded. Most participants are young adults who were not acquainted prior to the meeting. This zoom
recorded data thus provides us with a new environment in contrast to that of face-to-face conversations among
people with a close relationship in a relaxed condition where laughter is often observed and studied.
According to our preliminary findings, laughter plays an important role serving as an ‘off-record’ strategy to
maintain orderly interaction with a stranger in a publicly viewable environment. In our data, laughter is ob-
served particularly frequently at the outset of a conversation and at the turn exit environment where some
stance indication is expected. These are sensitive interactional environments especially when participants have
not established strong ‘personal common ground,’ and must heavily rely on a general ‘communal common
ground’ (Clark 1996a, b). With laughter, speakers can negotiate their social relationship with their interlocu-
tors and epistemic and affective stance towards a ‘stance object,’ e.g., a government policy on Covid-19. (DuBois
2007).
Another contribution of this panel is its crosslinguistic/cultural perspective. Since delicacy of interaction may
be culturally dependent, laughter behavior may show subtle differences in different languages. Some presen-
tations will focus on multiple language perspectives on interactive patterns.
Most presentations on this panel will look at laughter using the data from our on-going research using such
theoretical perspectives as interactional linguistics, CA, common ground, and politeness theory, and identity
study.

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New trends in reformulation: Theory, methods and challenges

Panel

Dr. Salvador Pons Borderia 1 , Dr. Shima Salameh Jiménez 2 , Dr. Adrià Llibrer 3
1. University of Valencia, 2. Complutense University of Madrid, 3. University of Salamanca

This panel explores new trends in reformulation, given the special interest shown by recent publications
(Gabarró, 2017; Kim, 2021): these works reveal a need for addressing reformulation through new types of data,
other languages not previously addressed, or alternative theoretical frameworks.
In the last forty years, reformulation and reformulation markers have been widely described in Romance and
some Germanic Languages (Gülich & Kotschi, 1983; Roulet, 1987; Rossari, 1994; German; Robles, 2017; English;
Del Saz, 2003). As a result, reformulation has been defined as a pragmatic function distinguished from other
functions such as correction or conclusion (Pons, 2017).
Nevertheless, recent work in reformulation points to some new issues which will be addressed in depth in this
panel:
a) Negation and reformulation. The relationship between reformulation and negation has long been considered
(Du Bois, 1974; Foolen, 1991). Different approaches to negation in discourse involve correction and reformula-
tion as discourse strategies: metalinguistic negation (Horn, 1985; Sadock & Zwicky, 1987), cancellability-tests for
q-based implicatures (Horn, 1989), non-descriptive, metadiscursive denial (Nolke, 1992; García Negroni, 1998),
polarity items in echoic utterances (González, 2008), or even approximative adverbs (Pardo, 2021). For these
reasons, three main research questions arise:

1. How do negation and reformulation intertwine in discourse?


2. How (and if) this relationship varies across languages?
3. Which type of linguistic categories develop reformulation meanings?

b) Reformulation in non-Indo-European languages. Reformulation has hardly been described for Eastern
or African Languages (Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Amharic, etc.). The study of reformulation in non-Indo-
European languages provides a more complete picture of reformulation as a universal process shared across
languages. This, in turn, triggers some new research questions:

1. Are there universal features in reformulation?


2. Are there clear boundaries between reformulation and other functions in non-Indo-European lan-
guages?
3. Do reformulation markers stem from the same origins in non-Indo-European languages?
4. Do new features of reformulation arise in non-Indo-European languages?

c) Reformulation and variation studies. Reformulation studies have not addressed variation as one of their
key concerns. Yet a focus on variation in dialects, sociolects, genres, registers, etc. triggers some new research
questions:

1. Is it possible to find different reformulation structures across dialects? (e.g., Arabic dialects, Italian di-
alects, etc.)
2. Which features are shown by reformulation markers in sign language? Can these features be system-
atized? Are there other mechanisms to express reformulation? (e.g., special gestures)

d) Reformulation and experimental approaches. Reformulation can be approached with experimental tools
focusing on both comprehension and production (eye-tracker, time-response measurements, etc.) (Salameh
2021). Experimental results provide researchers with new data shedding light for understanding reformulation.
Some research questions to be answered are:

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1. Can reformulation be measured through new experimental techniques? (EEG, visual word paradigm,
etc.)
2. Does reformulation show similar or different processing patterns compared to other functions?
3. Do processing patterns in reformulation markers differ across languages?

All the specific questions related to issues (a) to (d) have been addressed by the accepted contributions included
in this panel. The theoretical and methodological results obtained confirm that reformulation is still a growing
research field.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

On pragmatics and ‘Peach Tree Dishes’: Discourses of far-right


extremism, conspiracy, and solidarity

Panel

Dr. Catherine Tebaldi 1 , Dr. Dominika Baran 2


1. University of Luxembourg, 2. Duke

Although often dismissed by both academics and progressive voters as nonsensical and irrelevant fringe ideas,
far-right conspiracy narratives in fact present complex, multimodal, and affective discourses that contest, co-
opt, and connect to mainstream and official knowledges, and as such become increasingly normalized, accepted,
and influential. Responding to the 2023 IPrA conference theme of exceptionality and ordinariness, this panel
explores the conflicting (meta)pragmatic regimentation and unruliness of digital discourses of far-right poli-
tics, of our complicity in them (Verschueren 2021) or contestation of them. Digital, multimodal discourses can
co-opt the language of the ordinary to promote exceptional conspiracy narratives as, for example, meat eating
in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent evocation of the supposedly outrageous notion of growing meat in a “peach
tree dish” (sic!) which aligned the replacement of meat with the replacement of white men. Alternatively, they
banalize the language of progessive values: COVID anti-vaccine advocates have co-opted the slogan of repro-
ductive rights activists, “my body, my choice,” in protest signs in Ireland, UK, US, and elsewhere (Strange 2021),
while in Poland, anti-genderist politicians and media have sought to resignify the LGBTQ+ symbol of the rainbow
as an index of sinful, immoral, and unpatriotic ideologies (Baran 2022). Perhaps most perplexingly, the reac-
tionary right sometimes takes up the language of critique (Tebaldi 2021) and creates a popular, pseudo-linguistic
analysis around the ordinariness of words, claiming that it is the progressives who twist and denaturalize the
“true” meaning of words and concepts such as, for example, “marriage,” “freedom,” or “patriotism.” Given the
global influence of rightwing languages of hate, this panel aims to examine and demystify their discursive oper-
ation in various national, regional, and local contexts, but also to engage with existing counter-discourses that
seek to disrupt rightwing attempts at co-opting and perverting progressive terms and ideas. This latter focus
is crucial because, as Borba (2018) convincingly argues, “hatred is past oriented” (177) whereas “acts of hope”
(174) look to the future and to the potential for checking and pushing against acts of hate. Consequently, we
invite contributions to the panel that include but are not limited to: theoretical exploration of contestations and
different uptakes of discourses, exploration of rightwing protest discourses (e.g. anti-vaccine, anti-reproductive
rights, conspirituality, and others), the new solidarities produced between but also, crucially, against these, and
attempts at disrupting these rightwing uptakes through oppositional discourses of hope.

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Performing compliments in a variationist perspective

Panel

Prof. Marina Castagneto 1 , Dr. Chiara Meluzzi 2


1. University of Molise, 2. University of Milan

Language communities of native speakers are not homogeneous wholes and some pragmatics phenomena are
particularly sensitive to variation: the linguistic act of compliment is one of them.
The literature on compliments has often presumed the uniformity of communicative strategies by speakers be-
longing to the same linguistic community (e.g. US or Chinese cultures, conceived as a whole). Conversely, a
different theoretical and methodological approach is represented by variational pragmatics (Schneider & Bar-
ron 2008).
To date, few studies have been dedicated to the pragmatic variation of compliments (Lin et al. 2012, Mulo
Farenkia 2012, Placencia & Fuentes 2013), and almost none on regional varieties within a specific language,
apart from the pioneering work of Schlieben-Lange & Weydt (1978) and, recently, Castagneto & Ravetto (2015).
Scholars’ attention has instead addressed social variability of compliments and compliment use on social media
(e.g. Maíz-Arévalo 2013, Placencia & Eslami 2020).
As compliment is sensitive to any kind of linguistic factors of variation, only a variationist approach will allow
to define compliment as a speech act, differentiating it from partially overlapping acts (e.g., flattering, praise).
The panel will discuss compliments’ variability across four main dimensions:
1) national varieties of specific pluricentric languages, or regional varieties of one language, and related polite-
ness models;
2) social varieties of one language, depending on one or more macro-social factors (gender, age, social class);
3) perception of compliments across modalities;
4) linguistic usages and politeness models.
Participants will also discuss on the following topics:
- interaction of macro- and micro-social factors in compliment management;
- socio-pragmatic variation in compliments’ forms and routines;
- compliments’ variability across data types (e.g., naturally-occurring discourse vs. elicited data);
- application to language teaching and learning of pragmatics.
Minimum bibliography
Castagneto, M. & Ravetto, M. (2015) The variability of compliment responses: Italian and German data, in S. Gesu-
ato, F. Bianchi & W. Cheng (eds.) Teaching, learning and investigating pragmatics: principles, methods and prac-
tices, Cambridge, CUP: 387-413.
Lin, Ch.Y.; Woodfield, H. & Ren, W. (2012) Compliments in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese: The influence of region
and compliment topic, “Journal of Pragmatics” 44(11): 1486-1502.
Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2013) “Just click ‘Like”’: Computer-mediated responses to Spanish compliments, “Journal of
Pragmatics” 51: 47-67.
Mulo Farenkia, B. (2012) Compliment strategies and regional variation in French: Evidence from Cameroon and
Canadian French, “Pragmatics” 22(3): 447-476.
Placencia, M. & Fuentes, C. (2013) Cumplidos de mujeres universitarias en Quito y Sevilla: un estudio de variación
pragmática regional. “Sociocultural Pragmatics, International Journal of Spanish Linguistics” 1(1): 100-134.
Placencia, M.E. & Eslami, Z.R. (2020) Complimenting Behavior and (Self-)Praise across Social Media: New contexts
and new insights, Berlin, John Benjamins.
Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte & Weydt, Harald (1978) Für eine Pragmatisierung der Dialektologie, “Zeitschrift für
Germanistische Linguistik” 6(3): 257–282.

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Schneider, K.P. & Barron, A. (2008) Variational pragmatics, Amsterdam. John Benjamins.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Poetics of Phaticity: Contacting and Distancing in


Contemporary Social Life

Panel

Dr. Shunsuke Nozawa 1 , Dr. Makiko Takekuro 2


1. Hokkaido University, 2. Waseda University

In his 1923 discussion of “phatic communion,” Bronisław Malinowski emphasized the role of language as a
“mode of social action,” suggesting that it is not simply used to convey referential information but also serves
to create and maintain social “ties of union” (1923). The notion of “phatic” was then reformulated in Roman
Jakobson’s “event”-based model of communication (1960), in which it serves to highlight “contact” as a necessary
aspect of communicative functionality (see Zuckerman 2021). This line of thinking has seen renewed interest
in the last decade or so, prompting scholars to mobilize analyses of communicative “channels” (or media) —
how they are narrated, established, maintained, destroyed, and fantasized — in order to explore negotiation of
social value, interpersonal politics, emerging identity, and other themes (see e.g. Kockelman 2010, Lemon 2013,
Slotta 2015, Nozawa 2015, Zuckerman 2016, Manning 2018, Smith and Barad 2018, Wilf 2021). It is a sobering
realization that, just as we are about to observe the centennial of Malinowski’s coinage, we find ourselves in the
midst of the global covid pandemic where phaticity — the drama of contacting and distancing — has become
front and center in characterizing the contemporary zeitgeist (Fleming and Slotta 2020).
Inspired by this reemergence of the phatic concept, our panel explores articulations of contacting and distanc-
ing in the contemporary social life as it relates to language and communication. With a premise that con-
tact/communion is interactional and predicated on how things, people, and other actants come to be located
in the here-and-now of communicative event, or in other words “poetically” structured in ongoing processes of
interaction and interpretation, we address the question of poetics of phaticity. As we expect that contact can
also be coterminous with disruption, avoidance, discontinuity, and other signs of discordance (Takekuro 2018),
how might such poetic regimentation of contact relate to operations of power? How do acts of contacting and
distancing generate or presuppose desires and anxieties about communication in different scenes of social life?
Creatively drawing on these questions, the presentations for our panel cover a diversity of topics ranging from
public discourse on contagion, phaticity in political speech, interaction in educational settings, rural communi-
ties and tourism, and rural communities, and media representations. Taking a discourse-centered approach to
phaticity in communication, some of the papers in our panel analyze interactional textuality of contact, while
others attempt to incorporate a multimodal analysis of several semiotic domains such as physical representa-
tions (especially gestures) and spatial arrangements.

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Politeness and impoliteness in French and in comparison with


other languages

Panel

Dr. Nicolas Ruytenbeek 1 , Dr. Shima Moallemi 2 , Prof. Els Tobback 3 , Prof. Chantal Claudel 2 , Prof.
Kerry Mullan 4
1. KU Leuven, 2. Université Paris Nanterre, 3. Universiteit Antwerpen, 4. RMIT University

In France, work on linguistic (im)politeness in French originated in the research on cultural variation and in-
variants in verbal interactions carried out by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni since the 1990s. Using this frame-
work, pragmatics was used to address speech acts from a cross-cultural or intercultural perspective (Kerbrat-
Orecchioni 2000). This research angle has given rise to the examination of a variety of speech acts including com-
pliments (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005), offers and requests for information, requests (Béal 2010) and invitations
(Traverso et al. 2018). Such pragmatic approaches to (im)politeness in French have also resulted in fieldwork in
commercial sites such as bakeries, butchers, pharmacies, florists, shoe shops, etc. in France (Kerbrat-Orecchioni
2001) and their comparison with speech act realizations in communities such as Syria (Traverso 2006), Lebanon
and Tunisia (Dimachki and Hmed 2002). Recent developments on (im)politeness in the French-speaking world
include comparative work based on corpora from electronic communication (Claudel 2021), in social media
(Tobback 2019) or which take speaker behaviour as a starting point (Moallemi 2019).
The present panel proposal further develops this research axis by gathering researchers working on the expres-
sion and perception of (im)politeness in French as well as in a comparative perspective between French and
another language.
References
Béal, Christine, 2010. Les interactions quotidiennes en français et en anglais, De l’approche comparative à l’analyse
des situations interculturelles, Berne, Peter Lang.
Claudel, Chantal, 2021. L’e-politesse dans les courriels en français et en japonais. Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nou-
velle.
Dimachki, Loubna & Hmed, Neijete. 2002. La comparaison interculturelle : exemple du remerciement dans les
interactions de commerce en France, au Liban et en Tunisie, Marges linguistiques, Christine Béal & Véronique
Traverso (Eds.), 1-15.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 2000. « Les actes de langage dans une perspective interculturelle : problèmes
théoriques et descriptifs », in Traverso V. (Ed.), Perspectives interculturelles sur l’interaction, Lyon, PUL, 75-92.
___. 2001. « ‘Je voudrais un p’tit bifteck’ : la politesse à la française en site commercial ». Les Carnets du Cediscor
7 : 105-118.
___. 2005. Le fonctionnement du compliment dans l’interaction. Letras por dentro II, Wilberth Claython Ferreira
Salgueiro, Julia Maria da Costa Almeida et Pedro José Mascarello Bisch (Eds.), Vitória, Flor&cultura, 9-19.
Moallemi, Shima. 2019. L2 socialization and the construction of a bilingual pragmatic competence, with focus
on the Persian politeness system (“ta’ârof”). In G. Aloa & T. Szende (Ed.), Pragmatic competence in L2: focus on
politeness. Brussels, Peter Lang, 219-232.
Tobback, Els. 2019. La modestie à la française à travers l’acte de l’éloge de soi. Analyse comparative
français/américain des procédés pragmatiques de modification utilisés dans les résumés LinkedIn. Travaux
de Linguistique 79 (2): 101-136.
Traverso, Véronique. 2006. Aspect of polite behaviour in French and Syrian service encounters: A data-based
comparative study. Journal of Politeness Research 2(1): 105-123.
Traverso, Véronique, Ticca, Anna Caludia & Ursi, Biagio. 2018. Invitations in French: A complex and apparently
delicate action. Journal of Pragmatics 125: 164-179.

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Practices of knowledge management in helping interactions

Panel

Dr. Susanne Kabatnik 1 , Prof. Eva-Maria Graf 2 , Prof. Thomas Spranz-Fogasy 3


1. Greifswald, 2. Klagenfurt, 3. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Balancing knowledge asymmetries and establishing intersubjectivity as preparatory work for change are core
elements of ‘helping’ in helping interactions (Graf & Spranz-Fogasy, 2018). Verbal helping (Pick & Scarvaglieri
2019, in press) thereby is a central component of institutional helping interactions (such as medical, psychother-
apeutic, counselling and coaching conversations) (see Graf et al. 2014 on interaction types, Graf et al. 2019 and
Pawelczyk & Graf 2019 on change, and Scarvaglieri et al. in press on relationship management in these con-
texts). Knowledge is generated and updated by the interactants in the sequential unfolding of such institutional
helping communication. In this process of mutual documentation of understanding (Spranz-Fogasy 2010; Dep-
permann 2015), i.e., grounding, the interactants establish a common ground (Clark 1992; Deppermann 2018)
that builds the knowledge basis for helping. Co-constructing and managing (problem) knowledge thereby de-
termine the solution (finding) knowledge as procedural knowledge. In this context, different epistemes are
crucial, i.e., both, the professional knowledge of those providing help and the biographical, emotional and/or
problem- or illness-related knowledge of those seeking help. These manifest themselves as epistemic status
in the conversation (Heritage 2012; 2013). Discursive practices such as questions or formulations (Weiste &
Peräkylä 2015) as well as narratives (Deppermann 2018), but also explanations, justifications, or excuses (Scott
& Lyman 1968; Heritage 1998) are central to the processing of knowledge. Furthermore, participants negotiate
their epistemic stance, i.e., the interactants’ attitude towards a certain object of knowledge (Deppermann 2018).
Such epistemic stance is expressed with specific interactional practices of knowledge communication and lin-
guistic forms, such as oh-prefacing in English (Heritage 1998, 2018) or the use of modal particles in German
(Reineke 2015; Blühdorn et al. 2017).
The panel aims to bring together up-to-date CA research on practices of knowledge transfer and management as
one of the most important communicative tasks in helping interactions. The focus is on analyzing the sequen-
tial organization and linguistic realization of such practices involved in knowledge management as well as on
different interaction types of helping and how practices of knowledge management unfold in them.

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Pragmatic approaches to visual discourses in online


interactions

Panel

Dr. Carmen Pérez-Sabater 1 , Dr. Agnese Sampietro 2


1. Universitat Politècnica de València, 2. University Jaume I

One of the most striking characteristics of contemporary online communication is its multimodality, i.e., the
presence of different semiotic codes in the same “product.” Users can easily include images (photos, memes,
stickers, drawings, etc.), emojis, videos, and audio files and edit and modify them in their digital interactions. As
such, these visual elements become part of the interaction, which is characterized by several possible layers of
multimodality relating such discourses as typed text, emojis, images, video, and animated GIFs, among others
(Siever & Siever, 2029; Yus, 2022).
Despite its relevance, multimodal communication is under-researched in comparison with textual communica-
tion. Some of the features that have attracted the interest of researchers are emojis, stickers, GIFs, and graph-
ical icons. Emoticons first (faces composed by punctuation marks such as :-) ) and later emojis (pictographic
images) have been extensively studied under the lens of pragmatics in the latest years. Researchers have ana-
lyzed their use in many social media platforms (e.g., WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, Instagram, bulletin
boards) and languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish) (see, for example, Al Rashdi,
2018; Bieswanger & Pappert, 2019; Sampietro, 2016; 2019; Pérez-Sabater, 2019, 2021).
However, despite this recent academic interest in emojis, the pragmatic functions of other visual elements/cues,
such as photos, stickers, GIFs, and short video clips, have been largely ignored by digital communication schol-
ars. So far, studies have found that other graphical icons are primarily used to react to a previous textual
message (Dainas & Herring, 2021). Research on their function in interaction, the cultural variation in their use,
and their understanding is still in its infancy.
This panel explores the function of different graphical icons in digital interaction from a pragmatic perspective.
Concretely, its contributions include investigations of various visual elements, namely GIFs, stickers, emojis,
pictures, hashtags, and typography, drawing on different data/applications, such as Twitter, WhatsApp, and
Instagram. The oral presentations included in this panel also study diverse contexts, from informal interactions
among friends to political discourse and online grooming.
In sum, the contributions cumulatively enrich our understanding of how users deploy a variety of visual re-
sources in digital interactions taking into account the three fundamental “layers” of cyberpragmatic analysis
(Yus, 2022): the users, the context, and the interaction.
References
Dainas, A. R., & Herring, S. C. (2021). Interpreting Emoji Pragmatics. In C. Xie, F. Yus, & H. Haberland (Eds.),
Approaches to Internet Pragmatics: Theory and Practice (pp. 108–144). John Benjamins.
Pérez-Sabater, C. (2019). Emoticons in Relational Writing Practices on WhatsApp: Some Reflections on Gender.
In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future
Directions (pp. 163–189). Springer.

Pérez-Sabater, C. (2021). Moments of sharing, language style and resources for solidarity on social media: A
comparative analysis, Journal of Pragmatics, 180, 266-282.

Sampietro, A. (2016). Exploring the punctuating effect of emoji in Spanish WhatsApp chats. Lenguas Modernas,
47, 91–113.
Sampietro, A. (2019). Emoji and rapport management in Spanish WhatsApp chats. Journal of Pragmatics, 143.

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Yus, F. (2022). Smartphone Communication: Interactions in the app ecosystem. Routledge.

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Pragmatic aspects in food-related communication

Panel

Prof. Daniela Cesiri 1 , Prof. Francesca Coccetta 1 , Dr. Katia Peruzzo 2


1. “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice, 2. University of Trieste

Food is an important means for human societies not only because it provides nutrition but also for its socializing
function. The rituals accompanying its preparation and consumption have always favoured social bonding in
any kind of human civilization. Indeed, communication about food and nutrition is omnipresent in our daily
life and, in more recent years, it has proceeded through both traditional and new media. The former includes
printed cookbooks, TV and radio shows, while the latter exploits the affordances of digital channels such as
YouTube, social media, virtual tasting experiences through websites, food blogs, etcetera. In this context, culi-
nary experts, chefs, and amateurs contribute to shape the message, thus acting as both creators and receivers
of food-related content. This, in turn, includes a certain degree of interaction among the participants in the
communicative situation (e.g., in food blogs or in social media). The responsibility of the creators of the mes-
sage in this case lies in the correct transmission of specialist knowledge as well as in the accurate conveyance
of culture-specific elements that are usually associated with certain dishes or culinary traditions.
The panel explores the pragmatic implications of communication concerning food preparation and consump-
tion. Particular attention is paid to the exploration of the ways in which concepts related to food are dealt with
in digital genres, ensuring the dissemination of culinary knowledge and the preservation of local cultures and
food-related habits. More specifically, the panel addresses multimodal aspects in food-related communication
in digital genres such as food blogs but also specific textual genres such as recipes in social media and websites
addressing adults as well as children. Furthermore, the panel investigates food-related communication through
animation, advertising campaigns, with some reflections on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected our habits.
Finally, particular relevance is given to pragmatic aspects in the translation of food-related vocabulary in genres
such as fictional prose and TV series.

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Pragmatic development, sense conventions and the puzzle of


non-literal uses

Panel

Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 1 , Dr. Nicholas Allott 1


1. University of Oslo

A puzzling feature of pragmatic development is the mixture of ability and difficulty pre-school children have
with non-literal uses of language (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, irony, implicature). While children are in many
respects expert communicators from early on (Matthews 2014; Zufferey 2015; Grigoroglou & Papafragou 2017)
and spontaneously produce metaphors (Billow 1981) and metonymies (Falkum 2019) they often have difficulty
going beyond the conventional senses of words to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning (Long, Shukla &
Rubio-Fernandez 2020; Falkum, Recasens & Clark 2017).
This could merely suggest that (some) figurative use is harder to interpret than literal use. However, there
is recent evidence that children’s performance with non-literal language goes backwards around 5 years old.
Falkum, Recasens and Clark (2017) found a U-shaped development in metonymy comprehension, with 3-year-
olds and adults performing better than 5-year-olds, who tended to interpret metonymic uses literally. This
finding was reproduced by Köder & Falkum (2020), and the U-shaped trajectory (UST) may also be found for
other figurative use. A number of authors have proposed a ‘literal stage’ in metaphor comprehension after
early ability with metaphor (Levorato & Cacciari 2002; Vosniadou 1987; Winner 1997; for early ability see Billow
1981).
This finding, if robust, promises to shed light on a number of issues in the development of pragmatics, and
suggests a number of research questions. For example, it weighs against the influential view that literal and
(some) figurative utterances are processed the same way (e.g. on metaphor: Giora 2008; Sperber & Wilson
2008; Wilson & Carston 2007). It obviously poses the question: what is special about development around 5
years old? Possible answers might draw on the development of Theory of Mind (Westra & Carruthers 2017,
Kissine 2021) or of comprehension of and interest in norms (Rakoczy & Schmidt 2013; Paulus & Schmidt 2018),
since children’s abilities in both areas show radical improvement around this age.
This panel features contributions that address puzzles relating to the uneven development of non-literal uses,
both theoretically and empirically.

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Pragmatic Variation in Pluricentric Languages

Panel

Prof. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer 1 , Prof. Klaus Schneider 2


1. Indiana University, 2. University of Bonn

Research on linguistic pluricentrism has mostly concentrated on national varieties of a language, as well as on
dominant and non-dominant varieties (Schneider & Félix-Brasdefer 2022). Pluricentric languages, such as Ara-
bic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Portuguese, have been generally defined as languages having differ-
ent national varieties, each with a standard codified register. Intra-lingual pragmatic variation is systematically
studied in variational pragmatics (Schneider & Barron 2008; Schneider 2020). This approach is focused on the
intersection of pragmatics and dialectology and examines differences that can be correlated with macrosocial
and microsocial factors that influence communicative language use. Relevant macrosocial factors include re-
gion, gender, age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, while microsocial factors include social distance/degree
of familiarity, social power, and situational variation. Region, whose impact on language use has received more
attention in research than any of the other factors mentioned here, has been theorized as a multifaceted con-
cept pertaining to five levels in geographical space: supranational, national, subnational, local, and sublocal
(Schneider & Barron 2008). Region is, therefore, not limited to the traditional understanding in dialectology,
but used here as “an umbrella term for a hierarchy of spatial entities” (Schneider 2010, p. 248).
This panel examines pragmatic variation at the level of national varieties of seven different pluricentric lan-
guages, i.e., languages with several interacting centers and norms of their own (Clyne, 1992). The languages cov-
ered are Arabic, Chinese, English, German, French, Spanish, and Swedish, among them two non-Indo-European
languages and some understudied Indo-European languages. The national varieties also include three post-
colonial varieties (Namibian English; Nigerian English; Cameroon French). We investigate and problematize
to what extent place plays a role in pragmatic variation. The panel focuses on the analysis of language use at
different levels of analysis: formal, actional, sequential, interactional, organizational, stylistic, and prosodic.
Methodological principles and methodological choices are also discussed, specifically data types and data col-
lection instruments. The panel is organized in three sessions, with a total of nine presentations, including Q &
A for each presentation. There will be opening remarks and a final discussion.
References
Clyne, Michael (1992). Pluricentric languages: Introduction. In: Michael Clyne (ed.), Pluricentric Languages:
Differing Norms in Different Nations, 1–9. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schneider, Klaus P. (2010). Variational pragmatics. In: Mirjam Fried, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren (eds.),
Variation and Change: Pragmatic Perspectives, 239–267. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schneider, Klaus P. (2020). Rethinking pragmatic variation: The case of service encounters from a modified
variational pragmatics perspective. In: J. César Félix-Brasdefer and María Elena Placencia (eds.), Pragmatic
Variation in Service Encounter Interactions across the Spanish-Speaking World, 251–262. Abingdon/New York:
Routledge.
Schneider, Klaus P. and Anne Barron (2008). Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational
pragmatics. In: Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron (eds.), Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties
in Pluricentric Languages, 1–32. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schneider, Klaus P. and J. César Félix-Brasdefer (2022). Pragmatic variation across national varieties of pluri-
centric languages. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Heiko Hausendorf (eds.), Pragmatics of Space (Handbooks of Prag-
matics, vol. 14), 637–678. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Pragmatics of the ‘(a)typical clause’ across languages

Panel

Prof. Ritva Laury 1 , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Alberta

In both scholarly papers and textbooks, linguists have presented the typical clause as consisting of an active,
transitive verb and its overt arguments. For example, consider the following, constructed clause given in the
section on structural analysis in a popular introductory linguistics textbook (Yule 2006: 80).
Her father brought a shotgun to the wedding
The dominant grammatical tradition, passed on in linguistic training and reflected in our terminology, is in
fact mostly based on Indo-European languages. Our conception of typical clauses, for instance, is based on
studying constructed data which is heavily influenced by written language primarily from that language family
(for discussion, see Linell 2005; Ono, Laury and Suzuki 2021).
However, it has been shown that the typical English clauses in conversation, the most basic use type of human
languages, tend strongly to be intransitive; Thompson & Hopper (2001) showed that two-participant clauses
such as the example above, account for only 27% of all clauses in the conversational data they studied, with
one-participant clauses accounting for 73%. Furthermore, in many languages, overt mentions of participants
involved in the action or state expressed in the clause are rare (for Japanese, see, e.g., Ono & Thompson 1997;
for Indonesian, see Ewing 2019). Thus it appears that the clause types often thought to be the most common are
actually atypical even in the most commonly studied languages.
Our panel examines clause types in everyday language use from a variety of theoretical orientations in a wide
range of geographically, typologically and genetically unrelated languages. The presentations are based on data
from Anal Naga, Burmese, English, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, Karbi, Korean, Mandarin, Mano, Nuuchah-
nulth, Swedish, Turkish, and Upper Kuskokwim. We ask questions such as how the concept of ‘clause’ should
be defined and whether the celebrated status given to it is deserving, given its manifestation in actual data
across languages (Ono et al. 2019), how ‘nonverbal’ clause types should be understood (Haspelmath 2022), and
whether the concept of ‘predicate’ might be more useful in crosslinguistic study than the concept of ‘clause’
(Thompson 2019). Most importantly, we examine how these typical and atypical ‘clauses’ are employed in ev-
eryday language use in the diverse set of languages in our panel.

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Prosody, gesture, and conversation

Panel

Dr. Margaret Zellers 1 , Dr. Maria Graziano 2 , Prof. David House 3


1. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2. Lund University Humanities Lab, 3. Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan

Face-to-face conversation is a process that integrates spoken language as well as a variety of bodily movements
moment-by-moment. The multimodal nature of conversation means that interfaces arise between acoustics (in
particular prosody), visible bodily movements (especially gestures), and the structural organization of conversa-
tion. Prosody refers to the aspects of the speech signal that (may) occur over stretches longer than an individual
speech segment or phone, with most prosodic research focusing on pitch, intensity, and duration. A gesture can
be defined as a movement, typically of the hands, but also of other parts of the body, that accompanies speech
and has a communicative value. Conversation can be described as spontaneous, non-task-driven, spoken social
interaction involving two or more participants. The binary interfaces between prosody and gesture, prosody
and conversation, and gesture and conversation, are receiving increasing amounts of attention. However, an
investigation of the intersection between all three of these systems is still in its infancy.
The relationship between gesture and prosody differs in the context of different conversational actions. Many
studies have found that gesture and prosody function in parallel in the context of prominence marking, which
is essential for communicating information-structural aspects such as new/given and contrast/correction.
Others have found that the interaction of prosody and gesture is crucial to manage smooth turn-taking among
conversational participants. As the most common everyday use of spoken language, conversation provides
an ideal setting to investigate the relationship between prosody and gesture across a variety of different
communicative functions, in terms of both linguistic functions and conversational actions. This panel features
research at this three-way intersection from a variety of methodological perspectives, specifically taking
perspectives on the following:

Relative independence or interdependence: since despite the differences between the two modalities, gesture and
speech often show extremely close temporal and semantic coordination, to what extent are these modalities
integrated? To what extent does coordination between the modalities vary depending on the communicative
situation?
Complementarity versus coordination: what is the scope of gesture and prosody in communicating conversa-
tional meanings/actions? To what degree do gesture and prosody arise complementarily versus in a coordi-
nated way and what is the degree of redundancy? How are these modulated by different functional needs in
conversation?
Methods of description: what types and granularities of parallel annotation of prosody and gesture are needed
in order to be able to carry out effective analyses? How can these be applied to spontaneous speech with its
high degree of variability?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rapport management in onsite and remote interpreting

Panel

Prof. July De Wilde 1 , Dr. Jelena Vranjes 1 , Mr. Dries Cavents 1


1. Ghent University

When transferring the speech of interlocutors who have no access to each other’s language, interpreters never
act as mere ‘conduits’ transferring the message automatically. Instead, they act as fully-fledged social agents
co-constructing meaning. In conducting this type of interpersonal work, rapport is of key importance. The man-
agement of interpersonal relations in interpreting research has been studied in terms of ‘facework’ (Pöllabauer
2007), ‘(im)politeness’ (Mapson 2019) and, more recently, under the broader notion of ‘rapport management’
(Mapson & Major 2021). We understand rapport management as the process of promoting, maintaining and
threatening harmonious social relationships in interactions, motivated by considerations of face, behavioural
expectations and interactional goals (Spencer-Oatey 2008). Interpreters may omit, mitigate or strengthen de-
liberate discourse strategies (such as requests, verbal aggression, compliments) directed at the primary partici-
pants or at the interpreter themself. Furthermore, the interpreter’s active involvement in interaction manage-
ment changes the behavioural norms related to turn-taking and challenges direct contact between participants.
However, while previous studies provide rich insights of rapport management in dialogue interpreting on a
verbal level, much less is known about multimodal aspects of rapport management. In managing rapport, both
verbal and non-verbal behaviour (gestures, mimics, gaze) are essential (e.g. Davitti & Braun 2020). Moreover, in
the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased importance of different forms of distance interpreting
(e.g. video-remote and telephone interpreting), the question is raised as to the exact impact of the interpreter’s
reduced presence on the interpreter’s and primary participants’ management of rapport.
The aim of this thematic panel is to provide a forum for ongoing research on the imbrications between rap-
port, multimodality and communication technologies. The panel therefore brings together scholars providing
insights form different perspectives. In particular, contributions to this panel will discuss topics such as:

• Multimodal rapport management and face-work in different settings such as police interviews, court,
maternity care etc.;
• The difference between onsite interpreting and distance interpreting (telephone, video remote etc.);
• The primary participants’ perceptions of rapport management and rapport building.

References
Davitti, E. & Sabine, B. (2020) Analysing interactional phenomena in video remote interpreting in collaborative
settings: implications for interpreter education. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 14 (3), 279-302.
Mapson, R. (2019). Im/politeness and interpreting. Routledge.
Mapson, R., & Major, G. (2021). Interpreters, rapport, and the role of familiarity. Journal of Pragmatics, 176,
63–75.
Pöllabauer, S. (2007). Interpreting in asylum hearings: Issues of saving face. In C. Wadensjö, B. Englund Dim-
itrova & A. Nilsson (eds.) The Critical Link 4. Professionalisation of Interpreting in the Community (pp. 39–52).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Face, (im)politeness and rapport. Continuum International Publishing Group.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Re-considering discourses of war and peace: 21st century


transcultural perspectives

Panel

Prof. Cornelia Ilie 1 , Prof. Manfred Kienpointner 2


1. Strömstad Academy, 2. University of Innsbruck

History has shown that ideological struggles, political polarizations, armed conflicts, and counter-peace
processes are impacting not only the international power balance and peace, but also individual and collective
beliefs articulated in interpersonal and intergroup interactions. This panel sets out to explore and discuss
the underpinnings, implications and consequences of diverging / shifting discourses of war and peace that
extend across time and space. Such discourses often reveal divergent perceptions, biased interpretations and
disagreements, reinforced by antagonism, resentment and aggression (Allan 2004, Dardis 2006, Herber 2007,
Lule 2004). Exploring the ways in which war is portrayed discursively, scrutinized rehetorically, and debated
argumentatively, both offline and online, can help us understand the interactional and socio-psychological
mechanisms, as well as the immediate or medium/long-term outcomes of pro-war and anti-war discourses,
belligerent rhetoric, political propaganda and overt/covert manipulation on the mindsets of individuals and
public opinion (Bugarski 2009, Hodges 2013, Rampton 2003).

Going beyond traditional conceptualizations and definitions of the terms war-peace, the panel contributors use
cross-disciplinary approaches (Zaman (2009) for a deeper understanding of war and peace in a historical, polit-
ical and cultural perspective. The main issues participants will reflect on, analyse and debate are the following:
- Argumentation and counter-argumentation strategies in war and peace discourses
- (Re)conceptualizing war, peace and nonviolence in a diachronic perspective
- Problematizing the underpinnings of war discourses in online environments
- (Re)contextualizing and re-interpreting narratives of war and peace
- Seeking to re-write history through re-descriptions and re-interpretations of war narratives
- Metaphorical ways of understanding and representing war and peace
- Hidden agendas in the mediatisation of narratives about war and peace
- Generating and spreading fake news in times of war and unpeace

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reading Bauman & Briggs’s “Poetics and performance” three


decades later: How can a/typical interactions, spaces and
temporalities critically inform pragmatics?

Panel

Dr. Daniel Silva 1 , Dr. Daniela Palma 2


1. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

In 1990, Richard Bauman & Charles Briggs published an influential review article on poetics and performance
as critical loci for analyzing social life (Bauman & Briggs, 1990). This article has been an important source for
studies on communicative practice, for a number of reasons. We may tentatively list: First, Bauman & Briggs
join the effort of other scholars in that historical period in examining poetics and performance beyond their
alleged “parasitic” role on “such ‘core’ areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such
anthropological fields as economy and social organization” (p. 19). Second, they debate, and reinvigorate, the
very status of poetics on the study of the performativity of language. Decades before, Austin (1962) had advised
his readers that such “etiolations” of language such as “us[ing] speech in acting, fiction and poetry, quotation
and recitation” (p. 92) would fall outside the study of (typical) serious performative language. Third, Bauman
and Briggs not only discuss that “acting”, “quoting” and “reciting” are typical performative moves in everyday
“serious” performances but also point that these moves “de-center” verbal forms and performers alike, for
one’s verbal performance largely relies on citing and objectifying pre-existing generic speech forms. In this
sense, they term ‘entextualization’ “the fundamental process… of render[ing] discourse decontextualizable” (p.
73). Fourth, and fundamentally, they discuss that the process of producing texts as extracting decontextualizable
units across interactional settings is embedded in various institutional and social practices of building authority,
inequality, and control.
If we consider IPrA’s 2023 theme, “The shape of interaction: the pragmatics of (a)typicality”, Bauman & Briggs’s
pioneering text brought the “atypical” (e.g., poetics and performance) to bear on the “typical” (e.g., ordinary
language). 32 years later, this panel invites scholars to critically revisit Bauman & Briggs’s proposal vis-à-vis
our field sites, political scenarios, and epistemic projects. As part of the activities of the research project “Tra-
jectories of peripheral lives: Violence between the ordinary and extraordinary in (auto)biographical narratives
and poetics” (funded by Fapesp), the panel asks participants to critically engage with the legacy of this decen-
tered view of discourse and the subject – which is by no means a product of these authors alone but part of an
ongoing dialogue with multiple voices, including from the margins. Further, the panel welcomes research that
engages the minutiae of poetics and performance to problematize what is framed as “typical” in interaction –
often while dismissing as atypical minority forms of belonging in language, race, gender, sexuality, and politics.
As scholars interested in critically understanding the “shape of interaction”, some fundamental questions that
we may ask ourselves and our empirical materials are: What does it mean to “decenter” texts as entextualized
practices and precipitates of power in a particular (ramified) empirical site? How is poetics construed in the
interactions I examine? How do participants challenge “reified texts” – that is, particular modes of entextual-
ization crystalized as “typical”, “unchallenged”, “default”, “canon”? How may we critically receive Bauman &
Briggs’s (1990) proposal vis-à-vis our contemporary epistemic and (geo)political challenges?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Recruitment of environmental resources for interactional


purposes in the early years

Panel

Dr. Amanda Bateman 1 , Prof. Friederike Kern 2


1. University of Waikato, 2. University of Bielefeld

The panel will bring together Child Interaction researchers to explore the affordances environments provide –
or restrict – to interactions between children, their peers and their caregivers. Main interest will be to gain a
better understanding of the (cultural) ways multimodal resources are used to co-construct complex interactions
in the early years.
Recruitment of tangible resources in interaction are often embodied and are key in everyday accomplishments
between people (Goodwin, 1994, Goodwin and Goodwin, 2000). Prior ECE research notes that the natural out-
door environment affords opportunities for children to initiate interactions through orientating their talk to
noticeable environmental features (Waters & Bateman, 2013) and enter into verbal contracts to engage in cul-
turally appropriate ways in protected spaces (Bateman & Roberts, 2018).
Inside the early childhood environment, the entrance hall has been found to offer affordances for parents,
children and teachers to meet where code switching between home and preschool languages offer rich oppor-
tunities for language learning (Bjork-Willen, 2017), and parents make an effort to attune their children’s bodies
to the structural affordances of a spatial environment while using manual guidance to do so (Kern, 2018).
Emotional displays are often observable in environmental spaces, and attended to pragmatically. Where young
toddler children express emotional upset regarding difficulty mastering complex terrain, teachers offer verbal
directives about how to move their body, encourage independence and empowerment (Bateman, 2021). Fur-
ther emotional support through engaging with environmental resources is observable for children who have
experienced trauma through natural disasters such as earthquakes, where exploring damaged spaces provides
opportunities for talking about trauma in inductive and practical ways (Bateman, Danby & Howard, 2013).
In all of these spaces, we see the synthesis of gesture, talk and emotion, offering an intertwining of multimodal
resources that work to co-construct complex interactions that empower children to be confident in their auton-
omy over their bodies to move through space.
Bateman, A. (2021). Teacher responses to toddler crying in the New Zealand outdoor environment, Journal of
pragmatics, 175, pp. 81-93.
Bateman, A., Danby, S. and Howard, J (2013). Everyday preschool talk about Christchurch earthquakes, Aus-
tralian Journal of Communication, 40(1), pp 103-123.
Bateman, A. and Roberts, P. (2018). Morality at play: pretend play in five-year-old children in New Zealand
bushland, ROCSI, 2(2), 195-212/
Bjork-Willen, P. (2017). The Preschool Entrance Hall: A Bilingual Transit Zone for Preschoolers. In A. Bate-
man and A. Church (Eds.). Children and knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis. (pp 169-187)
Singapore: Springer
Goodwin, Charles, 1994. Professional vision. Am. Anthropol. 96 (3), 606e633.
Goodwin, Marjory H., Goodwin, Charles, 2000. Emotion within situated activity. In: Duranti, A. (Ed.), Linguistic
Anthropology: A Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 239e257.
Kern, Friederike (2018). Mastering the body. Correcting bodily conduct in adult-child interaction. ROCSI 2.2,
213–234.
Waters, J. and Bateman, A (2013). Revealing the interactional features of learning and teaching moments in
outdoor activity, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2), 1-13.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Recycling and reshaping previous turns in multimodal


interactions

Panel

Dr. Vanessa Piccoli 1 , Dr. Biagio Ursi 2


1. Université Paris Nanterre, 2. Université d’Orléans

A large number of studies on naturally occurring conversations have shown how interactants continuously ad-
just to one another, adapting their actions/turns to coparticipants, to interactional contingencies and to multiple
action trajectories (Haddington et al. 2014; Lindström et al. 2021, among others), through a variety of semiotic
resources (Goodwin 2018). Recycling stretches of previous talk may be an indicator of the collaborative nature
of conversation, since it signals “what new information has been taken up by the other and so added to com-
mon ground” (Clark & Bernicot 2008: 352). This is especially important in interactions where intersubjectivity is
hard to achieve, due to epistemic or linguistic asymmetries (e.g., plurilingual encounters, atypical interactions).
For instance, in classroom interactions, matching gestures are mobilized to display interactive co-engagements
and to create learning opportunities (Majlesi 2015).
As Traverso (2017) observed in plurilingual healthcare settings, recycling conversational materials can take the
form of rephrasing or embodied reuses; even when verbal intercomprehension is blocked, multimodal refor-
mulations contribute to the progressivity of the conversation. When participants repeatedly recycle an earlier
multimodal contribution, a conversational routine emerges (Chernyshova et al. 2022), i.e., a new configuration
becomes a recognizable, available and shareable resource by participants. By reshaping previous turns in dif-
ferent sequential environments, participants assure coherent and respecified realizations over extended action
trajectories or interactional activities.
This panel aims at exploring recycling and reshaping practices involving multiple semiotic resources in talk-
in-interaction. Particular attention will be drawn to the reusing of previous embodied turns as a relevant con-
versational phenomenon in sequence organization (openings and closings, backlinking, etc.). Based on multi-
modal interaction analysis, panel contributions scrutinize the temporal mobilization of linguistic structures and
the routinization of “multimodal gestalts” (Mondada 2015). More specifically, they highlight the instructional
and meaning-making functions of multimodal routines in dance lessons, interpreter-mediated consultations,
doctor-patient conversations, as well as visually impaired interactions.
Besides the panel organizers, the following researchers have confirmed their participation: Oliver Ehmer (Os-
nabrück), Piera Margutti, Vittoria Colla & Valeria Barbieri (Modena), Monica Simone, Chloé Mondémé & Renata
Galatolo (Bologna & Lyon), Véronique Traverso (Lyon).
References
Chernyshova E., Piccoli V. & Ursi B. (2022). Multimodal conversational routines: Talk-in-interaction through the
prism of complexity. In Lund K. et al. (Eds.), Language is a complex adaptive system. Explorations and evidence.
Berlin: Language Science Press, 131-146.
Clark E. V. & Bernicot J. (2008). Repetition as ratification: How parents and children place information in com-
mon ground. J.Child Language 35(2), 349-371.
Goodwin C. (2018). Why Multimodality? Why Co-Operative Action? Social Interaction 1(2).
Haddington P., Keisanen T., Mondada L. & Nevile M. (Eds.) (2014). Multiactivity in Social Interaction. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Lindström J., Laury R., Peräkylä A. & Sorjonen M.-L. (Eds.) (2018). Intersubjectivity in Action. Amsterdam: Ben-
jamins.
Majlesi A. R. (2015). Matching gestures. Teachers’ repetitions of students’ gestures in second language learning
classrooms. J.Pragmatics 76, 30-45.

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Mondada L. (2015). Multimodal completions. In Deppermann A. & Günthner S. (Eds.), Temporality in Interaction.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 267-308.
Traverso V. (2017). Formulations, reformulations et traductions dans l’interaction: le cas de consultations médi-
cales avec des migrants. RFLA 22(2), 147-164.

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Referential practices in action: a usage-based perspective on


canonical and non-canonical uses of pronouns referring to
persons

Panel

Dr. Jens Lanwer 1 , Prof. Wolfgang Imo 2 , Prof. Evelyn Ziegler 3 , Prof. Melitta Gillmann 3
1. University of Münster, 2. University of Hamburg, 3. University of Duisburg-Essen

It is a well-known fact that pronouns referring to persons can be used not only in their canonical, prototypical
meaning (e.g. “I” as a speaker-deictic pronoun, “one” as an indefinite generic pronoun etc.), but also in non-
canonical ways (e.g. “I” as a generic pronoun or “one” referring to a definite person, often the speaker him-
or herself) (see, for example, Auer/Stukenbrock 2018, De Cock 2011, De Cock/Kluge 2016, Imo/Ziegler 2019 or
Kitagawa/Lehrer 1990). These observations are based on empirical analyses of (mainly spoken) language use.
However, a systematic, usage-based account of such non-canonical uses is still lacking; in particular, one that
takes into account aspects such as (a) the division of labor between different pronoun types within a language or
variety, (b) the exigencies of the variable communicative ecologies of referential practices (from face-to-face in-
teraction to writing a novel), and the relevance of variation in referential practices between members of differ-
ent speech communities (including a comparative perspective). This panel, which addresses these aspects from
a usage-based perspective, will focus on the following questions: What practices with personal pronouns can
be identified? How is pronoun use related to the modality and materiality of language use? Can action-related
properties of pronouns be identified? In what ways can pronouns be viewed as solutions to communicative
problems and how do they contribute to the construal of situations? Which semantic or referential properties
(such as genericity and specificity, definiteness and indefiniteness, exclusivity and inclusivity, agentivity and
non-agentivity) are relevant in the process of person reference? Which contextualization devices do partic-
ipants employ in the non-canonical use of pronouns? Contributions to this panel cover different situational
settings of pronoun use, such as medical interaction or parliament debates, as well as different languages, such
as Swedish, Spanish, Finnish, Japanese, German or Lingála.
References:
Auer, P./ A. Stukenbrock (2018): When ‚you‘ means ‚I‘: The German 2nd Ps. Sg. pronoun du between genericity
and subjectivity. In: Open Linguistics 4, 280–309.
De Cock, B. (2011): Why we can be you: The use of 1st person plural forms with hearer reference in English and
Spanish. In: Journal of Pragmatics 42, 2762–2775.
De Cock, B./ B. Kluge (2016): On the referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences.
In: Pragmatics 26, 351–360.
Imo, W./ E. Ziegler (2019): Situierte Konstruktionen: Das Indefinitpronomen man im Kontext der Aushandlung
von Einstellungen zu migrationsbedingter Mehrsprachigkeit. In: OBST 94, 75–104.
Kitagawa, C./ A. Lehrer (1990): Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. In: Journal of Pragmatics 14, 739–759.

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Research involving languages you don’t speak: Reflections on


‘spaces of linguistic non-understanding’

Panel

Dr. Marie Jacobs 1 , Ms. Ella van Hest 1


1. Ghent University

In the era of superdiversity, many (socio)linguists aim to study phenomena related to multilingualism and lan-
guage diversity. This panel aims to encourage reflection regarding the methodological, epistemological, and
ethical difficulties and opportunities of doing qualitative research that involves languages the scholar does not
have any (or only limited) knowledge of.
To facilitate this discussion, we draw on the concept of “spaces of linguistic non-understanding” (spaces of LNU),
i.e., “instances in which the researcher, while collecting and/or analysing data, encounters (stretches of) interac-
tion which unfold in languages outside their own repertoire” (van Hest & Jacobs, 2022, p. 20). This phenomenon
concerns talk or text which the researcher observes but cannot understand. The presence of such spaces of LNU
can be tangible during data collection (e.g. when conducting participant observation of interpreter-mediated
service encounters, when asking interview questions with the help of an interpreter, when observing translan-
guaging practices that involve languages, lects, styles or registers that you are not–or not completely–proficient
in) and/or analysis (e.g. when transcribing, translating and analysing linguistically diverse data, when consult-
ing a translator to help process data).
Although spaces of LNU are–at first–incomprehensible, they do shape the researcher’s understanding of the
situation at hand. This is challenging with regards to the status of the knowledge generated in the re-
search project: conducting research that involves spaces of LNU renders researchers vulnerable to illusions
of (mis)understanding. This panel is, however, not only interested in the pitfalls of working with multilingual
data or in the measures taken to gain analytical control over such linguistic sequences, but it also aims to explore
the analytical opportunities which such research entails. As the presentations will reveal, unexpected rewards
may present themselves when the potential unknowability of spaces of LNU are acknowledged and explored.
We will discuss questions such as: How to make sense of encounters which involve locally incomprehensible
stretches of talk? How to ensure the ethics and the reliability of the study when working with translated tran-
scripts? How to provide a contextualised analysis of spaces of LNU and the perspective of research participants
that speak a language outside your own linguistic repertoire, without perpetuating the societal inequalities
non-understanding often involves? How do spaces of LNU shape, transform or even enrich the ethnographic
relationship between participant and researcher? What can be gained by being self-reflective about linguistic
limitations and ethnographic vulnerabilities?
In answering these questions, our panel fuels the scholarly debate on how to conduct research in times of
globalisation by bringing together methodological reflections from a variety of settings (ranging from mundane
conversations and family talk to speech in medical, bureaucratic and judicial contexts). We conclude that, as
many research settings are increasingly characterised by the presence of multilingualism, researchers cannot
shy away from linguistically diverse realities but do need theoretical grounding and analytical tools to capture
and investigate everyday realities.
van Hest, E., & Jacobs, M. (2022). Spaces of linguistic non-understanding in linguistic ethnography (and beyond).
In M. Victoria (Ed.), Researching Transculturally: Methodological Issues and Challenges (pp. 14–38). Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.

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Reshaping interaction in higher/tertiary education (HTE)


under the challenges of inclusion

Panel

Prof. Christiane Hohenstein 1 , Prof. Magdalene Lévy-Tödter 2 , Dr. Agnieszka Sowinska 3 , Prof. Bettina
M. Bock 4
1. ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics, 2. FOM University of Applied Sciences, 3. Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń,
Poland (Department of Experimental Linguistics) & Universidad Católica del Norte, Antofagasta, Chile (School of English), 4.
University of Cologne

The panel addresses IPrA’s special theme The shape of interaction: the pragmatics of (a)typicality by asking
how academic communication is or can be (re)shaped as an interaction that strives to be inclusive. Inclusive
interaction in higher/tertiary education (HTE) entails but is not restricted to e.g. subtitling, audio description,
sign language translation, simplified language (“Easy Languages”) and Universal Design for learning. Students
experiencing barriers bring with them their own resources and sensitivity for interacting, communicating and
acquiring knowledge. The panel brings together scholars whose research deals with communicative vulner-
ability and accommodation strategies, experiencing minority status, the pragmatics of asymmetric, inclusive,
accessible, and bias-free communication in academic interaction and related research on Universal Design.
Methods include multimodal analyses of interaction data, analyses of institutional talk/text/discourse/media
situated in HTE/universities, and research comparing international advances in academic inclusion. The panel
also focuses on methodological and theoretical reflections, bridging gaps between linguistic pragmatics and dis-
ability studies in HTE. New contradictory developments in interaction in higher education, such as aspiration
for more participation and increasing language anxiety will also be explored. The panel is going to answer the
following research questions:

• Which adaptations in actual academic interaction can accommodate students who experience commu-
nicative barriers, e.g., auditory or visual, for various reasons? What can we learn from their experience
of “minority status”?
• Which types of interactions in HTE bear which risks of exclusion and hindered participation, and how
can these situations and settings be described from interaction data?
• As interactions between people with and without impairments are often described as “asymmetrical” or
“atypical”: In what way are those interactions in HTE contexts actually different from “typical” interac-
tions? How do categories like the ones mentioned shape the research on interactions?
• How do terms such as “inclusive”, “barrier-free”, “accessible”, and “(dis-)ability”, shape institutional com-
munication? And how can inter- and transdisciplinary approaches reach more clarity on the terms and
help reshape interaction in HTE?
• In which ways can issues of diversity – e.g., culture, multilingual societies, the individual students’ lin-
guistic competencies in L1 (first language) and L2 (foreign or second language) and their intersectional
needs – be integrated into an approach that has a broad understanding of inclusion and relates inclusive
communication to accessible, intercultural and bias-free communication?
• What kind of competencies are acquired on the part of translators, mobility trainers and others with
intermediary roles?
• How can knowledge on socio-cultural, linguistic and pragmatic aspects of inclusive communication be
explored, shared and transferred internationally in HTE, given the great divides that exist, depending on
historical and institutional (pre-)conditions, more or less advanced inclusive institutions and education
systems, and provisions in recognition of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities?

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The panel is organised by the International Network on Inclusion and Inclusive Communication in Tertiary
Education (NIICTE), established at the 2021 IPrA conference. Its purpose is to strengthen interdisciplinary col-
laboration on inclusion, with a view to how linguistic pragmatics can inform practices of inclusion and inclusive
communication in HTE.

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Responses to news: Cross-linguistic perspectives

Panel

Dr. Michal Marmorstein 1 , Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed 2 , Dr. Xiaoting Li 3


1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. King’s College London, 3. University of Alberta

This panel explores the ways in which participants in talk-in-interaction display their orientation to prior turns
as ‘news’. The presentations take a cross-linguistic perspective, considering newsmarks, news receipts, and
other types of news responses across languages. Responses to news are an interactional resource with which
participants overtly manage their emerging transition from not-knowing to knowing. Responses to news can
also assess the type of knowledge that is conveyed on scales from ordinary to noteworthy, acceptable to ques-
tionable, and credible to contestable. Moreover, responses to news can accomplish affiliative work. Given the
multi-layered interactional work accomplished by news responses, they appear to be a fruitful site for the study
of participants’ display and negotiation of knowledge and stance (Stivers et al. 2011).
Based mostly on English data, existing literature commonly distinguishes between news receipts and news-
marks. News receipts (e.g. English oh), are backward-looking, and as free-standing items they typically
accomplish sequence closing. In contrast, newsmarks (e.g., English really?, is it?) invite more talk about
the news and can manage divergent expectations (Heritage 1984; Jefferson 1981; Maynard 1997; Stivers &
Enfield 2010; Thompson et al. 2015). The sequential implicativeness of newsmarks is related by some to
their semantics. For instance, English really is described as a means to question the validity of an informing
(Thompson et al. 2015: 77). However, news responses in other languages and emerging from different lexical
sources have been shown to accomplish different orientations to prior talk. For example, Arabic wallāhi (‘by
God’) has been shown to treat prior talk as remarkable (Marmorstein & Szczepek Reed, 2021). In Mandarin,
shi ba ‘be PRT’ (which can be translated as ‘is it’?) can function as a newsmark or display affiliation (Liu & Yao,
2021). The panel brings together cross-linguistic work which presents different facets of the co-construction of
news as epistemically, affectively, and interactionally relevant.

Jefferson, G. (1981). The abominable ‘ne?’ An exploration of post-response pursuit of response. In P. Shroder
(Eds.), Sprache der Gegenwaart (pp.53-88). Düsseldorf: Schwann.
Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. Maxwell Atkinson &
John Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 299–345). CUP.
Liu, H. & Yao, S. (2021). Some interactional uses of shi ba in Mandarin conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 181,
227-240.
Marmorstein, M., & Szczepek Reed, B. (forthcoming). Newsmarks as an interactional resource for indexing
remarkability: a qualitative analysis of Arabic wallāhi and English really. Contrastive Pragmatics.
Maynard, D. W. (1997). The news delivery sequence: Bad news and good news in conversational interaction,
Research on Language & Social Interaction, 30(2), 93–130.
Stivers, T., & Enfield, N. J. (2010). A coding scheme for question–response sequences in conversation, Journal of
Pragmatics, 42(10) 2620–2626.
Stivers, T., Mondada, L., & Steensig, J. (2011). Knowledge, morality and affiliation in interaction. In: Stivers, T.,
Mondada, L., Steensig, J. (Eds.), The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, (pp. 3-24). CUP.
Thompson, S. A., Fox, B. A., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions.
CUP.

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Revisiting ideologies of English in the Nordic countries

Panel

Dr. Dorte Lønsmann 1 , Dr. Janus Mortensen 1 , Ms. Marianne Haugaard Skov 1
1. University of Copenhagen

In this panel we discuss ideologies of English in the Nordic countries as a particularly interesting case in relation
to English and globalisation. Since the end of WW2, the Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and
Denmark as well as several semi-autonomous areas) have been heavily exposed to English, which is introduced
early in the Nordic school systems and has a large presence in the everyday lives of the population. We are
interested in how language ideologies around and about English are tied to ongoing social change in the form of
globalisation, migration and mediatisation. The panel contributions discuss how recent societal developments
in the Nordic countries have generated increasingly complex and conflicting ideologies related to English. By
investigating these ideologies about English, the panel will contribute with new insights into the responses to
and beliefs about the processes of social change which the use of English goes hand in hand with.
The panel brings together a variety of perspectives with the aim of exploring the complexity and diversity of
ideologies of English across the Nordic countries, and with a contribution from the Baltic region as well. The
neighboring Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) provide an interesting contrast to the Nordic coun-
tries, as they have been under the Soviet Russian sphere of influence, and the use and ideologies surrounding
English have only recently come to the fore, but potentially so much the stronger.
The papers in the panel show that for some groups, English is associated with opportunities for the individual
and for society to engage with the globalised world and the globalised economy; for other groups, English is
associated with identity work and performance as members of global communities of practice; for yet others
English represents a barrier for participation in society and a possible threat to national languages and culture
in the face of hegemonic Anglophone influence. The papers explore these different ideologies and how they are
linked with individual traits e.g. age, profession, linguistic background and community of practice membership
as well as with historical differences between the nations. Furthermore, as a language not everyone has equal
access to, English is linked with processes of inclusion and exclusion, and the panel will explore how ideologies
of English contribute to inclusion and exclusion in different contexts. Together, the eight papers in the panel
and the closing discussion will explore how ideologies of English are linked with social change, social identity
and social inclusion.

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Robust and flexible interactive language technology for


human empowerment

Panel

Dr. Andreas Liesenfeld 1 , Dr. Hendrik Buschmeier 2


1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 2. University of Bielefeld

Beyond flashy PR and AI hype, language technology has the potential to change many people’s lives, as it makes
available new interactional resources and communicative modalities. Better hearing aids for deaf users or
disaster early warning systems for small language communities, for instance. However, commercial technology
providers design for the masses and rarely take an interest in marginalized user groups, so there is a lack of
work on life-changing pragmatic technologies that provide artificial senses, streamline the shape of interaction,
or empower users to exercise agency in social life.
Building interactive language technologies for diverse user groups requires understanding human interaction
beyond common ability assumptions. And building inclusive technology beyond mainstream user groups re-
quires a critical look at foundational principles of interaction. At the intersection of studies of human interaction
and interactive language technology, this panel invites contributions by researchers that share an interest in
building better tools to support human empowerment (e.g. Buschmeier 2018, Cassell 2020, Dingemanse and
Liesenfeld 2022, Pitsch et al. 2009).
Starting from human-centered approaches to such technologies, we focus especially on tech that facilitates in-
teractions that, for people involved, may straddle the boundaries between typicality and atypicality, fluency
and disfluency, empowerment and disempowerment. These seeming opposites represent the space in which
any interaction takes its shape. The challenge is to use insights from pragmatics, conversation analysis, human-
computer interaction and neighboring fields to characterize the shape of human interaction with diverse user
groups in mind, and work towards applying these insights in a new generation of robust and flexible language
technologies.
Topics covered in this session include: mixed-method approaches to miscommunication in human-AI interac-
tions; patterns of universality and diversity in human interaction; human-in-the-loop approaches to language
technology development; multimodal communication and interaction; developments in human-centered AI;
human agency and pragmatics in the face of ubiquitous computing.
References cited

Buschmeier, H. and Kopp, S., 2018. Communicative listener feedback in human–agent interaction: artificial
speakers need to be attentive and adaptive. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems (pp. 1213–1221). Stockholm, Sweden.
Cassell, J., 2020. The ties that bind. Reseaux, 220-221(2), pp. 21-45.
Dingemanse, M. and Liesenfeld, A., 2022. From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and
diversity-aware language technology. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Compu-
tational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 5614-5633). Dublin, Ireland.
Pitsch, K., Kuzuoka, H., Suzuki, Y., Sussenbach, L., Luff, P. and Heath, C., 2009. “The first five seconds”: Contingent
stepwise entry into an interaction as a means to secure sustained engagement in HRI. In Proceedings of the 18th
IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 985-991). Toyama, Japan.

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Shaping humour in interaction

Panel

Dr. Esther Linares-Bernabéu 1 , Prof. Leonor Ruiz Gurillo 2


1. University of Valencia, 2. University of Alicante

Humour is a multifaceted phenomenon that relies on human attributes such as perception, cognition and emo-
tions. It is an everyday reality and occurs in all sorts of contexts and, for this reason, humour is a subject that has
awakened the interest of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, and, consequently, studies on humour have
been carried out in different fields of science such as linguistics, sociology, psychology, education or medicine,
to name a few.
In particular, there is a burgeoning interest in humorous discourse from a linguistic and interactive perspective
and research on this issue has brought fascinating results (see Norrick & Chiaro, 2009; Chovanec & Tsakona,
2018; Yus, 2018; Mullan & Béal, 2018; Haugh & Weinglass, 2018; Sinkeviciute, 2019; Attardo, 2020; Mullan et al.,
2020; Chang & Haugh, 2020; Ruiz-Gurillo, 2021; Gironzetti, 2022). In this vein, this panel deals with the role of
humour in different interactive settings. Contributions to this panel will take a pragmatic angle when analysing
different interactive humour genres and they will show that humour is an intrinsically human phenomenon
based on ambiguity that crosses many lines and boundaries, including gender, age or ethnicity.
Focusing on the shape of humour in interaction, several types of genres may be distinguished, taking into ac-
count humorous realizations (Tsakona, 2017). For instance, there are communicative contexts where humour
is expected (i.e., jokes, Stand-up comedy, memes), and participants are in humorous mode. Likewise, there are
other situations in which humour acts as a discursive strategy (i.e., conversation, WhatsApp, Twitter) and the
interlocutors sustain and co-construct humour along several turns, both in online and offline settings. Finally,
it is also interesting to analyse how humour is negotiated in genres where comicality is not expected (i.e., blogs,
online forums).

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Social meaning and Its place in pragmatics and


sociolinguistics

Panel

Prof. Marina Terkourafi 1 , Prof. William Salmon 2


1. Leiden University, 2. University of North Texas

The notion of “social meaning”– understood here as aspects of an utterance that convey information about a
speaker’s social identity – has long been explored in the literatures of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropol-
ogy. It is only recently, however, that scholars in semantics and pragmatics have taken up the question of social
meaning and of how it might fit into the taxonomies of the semantics and pragmatics fields. For example, in an
English speaker’s ordinary use of ain’t, simple negation is expressed, but there is also something more, which
might inform listeners of the speaker’s regional identity, social class, mood, personality, or a whole host of other
identity characteristics. What kind of information is this, and how does it align with the meaning investigated
in semantics and pragmatics?
Not limited to controversial forms such as English ain’t, social meaning is ubiquitous in language and language
use. Furthermore, it not only conveys social information about its users but can also be relied upon by inter-
locutors in order to interpret linguistic forms at a semantic-pragmatic level. Inspired by recent work such as
Eckert (2019), Beltrama (2020), Salmon (2022) and others, this proposed panel will investigate social meaning
and its place in the meaning systems of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The panel will engage with questions
such as the following:
1) How is social meaning conceptualised by different scholars and how compatible are these conceptualisations?
2) How can social meaning be categorised in a taxonomy of (pragmatic) meanings, and are new categories
necessary?
3) How similar or different is social meaning from related notions proposed in neighbouring fields, such as ex-
pressive meaning (formal pragmatics), indexicality (linguistic anthropology), performativity and perlocution-
ary effects (philosophy of language) and more?
4) In what ways is social meaning used by interlocutors in semantic-pragmatic interpretations?
Social meaning is currently being approached from multiple angles (experimental, anthropological, formal) and
frameworks, and our goal is to have as many of these represented in the panel as possible. Overall, the goal of the
panel will be to assess the boundaries and contents of the term “social meaning,” the meaning taxonomies into
which it might fit, and its potential to lead to new analyses of socially constrained variation in interpretations.
References

Beltrama, A. (2020), Social meaning in semantics and pragmatics. Language and Linguistics Compass 14: e12398.
https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12398
Eckert, Penelope (2019). The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority. Lan-
guage 95: 4, 751-776.
Salmon, William (2022). Social Markers and Dimensions of Meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 192, 98-115.

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Sociopragmatics of conflict talk and dispute resolution:


Mitigation, reparation, and mediation practices

Panel

Dr. Carolina Figueras 1 , Dr. Inés Olza 2 , Dr. Marta Albelda Marco 3
1. University of Barcelona, 2. University of Navarra, 3. University of Valencia

Conflict talk represents the type of conversational activity in which two or more participants engage in con-
frontational actions conveying different positionings towards the same issue. The dynamics of a hostile ex-
change often brings about an array of negative emotions (Hartwick & Barki, 2002; Greco, 2008). The sequential
nature of conflict talk implies that the opposing interventions are organized in successive turns. Conflict talk
unfolds as an adaptative process with different stages: initiation, continuance, management and (maybe) reso-
lution of the conflictive matter (Grimshaw, 1990).
Whereas, in recent years, the structure and components of conflict talk have been the focus of attention in the
areas of conversational and discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics (cfr. Evans, Jeffries & O’Discroll,
2019; Koester, 2017), much less attention has been devoted to the range of mitigation procedures that are applied
to alleviate, resolve, or repair the effects of verbal confrontation between the parts in conflict. In fact, when
a dispute ensues, participants may opt for two different routes: to escalate or to deescalate the conflict. The
present panel focuses, precisely, on the procedures that either intensify or mitigate the hostilities between two
or more parties (cfr. among others: Caffi, 2007; Olza, 2017; Figueras, 2021; Albelda & Estellés, 2021). Within
the mitigation set of practices, we aim to examine two main types: the ones directed toward the reduction of
the distance between stances, viewpoints, or positionings, and the ones which target the negative emotions of
antagonism and stress associated to verbal conflict.
We seek to shed light on how conflict is managed and negotiated in diverse communicative settings, either
directly by the parties in dispute, or through a mediated intervention with a professional (legal advisor, psy-
chotherapist, mediator, etc.) (Garcia, 2019). The following contexts are within the scope of our interest:

1. Ordinary face-to-face conversation


2. Online supportive interactions
3. Doctor-patient interactions
4. Mediation processes
5. Family therapy
6. Intercultural mediation

References
Albelda, M. & Estellés, M. (2021). Mitigation revisited. An operative and integrated definition of the pragmatic
concept, its strategic values, and its linguistic expression. Journal of Pragmatics 183, 71-86.

Caffi, C. (2007). Mitigation. Oxford: Elsevier.

Evans, M., Jeffries, L., & O’Driscoll (eds.) (2019). The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict. London:
Routledge.
Figueras, C. (2021). Mitigation in discourse: Social, cognitive and affective motivations when exchanging advice.
Journal of Pragmatics, 173, 119-133.
Garcia, A. C. (2019). How Mediation Works: Resolving Conflict Through Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Greco, S. (2008). The ontology of conflict. Pragmatics and cognition, 16, 540-567.

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Grimshaw, A. D. (1990). Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations. Cambridge:


Cambridge University Press.
Hartwick, J., & Barki, H. (2002). Conceptualizing the construct of interpersonal conflicts. The International Jour-
nal of Conflict Management, 15, 216-244.
Koester, A. (2017). Conflict talk. In Vine, B. (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace.
London: Routledge.

Olza, I. (2017). Metalinguistic negation and explicit echo, with reference to English and Spanish. In Roitman, M.
(ed.), The Pragmatics of Negation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 45-61.

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Solitude speech: Empirical challenges

Panel

Dr. Mitsuko Izutsu 1 , Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu 2


1. Fuji Women’s University, 2. Hokkaido University of Education

The aim of this panel is to bring together papers that address language-related issues on solitude speech (or
monologue), namely, the use of language with no ostensible intention of speaking to others. Solitude speech can
be vocalized or unvocalized; vocalized private speech is often assumed to be “internalized” into unvocalized one
through the acquisition of language (Vygotsky 1934/1986). Vocalized solitude speech is likely to occur without
any addressees, and if with any addressees, it only appears in the form of an aside or as a response cry (Goffman
1978). The presence of an observer (Labov 1972) is so influential that it may hinder the production of the speech.
Unvocalized solitude speech is known as “inner speech” (Vygotsky 1934/1986), and as the name suggests, it does
not have a substantial form. Thus, the data used for the research of solitude speech are not easy to gather in
the spontaneous form of language, which causes the research field to fall far behind conversational studies (see
Diaz 1992 for methodological problems of private speech).
Despite such difficulty, various attempts have been made to collect speech samples of solitude speech. For vo-
calized solitude speech, Hasegawa (2005, 2010a, 2010b, 2011) collected the data of “soliloquy” in an experiment
that asked the subjects to speak aloud their thoughts while alone in a room. Izutsu, Kim, & Izutsu (2022) con-
ducted a questionnaire survey to elicit utterances that the subjects consider they would produce in situations of
Goffman’s response cries (see Koguma & Izutsu 2022 for a similar line of research). Du Bois (2009, 2011) created
a corpus of solitude speech, which was collected remotely from a subject wearing a portable digital recorder.
The verbal manifestation of solitude speech can also be extrapolated through the examination of diaries (Hirose
& Hasegawa 2010) or the on-stage monologue of dramas (Caluianu 2021).
Though invisible by nature, unvocalized solitude speech can also be investigated through the literary represen-
tation of thought in interior monologue, off-stage monologue (Caluianu 2021), or reported discourse (Takahashi
2021). In psychology, various methods have been developed to explore the nature of inner speech: for example,
“descriptive experience sampling” (DES) (Hubert & Heavy 2006) and electromyographic recordings of lip and
tongue movements (Sokolov 1972).
Our panel is aimed at sharing recent findings on solitude speech, taking into consideration what kinds of
methodologies can be used to elucidate various issues of solitude speech. It will seek to address questions in-
cluding the following:

• How is it possible to collect authentic linguistic material of solitude speech?


• Other than authentic speech samples, what kind of data is available for the investigation of solitude
speech?
• Are there cross-linguistic measures that help compare solitude speech samples in different languages?
• How are linguistic (lexical and morphosyntactic) facts observed in languages useful for further under-
standing of solitude speech (e.g., “displayed monologue” in Spronck 2021)?
• How is solitude speech linguistically differentiated from speech for communication?

The papers in this panel will explore these questions through the investigation of specific issues on solitudes
speech.

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Sound patterns in interactions between human and


nonhuman animals

Panel

Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed 1 , Dr. Katariina Harjunpää 2


1. King’s College London, 2. Tampere University

The panel explores the prosodic and phonetic design of vocalizations made in the context of human-nonhuman
interactions. Such sound patterns may be found in human talk designed for nonhuman animals and also
in nonhuman animals’ vocalizations. Interspecies interaction has received increased attention in recent
decades. Several studies in Conversation Analysis and related areas have investigated pet-directed talk for
how it contributes to interactions between humans, such as Bergmann (1988), Tannen (2004), and Roberts
(2010), who focus on pets as ‘thematic resources’ (Bergmann 1988: 305) that humans draw on to manage
their interactions. Other work has begun to unpack interspecies interaction as an object of study in its own
right, for example, at the vets (McMartin, Coe & Adams 2014; Lohi & Simonen 2021) but also in everyday
interactions (Mondémé 2019; 2021; Harjunpää 2022). The sound patterns of human-nonhuman interactions
have so far been under-explored, despite their central role in the performance of the human-nonhuman
relationship (but see Simonen & Lohi 2021; Cornips 2022; Harjunpää 2022). Some attention in this area has
been on comparing pet-directed talk with ‘baby talk’ (Mitchell 2001). The panel seeks to bring together work
that sheds light on fundamental issues regarding the nature of the sound patterns that can be identified
in interactions between human and nonhuman animals; the role of sound patterns in the organization of
human-nonhuman interaction; and what the use, delivery, and sequential positioning of sound patterns tells
us about the engagement of nonhuman animals as co-participants. Sound patterns may include the prosodic
and phonetic delivery of verbal turns by humans as well as nonlexical vocalizations by human or nonhuman
participants.

Bergmann, J. R. (1988). Haustiere als kommunikative Ressourcen. In H.-G. Soeffner (Ed.) Kultur und Alltag (pp.
299-312). Schwarz.
Cornips, L. (2022). The animal turn in postcolonial linguistics: the interspecies greeting of the dairy cow. Journal
of Postcolonial Linguistics, 6. 209–231.
Harjunpää, K. (2022). Repetition and prosodic matching in responding to pets’ vocalizations. Langage & Société,
176(2). 69-102.
Lohi, H., & Simonen, M. (2021). Hugging and kissing a dog in distress. Litteraria Copernicana, 37(1). 107-122.
MacMartin, C., Coe, J. B., & Adams, C. L. (2014). Treating distressed animals as participants: I know responses in
veterinarians’ pet-directed talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(2). 151-174.
Mitchell, R. W. (2001). Americans’ talk to dogs: similarities and differences with talk to infants. Research on
Language and Social Interaction, 34(2). 183-210.
Mondémé, C. (2019), La socialité interspécifique. Une analyse multimodale des interactions homme–chien.
Lambert-Lucas.
Mondémé, C. (2022). Why study turn-taking sequences in interspecies interaction? Journal for the Theory Social
Behaviour, 52(1). 67-85.
Roberts, F. (2004). Speaking to and for animals in a veterinary clinic: a practice for managing interpersonal
interaction, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37(4).421-446.
Simonen, M., & Lohi, H. (2021). Interactional reciprocity in human-dog interaction. In J. Lindström, R. Laury, A.
Peräkylä, & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Intersubjectivity in Action (pp. 397-428). Benjamins.
Tannen, D. (2004) Talking the dog: framing pets as interactional resources in family discourse, Research on

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Language and Social Interaction, 37(4).399-420.

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Stance-taking, differentiation and (a)typicality in discourse:


Ideologies of language, personhood, and competence in
multilingual communities

Panel

Dr. Jacqueline Messing 1 , Dr. Kathe Managan 2


1. University of Maryland-College Park, 2. University of Louisiana Lafayette

This panel will examine scalar notions of typicality and a-typicality through an analysis of narrative,
performance and discourse data we have each collected as part of ethnographic observation and archival
research. Our fieldwork includes qualitative interviews and recordings of socially-occurring interaction and
public performance, both in real life and online during the pandemic. We focus on ideologies of language,
personhood, and competence in multilingual and multimodal communities across differing cultural contexts.
The social actors in our discourse include college students and political campaigners in the U.S., comedy sketch
participants in Guadeloupe, bilingual-intercultural teachers in Mexico, a deaf-hearing signing community in
Ireland and Ukrainian speakers codeswitching in Russian on Facebook. We explore speakers’ stance-taking in
interaction, ideological differentiation, and other pragmatic strategies they employ to compare and position
themselves, and others, with respect to contested notions of typicality and a-typicality. Speakers in our field
sites participate in local pragmatics and sometimes contest ideological stances through position-taking towards
goals of seeming more or less “local,” “Indigenous/non-Indigenous,” “Native/Non-Native English Student,”
“old-fashioned” or “traditional,” “deaf or hearing,” “modern” or “diverse.”

In each field site, ideological discourses about linguistic multimodality, nationality, race, discrimination, moder-
nity, gender and notions of expertise circulate through the nation-state and communities at multiple scalar lev-
els (Irvine & Gal 2019). Our analyses will consider: What constitutes a “pragmatic a/typicality” in communities
where Kréyol/French, Nahuatl/Spanish, Ukrainian/Russian, Non-Native Englishes and sign languages are spo-
ken? How do ideologies of linguistic purism affect bilingualism? How do ideologies of native/non-native English
speaker categories shape interactions between international design students? How does language modality ac-
commodation underlie notions of typicality and atypicality of personhood in a given community?
References (abbreviated):
Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press.
Carr E. & Lempert M. (eds.) 2016. Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. California: University of
California Press.
Choi, M-S., Roose, T., & Manion, C. (Forthcoming). Navigating identities within liminal spaces. In R. Jain, B. Yazan,
& S. Canagarajah (Eds.), Transnational research in English language teaching. Multilingual Matters.
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.). Stancetaking in discourse, 139-182. John
Benjamins.
Gal, Susan, & Irvine, Judy. (2019). Introduction. In Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life
(1-26). Cambridge.
Heritage, J., & Sefi, S. (1992). Dilemmas of advice. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in
institutional settings (359-417). Cambridge.
Jaffe, Alexandra, ed. (2009) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford.
Lee, J., & Burch, A. R. (2017). Collaborative Planning in Process. TESOL Quarterly, 51(3):536-575.
Managan, Kathe (2022). Stereotype. International Encyclopedia Linguistic Anthropology, Stanlaw (Ed.).
Messing, Jacqueline & Ramos Rosales Flores (2013). Syncretic speech, linguistic ideology, and intertextuality. In
The persistence of language [Festschrift Jane Hill], 291-318. Benjamins.

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Tannen, D. (2007). Talking voices. Cambridge.

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Storytelling about and over food

Panel

Dr. Polly Szatrowski 1


1. University of Minnesota

This panel focuses on how storytelling about/over food is used to support assessments, categorize and identify
food, and negotiate identities. According to Lakoff (2006:143, 165) “[w]hat we can and cannot eat, what kinds
of edibles carry prestige, how much we are expected to know about what we eat … are aspects of individual
and group identity” and “ ‘minor identities’ like culinary preferences and sophistication contribute significantly
to our sense of ourselves”. However, if identity is viewed as discursively constructed meanings constituted
by the interactive performance of a multi-faceted dynamic mix of identities (Butler 2004, Bamberg, De Fina
& Schiffrin 2012, Brunner 2021), these “identities are not created by the food that they eat per se. Rather, …
[they] are established, shaped and shared through the talk about food” (Koike 2014:182) and used to negotiate
interpersonal relationships (Karatsu 2012).
Interaction over food prompts frequent multimodal storytelling using the food as a joint locus of attention.
Building on research on storytelling in interaction (Sacks 1992, Labov 1973, Jefferson 1978, C. Goodwin 1984,
Maynard 1987, M. Goodwin 1990, Norrick 2000, Szatrowski 2010, Karatsu 2012), the panelists investigate:

• What kinds of stories about/over food are told by whom?


• What triggers the stories in the interaction?
• How do stories influence the assessment and categorization of food?
• How are the stories contextualized and used to establish, share, and shape identities?

The data come from focus groups on food in English and conversations during Taster Lunches in English,
Japanese, and German. In English focus groups participants use stories to soften their negative stances by posi-
tioning themselves as “others”, create distance and avoid taking responsibility for food evaluations. In German
Taster Lunches, food is used as a starting point for stories that anchor speakers’ evaluation and establish their
(non-)expertise. Storytelling expresses individual/joint stance(s), showcases identit(ies), and can place food in
a personal, historical, or fictional setting and express humor. Stories in Japanese Taster Lunches related to the
appearance, taste, smell, shape of the food, use of eating utensils, eating order, etc., while others were triggered
by an amusing association with something in the meal/conversation. The stories often refer to aspects that are
important in participants’ culture/social groups (Bourdieu 1984, Ochs & Shohet 2006). Stories about past food
experiences support food evaluation. Congruent responses and second stories confirm evaluations and create
shared identities, while stories that support differing evaluations lead to varying identities.
Results contribute to the growing body of research on multimodal stories told in interaction by elucidating how
stories related to food and eating are triggered and developed in interaction through language, the body, and
the food, and are employed to negotiate individual/group identities and interpersonal relationships. They also
contribute to cross-cultural understanding, food development and marketing.

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Student practices in educational interaction

Panel

Dr. Myrte Gosen 1 , Dr. Karianne Skovholt 2 , Dr. Marit Solem 2


1. University of Groningen, 2. University of South-Eastern Norway

This panel highlights student practices in educational interaction. While the traditional take on classroom in-
teraction is based on the teacher as being the one who is actively taking the lead in interaction, there is an
additional need for more knowledge on how students interact in different educational contexts. This panel
gives the floor to scholars from different educational settings to present their work with various perspectives
on student practices in educational interaction.
Recent work on teacher practices provides important insights in how teachers behave interactionally in the 21st
century classrooms. Studies focusing on more discussion-based approaches (e.g. Gosen, Berenst & de Glopper,
2015; Willemsen, 2019) for instance illustrated that teacher practices entail initiations that elicit reasoning or
discussion, such as open invitations (Willemsen et al, 2018), requests for opinions (Van Balen et al, 2022) and
utterances with downgraded epistemic stance markers (Houen et al, 2019; van der Meij et al, 2022). Recent
work on student initiatives in classroom interaction includes Batlle Rodriguez & Murillo Wilstermann, 2018;
Dolce & Van Compernolle, 2020; Duran & Sert, 2021; Kardas Isler et al, 2019; Merke, 2018; Skovholt, 2018; Solem,
2016a; 2016b; Waring, 2011. This panel offers room for similar contributions with analyses of student practices
in whole-classroom interactions.
Besides that, studies with a focus on peer interactions (e.g. Herder, 2020, Jakonen & Morton, 2015; Pulles, 2021)
that offer closer insight in students interacting amongst each other without continuous presence of a teacher
are well represented in this panel. From kindergartners working together to university scholars collaborating
in an online environment, the contributions in this panel focus on student practices in these different settings
in which they interact with peers.
All together, we are aiming to create an overview of contributions with an interest in student practices in a dif-
ferent range of educational settings. In addition, all the contributions take a view on learning as it is happening
in these settings. This ranges from learning to write, to learning to assist each other, to the learning of an L2.
The overarching goal of this panel is to discuss the current state of research with a focus on student practices,
as well as to discuss future research needed in this particular direction. Tom Koole, with great experience in
teacher and student practices in classroom interaction (e.g. Koole, 2007; Koole 2010; Koole, 2012; Herder et al,
2022; Pulles et al, 2022; Van Balen et al, 2022; Willemsen et al, 2018) agreed to act as a general discussant during
this panel.

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Symptomatic speech: A challenge for pragmatic approaches

Panel

Dr. Maria Francisca Lier-DeVitto 1 , Dr. Lucia Arantes 1


1. PUC-SP

It could be stated that Pragmatics has become a common source of investigation for Language Acquisition and
Language Pathology researchers, as well as for clinicians. The reason for such a theoretical-descriptive option
or convergence could be attributed to the fact that Pragmatics has been traditionally concerned with communi-
cation principles and with the nature of specific social interactions. Therefore, the focus of that field of studies
is directed to both the language users’ intentions to convey meaning and the addressee’s ability to grasp them,
i.e., to interpretation skills.This panel aims at examining whether the pragmatic theoretical framework and
methodological models have been consistently applied and incorporated in the above-mentioned areas. This
panel addresses questions related to the way interaction and communication concepts have been approached
in some representative Language Acquisition studies and, more specifically, in those carried out in the Speech
Therapy clinical field. It is here assumed that both children’s utterances and symptomatic speech logically in-
volve asymmetric dialogical contexts. It should be said that although psychologists, linguists and clinicians
have taken therapeutic interactions under consideration and tried to characterize specific interactional con-
tours in order to delimit their particular structural facet (Mondada, 1997; Labov and Fanshel, 1977; Gale, 1991),
issues proper to either children’s speech and symptomatic speech have not been extensively discussed. It is ar-
gued here that the extremely unusual nature of the linguistic compositions that define either children’s speech
or pathological speech determine the unique communicative quality involved in each interactional situation
they are implied. No doubt, it seems important to consider the existing inner difference between adult-child
and therapist-patient dialogues. Indeed, children’s speech and symptomatic speech promote deep unbalanced
interactional events. It is also claimed that this subject matter has not, so far, been properly and rigorously
discussed by researchers who resort to Pragmatics when dealing with such asymmetric interactions. Alongside
a theoretical exploration concerning how concepts and principles from Pragmatics appear in representative
works from both areas of Language Acquisition and Speech Pathology and clinical areas, children’s speech and
as well as symptomatic speech data collected during clinical sessions will be analyzed and discussed in order to
demonstrate the unique nature of asymmetrical interac tions caused by strange atypical speech compositions
such as those produced by children and pathological speech.The methodological option adopted places side by
side data analysis and the arguments raised and developed. The theoretical position here assumed is linked to
the European Structuralism (Saussure, Jakobson, Benveniste) and Psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) as fundamen-
tal theoretical bases regarding language and the subject speaker, as far as pragmatics is concerned, Austin and
Grice, Levinson, Parret and Verschueren are authors consulted and studied. This panel aims at establishing an
empirical exploration of the above mentioned theoretical questions.

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Tales from the South: Doing narrative analysis beyond the


canon

Panel

Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar 1 , Dr. Naomi Orton 1 , Dr. Liliana Bastos 1
1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Scholars in the field of narrative analysis have long argued in favour of a shift from the study of “prototypi-
cal” labovian narratives to those that flout the canon. However, definitions of what may be considered typi-
cal/atypical and worthy of study still tend to be set in the privileged research centres of the Global North. This
panel therefore seeks to unite those working beyond such boundaries in order to reflect on the shape of narra-
tive and interaction in the Global South.
The field of narrative research tends to be committed to the social and political agenda of decolonial contem-
porary applied linguistics (as per Moita Lopes, 2006), aligned with pragmatic perspectives of interaction and
discourse analysis. We further take the view that, guided by such an agenda, narrative analysis has the poten-
tial to stretch disciplinary boundaries - enabling scholars to unite detailed microanalysis of narrative practice
with methodological tools derived from disciplines such as anthropology and sociology to philosophy, facilitat-
ing collaborations with researchers from beyond their own immediate field of study.
By zooming in on the sites of engagement in which storytelling takes place, researchers may thus focus attention
on any number of the interactional goals for which narrative may be exploited: from the production of identity
and the contestation/reinforcement of beliefs, values, labels and political structures to the creation of coherence,
cultivation of relationships/affiliations and stirring of audiences into action. By understanding narrative as a
situated practice which offers snapshots of the wider discursive struggles in which social actors are inevitably
engaged, narrative analysis as a microanalytical tool allows scholars to reflect on such issues and the ways in
which they may be indexicalised and negotiated at the level of interaction.
With this in mind, this panel showcases contributions guided by this perspective and which seek to shift the
spotlight from so-called “developed” countries and the Western discourse and epistemes produced there, to the
fringes of the globalised system, so that the “Master Narratives” and canonical definitions of the Global North
may be reshaped (Boaventura Santos, 2007).
The papers featured have largely been developed in research centres in the Global South and discuss the ways
in which scholars have adapted theoretical contributions from the field of narrative analysis or have formu-
lated new concepts in order to prioritise the examination of issues faced by those whose stories have long been
silenced.
Sites of investigation are varied in nature and span the following issues: access to public health and power
dynamics in clinical settings; state violence, gendered violence and the erosion of human rights; forced migra-
tion and institutional racism; protest and social movements; media and newslike narratives; neoliberalism and
meritocracy, amongst others. The panel further proposes reflections on the relations of power which inevitably
inflect research proceedings and the ways in which these work to shape interaction in research settings.

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Telling/not telling stories in discourses about Japan under


atypical situations

Panel

Prof. Kaori Hata 1 , Dr. Akira Satoh 1


1. Osaka University

Several years ago, we could not expect what’s going on in the world right now. Since the beginning of 2020,
we have learned that all human beings are still vulnerable to infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Since 24
February 2022, we have also learned that a world war is not necessarily a thing of the past. 2022 Russian
invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed the international relations not only in the West but also in the East.
These atypical situations often uncover what is normally concealed, including, prejudice, discrimination, and
inequality, that is, something we can’t speak openly at ordinary times. This panel deals with telling/not telling
stories in discourses concerning Japan (and sometimes in comparison with other neighboring countries such
as South Korea, China and Russia) under situations deviating from normal expectations, found in media, gov-
ernment statements, interviews, and daily conversations.
According to Georgakopoulou (2011), stories include not only full-fledged narratives studied in Labov (1972)
but also tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared or known events, allusions to previous
tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell. In this panel, although we examine various types of stories, we
pay special attention to refusals to tell and stories on taboo.
Many of these stories are about prejudice and discrimination based on diseases, nationalities and races, and
they allude/refer to untouchable issues in Japan, such diseases as leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) and
schizophrenia, strict immigration policy, the struggles between Japan and Korea due to the memories of the
previous war, and so on. For example, one of the presentations investigates the interactions among multiple
Japanese participants living in the U.K., who are potentially victims of discrimination as Asian telling in real or
hypothetical stories when COVID-19 was raging around the world. It also analyses telling/not telling of stories
about a boycott of Japanese products in Korea when tensions between the two countries rose. Some Japanese
women married to Koreans tend to refuse to tell the stories with her Korean partners in order to avoid dispu-
tation, while others positively discuss and research the issue together to find the common ground. In such a
case, taboo is alluded in various linguistic/non-linguistic manners and strategies to be maintained as something
forbidden to tell in the society.
Through these presentations about various ‘telling/not telling’ stories, this panel will multilaterally reveal how
taboos are hidden in communities at ordinary times and how they surface at extraordinary times.

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The complex relationship between pragmatics and theory of


mind: Empirical evidence across populations and theoretical
consequences

Panel

Prof. Valentina Bambini 1


1. iuss

This panel explores one of the most relevant topics for the understanding of the cognitive status of pragmatics,
namely its relationship with theory of mind (ToM).
Following the Gricean idea of the centrality of intentions in the definition of the speaker’s meaning, theoretical
approaches have often emphasized the mindreading roots of pragmatics [1,2]. However, empirical evidence
is scattered [3]. Neuroanatomically, pragmatic tasks and ToM tasks recruit partially overlapping brain regions
[4], but in the behavioral response these two domains are not robustly linked. Very early pragmatic skills seem
to heavily rely on social cognition aspects such as joint attention [5], but data on older children depict a more
complex scenario where inferential pragmatic skills are related to a multiplicity of factors, not limited to ToM
[6,7]. Interestingly, recent data suggest that early pragmatic skills might predict later ToM skills, rather than
viceversa [8]. In atypical populations, both children and adults, ToM difficulties often coexist with pragmatic
difficulties [9,10], but their predictive role is debated [11]. Also, there might be differences across pragmatic
tasks [12], from more grammar-related (e.g., scalar implicatures) and vocabulary-related (e.g., metaphor) to
more social uses of language (e.g., irony), and even across different classes of the same phenomenon (e.g., phys-
ical vs. mental metaphors [13]).
Such a variegated landscape calls for a unified discussion, which is vital to get a clearer view of the cognitive
status of pragmatics at the theoretical level and to account for empirical data. This is the purpose of this panel,
which brings together scholars investigating the relationship between pragmatics and ToM from a multiplicity
of angles and with an eye to the multiplicity of pragmatic phenomena.
References
[1] D Sperber, D Wilson, Mind Lang 2002, 17, 3–23
[2] D Mazzarella, I Noveck, Language 2021, 97, e198–e210
[3] FM Bosco, M Tirassa, I Gabbatore, Front Psychol 2018, 9, 1453
[4] A Reyes-Aguilar, E Valles-Capetillo, M Giordano, Neuroscience 2018, 395, 60–88
[5] D Matthews, Ed. , Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition, Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2014
[6] D Matthews, H Biney, K Abbot-Smith, Lang Learn Dev 2018, 14, 186–223
[7] M Pronina … V Bambini, Lang Learn Dev 2022, DOI 10.1080/15475441.2022.2074852
[8] P Del Sette … S Lecce, Cogn Dev 2020, 56, 100958
[9] M Champagne-Lavau, E Stip, J Neurolinguistics 2010, 23, 285–296
[10] V Bambini … M Bosia, Compr Psychiatry 2016, 71, 106–120
[11] M Kissine, Language 2021, 97, e139–e160
[12] C Andrés-Roqueta, N Katsos, Front Psychol 2017, 8, 996
[13] P Canal … V Bambini, Brain Cogn 2022, DOI 10.1016/j.bandc.2022.105879

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The cross-cultural pragmatic study of intercultural


encounters: (Strictly!) language-anchored inquiries

Panel

Prof. Juliane House 1 , Prof. Daniel Kadar 2 , Prof. Meredith Marra 3


1. University of Hamburg, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3. Victoria University
of Wellington

The aim of this panel is to bring together research dedicated to the cross-cultural pragmatic investigation of
intercultural encounters. As the organisers of this panel argued in two recent books (House and Kádár 2021;
Edmondson et al. 2022), a key strength of cross-cultural pragmatic research is that it allows us to investigate
intercultural encounters in strictly language-anchored and bottom-up ways. Cross-cultural pragmatics offers
rigorous and replicable methods to study intercultural encounters with the aid of language-based evidence
only, and without relying on non-linguistic analytic concepts such as ‘values’ and ‘ideology’. As such, cross-
cultural pragmatic research also neatly complements intercultural pragmatics because it utilises a very different
methodological and ontological universe than the latter.
Notwithstanding the potential of cross-cultural pragmatic research in advancing the analysis of intercultural en-
counters, to the best of our knowledge little attempt has been made to bring together cross-cultural pragmati-
cians to systematically study intercultural encounters from a strictly language-anchored point of view. This
panel aims to fill this knowledge gap. We will request panelists to devote particular attention to aspects of
cross-cultural pragmatic methodology with relevance for the study of intercultural encounters. In particular,
we encourage panelists to focus on the problem of how it is possible to interconnect instances of pragmatic
misunderstanding which emerge in intercultural interaction with linguaculturally embedded conventions that
trigger such instances of misunderstanding.

References
Edmondson, Willis, Juliane House, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2022. Expressions, Speech Acts and Discourse: A Peda-
gogic Interactional Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The cross-cultural pragmatics of language and politics

Panel

Prof. Daniel Kadar 1 , Prof. Juliane House 2 , Prof. Zohar Kampf 3


1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 2. University of Hamburg, 3. Hebrew University
of Jerusalem

The aim of this panel is to provide a platform for engaging in cross-cultural pragmatic research in the area of
language and politics.
The organisers of this panel recently argued (see House and Kádár 2022: 132) that language and politics is an
emotively and ideologically loaded area. Because of this, it is important for the analyst to attempt to leave be-
hind personal sympathies and antipathies, ideological presumptions, etc. in the study of political language use.
Contrastive cross-cultural pragmatics offers itself as a particularly useful field for the study of political language
use. This is due to the contrastive take of cross-cultural pragmatics, which allows researchers to relativise both
their own viewpoints and the phenomena they set out to investigate. Cross-cultural pragmatics also enables
more anti-essentialist and non-ethnocentric interpretations of instances of political language use.
Our goal in the proposed panel is to capitalise on the above-outlined strength of cross-cultural pragmatics and
bring together high-calibre scholars who have worked on language and politics. The goal of the panel is not
only to compare political language use in a wide range of linguacultures, including typologically distant ones
(e.g. German–Japanese, English–Chinese, etc.), but also to extend contrastive explorations onto the comparative
analysis of various genres and modes of communication of political language use. We hope that the panel
will not only open new vistas of pragmatic research on language and politics but also provide new synergies
between scholars working on pragmatics and other areas such as discourse analysis, communication studies,
and media. To achieve this objective, we intend to advertise the proposed panel both on Linguistlist and mailing
lists of other academic communities.
Reference

House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2022. Political Language in Contrast: An Introduction. Journal of Pragmat-
ics 188: 132-137.

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The feedback society: Discourses, identities, modalities

Panel

Prof. Sylvia Jaworska 1 , Prof. Camilla Vasquez 2


1. University of Reading, 2. University of South Florida

Mechanisms for evaluative feedback have become enmeshed into the fabric of nearly every aspect of contem-
porary society. Spanning a wide range of contexts, social relationships and modalities, the production – and
reception – of feedback is always a discursive activity. Conceptualized broadly, feedback can take many forms,
for example: diverse types of performance reviews in workplace organizations (Correll et al., 2020); evaluations
of products and services in online consumer reviews (Vásquez, 2014); patients’ assessments of healthcare ser-
vices (Baker et al., 2019); as well as academic peer reviews (Paltridge, 2017), to name a just few. Several of these
feedback activities are underpinned by neoliberal ideologies related to organizational efficiencies, professional
effectiveness, or the constant project of improving the self. Feedback activities are never ideologically neutral:
they often entail power relations, gatekeeping, or other forms of control and surveillance. Feedback also in-
volves subjectivity and any act of evaluative feedback may involve unexamined biases, whether of a personal
or structural nature. Recognizing that acts of evaluation are never only about the object or focus being assessed
– but are also productive sites for identity construction and the positioning of selves – discursive feedback al-
ways includes stancetaking (Du Bois, 2007; Kiesling et al., 2018). Providers of feedback may engage in epistemic
stancetaking (Parini & Fetzer, 2019) to position themselves as experts, authorities, or otherwise entitled to offer
assessments and to make judgements. Often, feedback also involves considerations of face, (im)/politeness and
other forms of relational work that might be influenced by the socio-cultural context in which feedback was pro-
duced and received. As an increasing number of our social and professional activities take place in networked
contexts, many genres of feedback today involve the use of multiple modes and materialities of communication.
This panel brings together researchers interested in feedback as a discursive practice. We invite scholars study-
ing not only diverse genres of feedback, but also those who adopt diverse methodological approaches to the
study of feedback. Of special interest are forms of feedback that take place in professional contexts; types of
feedback (and/or responses to feedback) that appear in digitally mediated or otherwise networked spaces; and
genres of feedback that involve multiple modalities and/or materialities. Contributions address some of the
following questions:

1. How is authority or expertise constructed in feedback?


2. What entitlements are signalled by the individual(s) offering evaluation?
3. How do feedback-givers align with others, construct various forms of sociality, or engage in relational
work within their evaluative texts or activities?
4. In what ways do specific genres of feedback reflect cultural differences?
5. In what ways is feedback-giving influenced by social factors including age, gender, race, ethnicity, socio-
economic status?
6. How are various racial, ethnic, gender biases and stereotypes embedded and reproduced in feedback?
7. How do mechanics of power and control play out in the discourse of feedback and how can those be
discursively challenged or resisted?
8. How are diverse modalities (and/or materialities) exploited in discursive feedback?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The impact of participants’ orientation in space on the


functions of gaze in interaction

Panel

Ms. Barbara Laner 1 , Dr. Elisabeth Zima 1


1. University of Freiburg

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the study of gaze in interaction. However, most studies
have focused on static, often semi-experimental settings in which the participants face each other (e.g. Rossano
2012, Kendrick & Holler 2017, Auer 2018). There is significantly less work on the gaze patterns found in other
types of F-formations (vis-à-vis, side-by-side, and L-shaped F-formations, Kendon 1990). The aim of our panel
is to shift focus to these lesser studied configurations (see e.g. Mondada 2014, Stukenbrock & Dao 2019) and
to explore whether and how the functionality of gaze is dependent on participants’ spatial arrangement (as
argued by Auer & Zima 2021). This includes the question as to when and for which interactional purposes,
participants in atypical F-formations and mobile settings gaze at each other. In these formations, the bodies
of the participants are prototypically directed into the space before them and unless they turn their heads,
they are not gazing at each other. Thus, their transactional segments usually only peripherally overlap, or
at times, there is no shared o-space (Kendon 1990: 233ff.) at all, i.e. whenever the participants gaze to their sides.

The contributions to this panel address gaze patterns in various spatial configurations (static and mobile; side-
by-side, vis-à-vis, triangular etc.) and interactional settings (dinner table conversations, orchestra rehearsals,
museum visits, VR environments). Many contributions combine external cameras and eye tracking data to
analyze interactants’ gaze behavior but the range of technologies used to study gaze (or the lack thereof) even
extends to VR glasses. Given this divergence in F-Formations, interactional tasks, and ways to capture and
analyze gaze, we expect this panel to make a significant contribution to the discussion about the influence of
the setting and the participants’ orientation in space on the functions of gaze in interaction.
References
Auer, P. (2018). Gaze, addressee selection and turn-taking in three-party interaction. In: G. Brône & B. Oben
(eds.), Eye-tracking in Interaction. Studies on the role of eye gaze in dialogue, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 197-231.
Auer, P. & Zima, E. (2021). On word searches, gaze, and coparticipation. Gesprächsforschung Online 22, 390-425.

Kendon, A. (1990). Conducting interaction: Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Conducting interaction:
Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kendrick, K. H., & Holler, J. (2017). Gaze direction signals response preference in conversation. Research on
Language and Social Interaction, 50(1), 12–32.
Mondada, L. (2014). Bodies in action: Multimodal analysis of walking and talking. Language and dialogue 4(3),
357-403.
Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze behavior in face-to-face interaction. Nijmegen: MPI.
Stukenbrock, A., & Dao, A. N. (2019). Joint attention in passing: What dual mobile eye tracking reveals about
gaze in coordinating embodied activities at a market. In: E. Reber & C. Gerhardt (Eds.), Embodied Activities in
Face-to-face and Mediated Settings. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 177-213.

125
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of body, mind and technology – different


approaches to theorizing and analyzing digitally mediated
interaction

Panel

Dr. Andreas Candefors Stæhr 1 , Prof. Lian Malai Madsen 1


1. University of Copenhagen

Research on social relations, personhood and communication in current mediatized societies can adopt differ-
ent strategies when trying to capture, describe and understand how digital technologies figure in human life.
One strategy is to emphasize the newness of current conditions and how this entails new conceptualizations
and terminological vocabulary. Another strategy is to look at current conditions through existing theoretical
perspectives and consider how these can be applied to enlighten and explain human social life and interaction
in digitally mediatized societies.
An example of the first is the posthuman perspective that emphasize the intersection of body, mind, technology
and materiality and deconstructs the divide between human and machine in various ways (Pennycook 2018).
This is, for instance, done by drawing on terms such as “the extended mind” (Clark 2008) - a notion that of-
fers an alternative way of understanding human actions and thought by pointing to how technological devises
expand the ways humans experience and understand everyday life and store memories. This line of thought
is closely related to Mitchel’s (2003) notion of “mobile cyborgs” which suggests that there are no clear bound-
aries between “internal cognitive processes and external computational ones” (Mitchel’s 2003:38). Examples
of the second strategy are Rampton’s work on digital surveillance and governmentality based on the works of
Gumperz and Foucault (Rampton 2016, 2022), the application of conversation analysis to digital communication
platforms (Meredith and Potter 2014) or adaptation of Goffman’s approach to the presentation of self in analy-
sis of internet communication (Dell 2002). These two tendencies relate to wider debates in language research
about the academic economy forging once widespread and popular agendas and concepts to be denounced and
replaced with new ones, which are proposed as better to address new circumstances in a more accurate and
perceptive way.
In this panel we ask: Is new always better? When and why are new approaches necessary? We invite papers
representing both strategies in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of existing and new theoriza-
tions and analytical tools addressing the relationship between body, mind and technology related to digitally
mediated interaction and human use of technological devices. We welcome both application of and reflection
on analytical approaches to situated communication and more general theoretical discussions of the relation-
ship between cognitive and affective processes, communicational experience and practices and technological
devices in human social life.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of digital disinformation

Panel

Prof. Zhuo Jing-Schmidt 1


1. University of Oregon

Digital media has transformed the way information is produced, communicated, transmitted, and consumed
(Castells 2009). A byproduct of these transformations is the rampant spread of disinformation in the digital
media space where the boundaries between user-generated content and traditional mass media have become
ever more blurred (Terzis et al. 2020). This panel takes the lens of linguistic pragmatics on digital disinformation
where disinformation is defined as information intended for deliberate deception.
This panel is intended to draw scholars working on discourse in social media, digital language, media communi-
cation, and anyone interested in the role of language use in social media where disinformation looms large and
poses threats to truth that is central to democracy and a civic society. The complex nature of the phenomena
calls for interdisciplinary approaches in addressing the relevant research questions.
Selected References
Castells, Manual. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Terzis, Georgios, Kloza, Dariusz, Kużelewska, Elżbieta, Trottier, Daniel, and Konstantinou, Ioulia. 2020. Disin-
formation and Digital Media as a Challenge for Democracy. Cambridge/Antwerp/ Chicago: Intersentia

127
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of human-machine interaction

Panel

Dr. Rita Vallentin 1 , Dr. Miriam Lind 2 , Prof. Britta Schneider 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), 2. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Even though the field of human-machine interaction (HMI) is blooming and both computer science and lin-
guistics provide increasingly detailed insight into the communicative abilities of voice-based devices and the
ways humans engage with emerging technologies, pragmatic aspects of actual in-the-wild interaction are rarely
addressed. Existing pragmatics research on HMI largely addresses two areas, politeness and communication
breakdowns/repair strategies. Studies on politeness in HMI are predominantly done for English and don’t reach
beyond the use of greetings, thank you and please which are then dismissed as “mindless politeness” (Lopa-
tovska/Williams 2018) and indirectness (Briggs/Williams/Scheutz 2017). The repair of communication break-
downs is largely a human responsibility and takes place through repetition, reformulation, and adjustments of
prosody/articulation (Beneteau et al. 2019). Other aspects of pragmatics, e.g. implicature and presupposition,
deixis and reference, information structure, affective and evaluative linguistic practices remain unaddressed.
This panel provides a first step towards a richer engagement with the pragmatics of human-machine interac-
tion. Contributions will address a variety of aspects of pragmatics in the sense of language use in everyday
HMI, taking “a general functional perspective on (any aspect of) language, i.e. as an approach to language
which takes into account the full complexity of its cognitive, social, and cultural (i.e. ‘meaningful’) functioning
in the lives of human beings” (Verschueren 2012).

References:
Beneteau, Erin et al. (2019): Communication Breakdowns Between Families and Alexa. In: Chi 2019, May 4-9,
2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300473.
Briggs, Gordon/Williams, Tom/Scheutz, Matthias (2017): Enabling Robots to Understand Indirect Soeech Acts in
Task-Based Interactions. In: Journal of Human-Robot Interaction 6 (1), 64-94. DOI: 10.5898/JHRI.6.1.Briggs.
Lopatovska, Irene/Williams, Harriet (2018): Personification of the Amazon Alexa: BFF or a Mindless Compan-
ion? In: CHIIR’ 18, DOI: 10.1145/3176349.3176868.
Verschueren, Jeff (2012): The pragmatic perspective. In: Jeff Verschueren; Jan-Ola Östman (eds.) Handbook of
Pragmatics 2012. DOI: 10.1075/hop.16.prag.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of the referential process and its


interpretation

Panel

Dr. Carmela Sammarco 1 , Dr. Alfonsina Buoniconto 1 , Dr. Debora Vena 1


1. Università degli Studi di Salerno

This panel aims to promote and compare theoretical and empirical studies investigating the co-construction of
reference (Abbott 2010; Brandom 1984; Evans 1982) with particular emphasis on the pragmatic conditions that
determine its (mis)understanding by the interpreter (Morris 1938) of a speech act performed through different
modalities (written, spoken, dialogic-conversational, etc. (Voghera 2017).

Studies on comprehension show how the necessary ability (Balota et al. 1990; Verhoeven & Van Leeuwe 2008)
to decode the surface elements of an utterance is not per se sufficient for an effective comprehension (Corno
1991; De Mauro 1985; Ferreri 2019; Kintsch 1998; Lumbelli 2009; Orrico & Sammarco 2021; Piemontese 1996).
This is particularly true for reference comprehension (Buoniconto 2022). It is now established that, from a
pragmatic point of view, reference is the action of verbally pointing to “a certain object or individual that one
wishes to say something about” (Carlson 2006). In order for this action to be successful, the addressee of the
message needs to be able to recognize the relation existing between a linguistic expression and its referent, be it
an extralinguistic (Halliday 2014) or a metatextual entity (anaphoric encapsulators) (Berretta 1990; Conte 1991;
1996; 1999; Korzen 2015).
Thus, reference construction has a strong interactional-mediational nature (Auer 1984; Calaresu 2018, in press;
Clark 2004, 2022; Enfield & Stivers 2007; Jucker et al. 2003; Sidnell & Enfield 2017) and context dependency: not
only does the speaker select reference expressions following addressee-oriented procedures, but, since referring
expressions need to be worked out contextually, the identification of a referent by the addressee may be different
from that originally intended by the speaker.
In spite of the increasing awareness on the interactional nature of reference (co)construction, as well as of its
place at the semantics/pragmatics interface (Carston 2017), a systematic investigation on how this linguistic op-
eration unfolds is still to be sought for. The panel means to gather studies shedding light on reference compre-
hension from different theoretical perspectives (text linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies, semi-
otics, language teaching, language acquisition, language education, clinical linguistics, socio- and psycholin-
guistics, etc.) and applied to different study domains (spoken, written, text readability, L1/L2 interlanguage,
language disorders, etc.).
Interpreter-oriented variables that could be taken into account are:
(a) the co-presence or non-presence of the speaker and the receiver in the enunciative situation;
(b) the amount of information that the receiver and the speaker share;
(c) the interactional ability of the receiver.
Point (a) relates to the different strategies for comprehending and/or constructing the reference in the spo-
ken and written modalities respectively (different degree of textual planning, greater or lesser specificity of
the reference). Point (b) relates to the shared encyclopedic and experiential background which both receivers
and speakers may use to fill informational gaps. Finally, point (c) relates to the physical abilities and disabili-
ties (hearing impairment, aphasia, learning disorders) involved in interaction, which necessarily condition the
speaker’s linguistic choices to eliminate elements that may be an obstacle to comprehension and make infer-
ences less implicit.

129
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of trusting (artificial) others

Panel

Prof. Kerstin Fischer 1 , Dr. Bracha Nir 2


1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. University of Haifa

Trust is a necessary ingredient for much, if not all, social interaction (e.g. Weber, Weber & Carter 2003), coop-
eration (McCabe, 2003) and sense of belonging (Baumeister & Leary 1995). Furthermore, we usually assume
others to be truthful (e.g. Grice 1975), honest (Bellucci & Park 2020), trustworthy (e.g., Sheard 2015), and able to
fulfill their promises (Friedrich & Southwood 2011).
More recently, artificial communicators are pushing into our social lives, such as health apps, life coaches, mes-
sage bots, personal assistants, AI-powered human resource management systems, autonomous cars, and even
social robots, asking for our trust (or their developers do, cf. Anton et al. 2020). Methodologically, this provides
us with the unique opportunity to investigate what influences trust, and how it is negotiated and regulated in
interaction, since one of the interaction partners can be entirely controlled. While many psychological deter-
minants of trust (e.g. Lokshina et al. 2020; de Visser et al. 2020) have been identified, the aim of the proposed
panel is to investigate what linguistic, nonverbal and pragmatic strategies are related to building trust, how trust
is built dynamically in interaction, what aspects of the context influence these dynamics, and what strategies
could be used to make people trust the system less, given that it may indeed not be trustworthy. We approach
these and other issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, with linguists, sociologists, communication scien-
tists, philosophers, psychologists, information and computer scientists, engineers, and digital media designers
contributing to our understanding of the pragmatics of trusting (artificial) others.
We will discuss linguistic, nonverbal and pragmatic strategies related to regulating trust, studies on context
factors involved in trusting, and dynamic accounts of trust negotiation in interactions between humans, and
between humans and artificial interaction partners.
Anton, E. et al. (2020). The humans behind artificial intelligence. ECIS 2020.
Baumeister, R.F. & Leary, M.R. (1995). The need to belong. Psychological Bulletin 117(3), 497–529.
Bellucci, G., & Park, S.Q. (2020). Honesty biases trustworthiness impressions. Experimental Psychology: General,
149(8), 1567-1586.
Friedrich, D., & Southwood, N. (2011). Promises and trust. In Promises and agreements, 277-294. OUP.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Speech acts, 41-58. Brill.
Lokshina, I. et al. (2022). On building users’ initial trust in autonomous vehicles. Procedia Computer Science,
198, 7-14.
Mccabe, K.A. (2002). A cognitive theory of reciprocal exchange. In Trust and reciprocity, 147-169. New York.
Sheard, M. (2015). Truth and trustworthiness. In Unifying the philosophy of truth, 107-115. Springer.
De Visser, E. et al. (2020). Towards a theory of longitudinal trust calibration in human–robot teams. Social
Robotics 12(2), 459-478.
Weber, L. et al. (2003). The social construction of trust. Springer.

130
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The roles of new speakers in the revitalization of endangered


languages

Panel

Dr. Yumiko Ohara 1


1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

Increased attention to the situation of indigenous languages has been seen not only in academia but also in
the venue of international politics. After 2019 was designated to be International Indigenous year, the United
Nations further declared the period of 2022 to 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, a move
intended to promote awareness of the endangered status of many of the world’s languages. At the practical level
of language preservation and revitalization, however, these declarations have led language activists to struggle
with the challenging issue of how to encourage people, many of whom have become accustomed to majority
languages, to learn and employ indigenous languages.
Walsh and Lane (2014) highlight some of the issues involved in facilitating an increase in ‘new speakers’ of in-
digenous languages, including the fact that acquisition generally occurs outside of the home, that the majority
have made an active choice to acquire the language, and that the acquired variety is often viewed by community
elders as different from traditional speech and thus unnatural. Further emphasizing differences in how indige-
nous languages are acquired, Wilson suggests, based on his work with the Hawaiian language, that instead of
infants and young children “College-educated young adults are perhaps the most important of all demographic
groups relative to the advancement of language revitalization.” (2018: 83).
To be sure, the situations of indigenous languages vary widely throughout the world and there is thus no one pre-
determined way to engage in the revitalization process. Some languages still have a comparatively large speaker
base while others do not. Some languages, such as Hawaiian and Māori, are recognized as official languages
while others such as Uchinaaguchi and Jejueo are not and are still categorized by their governments as dialects of
dominant languages. At the same time, though, most endangered languages share similar sociopolitical histories
that have led to the power differences that serve as the basis of language endangerment.
Through presentations that consider sociopolitical histories as well as current situations, this panel will bring
together researchers and activists to consider the process of promoting new speakers of indigenous languages.
The panel intends to consider a diverse range of indigenous language situations and it also encourages panelists
to explore cases of both successful and unsuccessful indigenous language acquisition. It is through the inves-
tigation of the successes and failures across a wide range of languages that the panel hopes to raise further
awareness about language endangerment and advance efforts to preserve and revitalize indigenous languages.
References
Walsh, John and Pia Lane. 2014. Report on conceptualisations of new speakerness in the case of indigenous
minority languages. New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges. ISCH COST ACTION
IS1306.
Wilson, William H. 2018. Higher education in indigenous language revitalization. Leanne Hinton, Leena Huss,
and Gerald Roche (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization. New York and London: Rout-
ledge. 83-93.

131
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The shapes of the interaction between social cognition and


language use: Socio-cognitive processes in different discourse
activities

Panel

Prof. Edwiges Morato 1 , Dr. Erik Miletta Martins 2 , Dr. Patrik Vezali 3 , Dr. Nathália Freitas 1 ,
Dr. Rafahel Parintins 2
1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 3. Universidade Federal dos Vales do
Jequitinhonha e Mucuri

This panel (organized by the COGITES Research Group (Cognition, Interaction and Meaning - UNICAMP, Brazil))
intends to gather researchers who see routine or institutional social-interactional practices and related discur-
sive activities as prolific loci to better understand the functional, mutually constitutive, interrelation between
language use and human cognition. In this Vygotskian- Tomasellian framework, we advance discussions on
how language organizes and is organized by social cognition and how this dialectical relation affects the shapes
of interactions.
In a more specific way, we are interested in shedding some light on the following question: how can discur-
sive activities (such as referring strategies, social categorization, topic management and progression, linguistic
metaphorization, argumentative strategies) trigger and/or be triggered by associated models of social cognition
responsible for underpinning inferences which shape (a)typical interactions in routine or institutional contexts
of language use.
Panel contributors bring data in which discursive activities not only reflect expected interactional models but
seek to somehow engage interlocutors to reflect upon, and sometimes even reconfigure, the occurring model
or even other models of interaction. The contributions investigate socio-cognitive processes like contextualiza-
tion, conceptualization, and framing and their functional aspects capable of mobilizing a variety of discursive
activities such as the ones mentioned above.
Our interest is to see how these socio-cognitive processes occur in a variety of contexts, whether they are “typi-
cal”, from a linguistic and pragmatic point of view - public speeches to daily interactions - or “atypical” language
that emerges from pathologies like aphasia and Alzheimer disease. Finally, we gather discursive analyses that
shed light on the linguistic and social nature of human cognition as well as the cognitive nature of social prac-
tices and language use.

132
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The speech action of commenting across discourse types

Panel

Dr. Robert Külpmann 1 , Prof. Rita Finkbeiner 1


1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Commenting is a kind of verbal behavior that is omnipresent in human communication. In everyday conver-
sation, we frequently comment on contributions to discourse, on shared perceptive stimuli, and on all kinds
of situations. With the advent of social media and multimodal communication channels, it seems that com-
menting has become even more important in social interaction. Comments can be made using a broad variety
of linguistic forms, ranging from graphematic means (e.g., round brackets) to particular word classes (e.g., sen-
tence adverbials) and sentence types (e.g., exclamative sentences), as well as non-linguistic means such as emojis
or gestures. Comments may also take the form of whole genres, e.g., in legal, academic, or news discourse.
Most scholars would agree that by commenting something, a speaker performs a kind of speech act (e.g., Searle
1965, Posner 1972), or, more broadly speaking, speech action (Sbisà & Turner 2013: 1). It is far from clear,
though, how the presumed speech act(ion) of commenting is to be defined. While most speakers will be able
to apply an intuitive, everyday notion of commenting, a common linguistic definition is lacking. For example,
some approaches take comments to be higher-order speech acts (Grice 1989: 362), others would treat them as
one of multiple simultaneous functions of interactional turns (cf. Levinson 2017: 203), and yet others as larger
(inter-)actional patterns or communicative practices (cf. Sbisà & Turner 2013: 5).
This panel brings together scholars from various pragmatic frameworks who investigate the speech action of
commenting from various methodological, empirical, and theoretical perspectives (e.g., discourse analysis, cor-
pus linguistics, the minimalism/contextualism debate), across different discourse types and media (e.g., COVID
19 discourse, gender discourse, social media), and in a broad variety of languages, such as Spanish, French, En-
glish, German, Turkish, Hebrew, and Chinese, in order to gain a better understanding of the theory and practice
of this pervasive, but highly under-researched speech action. Research questions to be addressed in this panel
include:

• How can we linguistically define the speech action of commenting?


• In which kinds of contexts, discourse types, or media do speakers comment on which kinds of stimuli?
• What types of knowledge (general knowledge, text type knowledge, frame knowledge, common ground
etc.) do addressees need to understand comments?
• How can we distinguish comments from speech acts such as assessments, replies, explications, conclu-
sions, criticisms, appraisals etc.?
• How are comments related to interpersonal phenomena such as humor, (im-)politeness, or stance-
taking?

References
Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2017. Speech acts. In Yan Huang (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, 199-216.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Posner, Roland. 1972. Theorie des Kommentierens: eine Grundlagenstudie zur Semantik und Pragmatik. Frank-
furt a. M.: Athenäum.
Sbisà, Marina & Ken Turner. 2013. Introduction. In Marina Sbisà & Ken Turner (eds.), Pragmatics of Speech
Actions, 1-21. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter (Handbooks of Pragmatics, 2).
Searle, John R. 1965. What is a Speech Act? In Maurice Black (ed.), Philosophy in America, 221-239. London:
Allen and Unwin.

133
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Types of conventionalization of communicative expressions


and processes of their emergence and disappearance

Panel

Prof. Masaki Ono 1 , Dr. Koichi Nishida 2


1. University of Tsukuba, 2. Yamaguchi Prefectural University

We discuss the types and processes of conventionalization of communicative expressions with focus on the
productive and updating effects of the speaker’s considerateness to the addressee(s). For example, greetings
are highly conventionalized, but some are so conventionalized that they are not used any more (at least in face-
to-face conversation). This is the case with sayonara‘good-bye’ in Japanese. This panel attempts to clarify the
conditions in which the considerateness motivates and also discourages the speaker to use conventionalized
communicative expressions.
Previous studies on linguistic conventionalization, as those on grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, have
tended to focus on the emergence of specific expressions, rather than on their obsolescence. This emergence-
orientation is one-sided, and needs to be complemented by the study on the process of how conventionalized
expressions go out of use. In addition, considerate expressions have been mainly discussed in terms of personal
relations between the speaker and the addressee(s), but their acceptability varies with age, gender, group affili-
ation, and speech situation. This means that they are conventionalized to different degrees in different context
types or registers: the more limited range of registers a given considerate expression has, the less frequently
it is used in other registers where the considerateness in question is detrimental to communication. Thus, our
working hypothesis is that conventionalized considerate expressions go out of use where they come to involve
pragmatic difficulties.
Japanese is rich with partially obsolete conventionalized expressions. Of particular interest are the pragmatic
difficulties brought about by the mismatch between already conventionalized expressions and young people’s
needs as well as the needs from new styles of communication such as SNS. For example, tumaranai-mono-desuga
‘although (this is an) uninteresting item (for you)’ is a conventionalized introductory remark for giving a gift, but
it is almost obsolete among those in their 20’s or younger. Like sayonara, the introductory remark belongs to a
formal register, and causes pragmatic difficulties to the people who put more importance on their in-group iden-
tity with their partner(s) than on formality and modesty. On the basis of observations of actual usage, historical
change, and register-specific collocations, we show how and where pragmatic difficulties cause conventional-
ized expressions to fade out and at the same time cause new ones to emerge in their place. Our panel is intended
to show that considerations of considerateness in specific registers help replace and update conventionalized
expressions from a cross-linguistic point of view.
Selected references:

De Fina, A., Schiffrin, D. and Bamberg, M. (ed.) (2006) Discourse and Identity, Cambridge University Press.
Hopper, P. and Traugott, E. (2003) Grammaticalization, 2nd Ed., Cambridge University Press.
Onodera, N. (2004) Japanese Discourse Markers: Synchronic and Diachronic Discourse Analysis, John Benjamins.
Terkourafi, M. (2015) “Conventionalization: A New Agenda for Im/Politeness Research,” Journal of Pragmatics
86, 11-18.

134
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Who pays? Traditional gender roles as performances of


normality in mainstream media

Panel

Dr. Maximiliane Frobenius 1 , Dr. Cornelia Gerhardt 2


1. WWU Münster, 2. Saarland University

While linguistics and the social sciences have long questioned essential concepts of gender and binary het-
eronormativity (e.g., Butler 1990, Cameron and Kulick 2003), mainstream media still seem to perpetuate tra-
ditional gender roles. There appears to be a clash between the theoretical advances made and “normality” as
portrayed in the media, or, to use a loaded term, between “woke” and mainstream culture.
This panel investigates those media products that show “regular” folk doing “being normal”, discursively repro-
ducing apparently acceptable patterns of behavior (Garfinkel 1967). We assume that successful media products
such as long-running TV formats portray such patterns and make them available for analysis. To give two ex-
amples of reality TV formats broadcast in Germany: the show First dates (filmed and aired in various other
countries around the world), featuring blind dates in a restaurant setting, regularly includes a negotiation of
who pays, often ending with the men footing the bill. Phrases like “the guy pays on the first date,” or “this is
how I was raised” reflect the candidates’ understanding of their role, indexing (Ochs 1990) notions of chivalry
and tradition. Deviant cases seem to require more interactional work, while same sex couples cannot effort-
lessly follow established patterns. The product-testing show Hot oder Schrott (known as Big box, little box in the
UK) systematically has women doing “interactional shitwork” (Fishman 1978) and helping maintain their male
partner’s face. When deviating from such patterns, they are considered “not nice”. In both cases, interview
sequences allow the participants of the shows to reflect on their behavior giving access to moral accountability.
The papers in this panel enquire into the apparent divide between performances of gender roles in everyday
life as transmitted through mainstream media products and discourses about gender in linguistics and other
social sciences. They target representations, that is challenges or reproductions, of heteronormative relation-
ship models in scripted TV productions, as well as the co-construction of gender roles in unscripted TV dialogue.
The role of pragmatic markers in the creation of intimacy, and the verbal and multimodal means used in dat-
ing situations will be spotlighted. This panel features research using multimodal, qualitative and quantitative
corpus-based methods in the analysis of media products, giving access to the performance of and resistance to
traditional gender roles as constructions of normality.
References
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.
Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003). Language and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fishman, P. (1978). Interaction: The work women do. Social Problems 25 (4): 397-406.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ochs, E. (1990). Indexicality and socialization, in J. Stigler, R. Shweder and G. Herdt (eds.) Cultural Psychology,
the Chicago symposia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 287-308.

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“Keywords” in sociopolitical debates: approaches to struggles


about meaning in discourse

Panel

Prof. Philippe Hambye 1 , Prof. Barbara De Cock 1 , Ms. Coline Rondiat 1 , Ms. Nadezda Shchinova 1
1. UC Louvain

Some terms that are highly dominant in current-day societal debate (such as populist, woke, cancel culture,
sustainable development, fake news or integration) seem to be used with a variety of meanings depending on
the context and/or the position of the speaker. While these words are frequently used as if their meaning was
conventional and clear, this meaning appears at the same time to be extremely vague, and is often the subject
of explicit controversy. Yet, such “keywords” (Williams 1985; Jeffries & Walker 2017) or “formules” (Krieg-
Planque 2010) play a central role in political and media discourse: they participate in processes of classifica-
tion/categorization which are related to political orientations and ideologies (Heller & McElhinny 2017, p. 4-9).
Indeed, establishing who or what fits into one of the categories these keywords refer to – e.g. saying who is “pop-
ulist” or not, what counts as “sustainable development” or not – is a way to differentiate and hierarchize objects
(ideas, individuals, groups, practices, etc.), and hence to legitimize or disqualify them. Therefore, the way they
are used in specific pragmatic contexts – associated with other words in lexical networks or with certain targets
and realities –, makes such keywords the locus of a “semantic struggle” (Kranert, 2020) to define and delimitate
these words and categories.
This panel wishes to foster a dialogue between researchers studying these phenomena in different linguistic
contexts (see e.g. Schröter et al. 2019) and with different methodological approaches. It includes contributions
that look into the meanings of terms that could be considered keywords, and that also look into how these
meanings are being constructed in discourse and/or in interaction.
References
Heller, M. & B. McElhinny. (2017). Language, Capitalism, Colonialism : Toward a Critical History. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.

Jeffries, L., & Walker, B. (2017). Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years. Bloomsbury.
Kranert, M. (2020). When Populists Call Populists Populists: ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ as Political Keywords in
German and British Political Discourse. In M. Kranert (Ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disci-
plines: The Return of Populists and the People (pp. 31–60).
Krieg-Planque, A. (2010). La formule “développement durable” : un opérateur de neutralisation de la conflict-
ualité. Langage et société, 134, 5-29.
Schröter, M., M. Veniard, Ch. Taylor & A. Blätte. (2018). A comparative analysis of the keyword multiculturalism
in French, British, German and Italian migration discourse. In: Migration and Media: Discourses about identities
in crisis, ed. by Lorella Viola & Andreas Musolff. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 13-44.
Williams, R. (1985). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press.

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“Only joking”: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction

Panel

Dr. Chi-He Elder 1 , Dr. Eleni Kapogianni 2 , Dr. Isabella Reichl 2


1. University of East Anglia, 2. University of Kent

This panel addresses the topic of ‘offensive humour’: a catch-all category that includes teasing, sarcasm, put
downs and jocular insults (see e.g. Sinkeviciute 2021). Specifically, it focuses on attempts to produce amusement
by denigrating a specific person or group of people, characterised through a seemingly faux negative attitude
towards a target but without a claimed malicious intent.
The panel addresses a range of interconnected themes relating to offensive humour. It discusses both theoretical
and practical challenges, including the deniability of offensive and controversial messages, how speakers can
negotiate their level of intent for having communicated an offensive message, as well as the degree to which
speakers can be held accountable by others when they can always claim to be ‘only joking’.
These challenges are framed via different pragmatic practices via which offensive humour can be delivered,
from covert hints to wild exaggeration, and the interactional affordances they allow. It offers perspectives on
different modes of delivery, acknowledging the different interpersonal challenges that face to face interaction
presents compared to offensive jokes makes on social media sites such as Reddit, Instagram and Twitter. It also
addresses how a speaker’s public persona, such as of stand-up comedians or politicians in the public eye, can
influence the uptake of offensive jokes, such as the degree to which they are offered plausible deniability, or
how audience reaction can inform public opinion.
In sum, this panel bring together insights from current work on humour, offensive language, teasing and non-
serious talk, misunderstandings, communicative intentions, commitment, accountability and deniability to ad-
dress these issues, and we look forward to a rich discussion of how language functions as the critical vehicle
for committing offensive humour, as well as how it is perceived, negotiated and/or ignored by participants in
interaction.

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Panel Contributions
(A)typical users of
technology in social
interaction (organized by
Florence Oloff, Henrike
Helmer)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(A)typical use of smart speakers: Usage patterns of stationary


voice-assistants during the process of domestication

Panel contribution

Prof. Stephan Habscheid 1 , Mr. Tim Hector 1 , Dr. Christine Hrncal 1


1. University of Siegen

Smart speakers – stationary “Intelligent Personal Assistants” with voice-user-interfaces – are becoming more
and more popular in private households. Technically, such systems enable “hands-free” processing by per-
manently listening to the home environment and react verbally once addressed with a “wake-word” (such as
“Alexa”). The devices offer features that align with domestic activities and also play a central role in regulating
smart-home-applications, e.g. smart bulbs or heaters (Ammari et al. 2019).
The devices and their features are to be integrated into everyday practices of the household members: beginning
with the first set up, the user and the device start a “joint journey” of domestication (Brause/Blank 2020) – “joint”,
because it is not only the users that adapt to the system’s demands, but also the devices that can be adapted to
users (e.g. changing preferences, recognizing voice characteristis of the individual users, get connected with
accounts).
Along this journey, the users form strategies and routines to linguistically produce requests to the devices. These
strategies and routines emerge with sensitivity to the situation and the practical accomplishment (Porcheron et
al. 2018) on the one hand but also become sedimented on the other – just as different contexts of application do
(Bentley et al. 2018). In the research project Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: “Intelligent Personal Assis-
tants”, we investigate these devices and shed light on accompanying linguistic practices of household members
by means of (multimodal) sequence analysis. In eight househoulds, we therefore collected video- and audio
data of the actual use of smart speakers: from the first installation over the first few weeks of usage up to a last
collection phase 4-6 months later.
On the basis of our data and a methodological reflexion on typicality, we will distinguish gradients of
(a)typicality: The very early usage during the first installation (and shortly after) as an atypical use, in which
users behave obstinately, test limits and make fun of it, a typical, routinised use, in which users apply the de-
vices for known purposes without much trouble, and then once again atypical, “advanced” use cases of “heavy
users” who exploit the more or less entire functional spectrum of the devices. Furthermore, we want to discuss
the “non-use” of the gadgets over time as an (a)typical phenomenon.
References:
Ammari, Tawfiq et al. (2019): “Music, Search, and IoT. How People (Really) Use Voice Assistants”. ACM Trans-
actions on Computer-Human Interaction 3/26: 1–28.
Bentley, Frank et al. (2018): “Understanding the Long-Term Use of Smart Speaker Assistants”. In: New York:
ACM: 1–24.
Brause, Saba Rebecca/Blank, Grant (2020): “Externalized domestication: smart speaker assistants, networks
and domestication theory”. Information, Communication & Society 5/23: 751–763.
Porcheron, Martin et al. (2018): “Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life”. In: Mandryk, Regan et al. (eds.): Proceed-
ings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ‘18. New York: ACM Press: 1–12.

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Displaying and solving trouble related to digital devices:


Understanding non-experts’ smartphone use

Panel contribution

Ms. Helena Budde 1 , Prof. Florence Oloff 1


1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

This presentation will focus on less experienced users of mundane technologies (such as smartphones or tablets)
and what their situated learning practices within smartphone courses for adults reveal about typical difficul-
ties in handling and understanding digital devices. With the increasing availability and use of smartphones
and the growing digitalization of commercial and administrative services within the past 15 years, also older
and previously “non-digital” adults have to increasingly acquire basic skills regarding mundane technologies.
Previous research has been particularly interested in how (very) young participants are introduced to and use
mundane technologies in their daily (institutional) routines (Lahikainen et al. 2017, Parry et al. 2017, Sahlström
et al. 2019). The acquisition of digital skills at a more advanced age has been mainly investigated based on sur-
veys or interviews (e.g., Selwyn et al. 2006, Quan-Haase et al. 2016, 2018), meaning that the situated learning
of mundane technologies by older adults has rarely been considered (but see Weilenmann 2010, Råman 2022).
Therefore, from an interactional perspective, the precise challenges that less routinised users of mobile devices
might encounter when engaging with these technologies have not been sufficiently explored.
Based on video recordings of six introductory courses to smartphones (Android & iPhone) from different adult
education centres in Germany, we will explore moments in which the course instructors (and sometimes fellow
students) have been mobilised by a participant regarding a problem they encountered while handling the
device (related, e.g., to the navigation on the interface, or to the localisation of a specific item or function on
the phone, cf. Råman & Oloff 2022). Using conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis (Stivers
& Sidnell 2005, Mondada 2007, 2016, Streeck et al. 2011, Deppermann & Streeck 2018), we will explore how
non-expert smartphone users make an initially opaque technological problem publicly available as a trouble
(Kendrick & Drew 2016), and how they then make a more expert user, typically the teacher, inspect the device
and identify the problem. In order to take into account possible processes of understanding from the non-expert
users’ side, we will also analyse how the solution to the problem is then implemented and by whom, and how
the students acknowledge and receipt this solution (e.g., Heritage 1984, Golato & Betz 2008). More generally, we
will reflect on the way the presence and absence of ordinary technological routines surfaces in this institutional
setting, and how this can give new insights for conveying digital skills to “less typical” users.

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Emotional displays when blind people encounter problems


with new technology

Panel contribution

Dr. Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen 1 , Dr. Brian Due 2


1. University of Copenhagen, 2. Copenhagen University

People with visual impairment (PVI) increasingly use mainstream technologies, such as smart phones and dig-
ital assistants featuring AI in their everyday lives. The PVI’s limited visual access can prove challenging when
learning to use these technologies. This paper explores how PVI manage their conduct when they encounter
problems with using new technology and how this leads to e.g. frustration, anger or self-consciousness, observ-
able in interaction as emotional displays (Local & Walker, 2008; Ruusuvuori, 2012). The paper examines the
interaction between the researcher, the AI, and the PVI in the face of two types of problems: when things go
wrong due to faulty technology and when things go wrong due to the participants inability to utilize the tech-
nology correctly due to their visual impairment. Data are video ethnographic recordings of people born with or
with late blindness who are testing or using the Google Home assistant in their homes and the Seeing AI app for
shopping for the first time. Participants are equipped with the new technologies but their use of it is naturally
organized in situ, producing the data as semi-experimental. The users can be considered ‘atypical’ not just due
to their visually impairment but also due to their novices status with respect to technology used, leading to re-
current trial-and-error sequences. By applying EMCA (Streeck et al., 2011) to video recordings of these settings
we explore PVI’s practices for managing conduct in the face of challenges with the use of new tech as well as
their multimodally displayed emotional stance when partaking in these complex activities. This paper discuss
the methodological consequences of designing research projects that put participants “on the spot” in new types
of situations affects and contributes methodologically with reflections on and suggestions for conducting video
ethnographic studies of atypical populations and use of new tech. The paper also contributes to EMCA research
into emotional displays as observable in interaction.
Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, Stance and Affect in the Organization of Activities. Discourse and society,
18(1), 53–74.
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (2000). Emotion within Situated Activity. I Duranti (ed.) Linguistic Anthropology:
A Reader. (s. 239–257). Malden, MA, Oxford, Blackwell.
Goodwin, M. H., Cekaite, A., Goodwin, C., & Tulbert, E. (2011). Emotion as Stance. I A. Peräkylä & M-L. Sorjônen
(eds.) Emotion in interaction. Oxford University Press.
Local, J., & Walker, G. (2008). Stance and affect in conversation: On the interplay of sequential and phonetic
resources. Text & Talk, 28(6), 723–747. https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2008.037
Peräkylä, A., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (2012). Emotion in Interaction (Illustrated edition). OUP USA.
Ruusuvuori, J. (2012). Emotion, Affect and Conversation. I The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (s. 330–349).
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325001.ch16
Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., & LeBaron, C. D. (2011). Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world
/. University Press.

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Learning the ‘new normal’: Adapted practices in telework

Panel contribution

Dr. Elina Salomaa 1


1. University of Jyväskylä

In the spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced knowledge workers to telecommute and to change their
working practices in an exceptionally fast pace. The effects of the pandemic have been seen leading to a ‘new
normal’ where remote work plays an increasingly important role in society (see Due & Licoppe, 2021). In this
regard, by focusing on the transition phase from face-to-face meetings to remote meetings, it is possible to shed
light on how the employees managed to adapt their working practices to technological environment and thus
to turn their new working practices from ‘atypical’ to ‘typical’.
This paper examines how specific organizational goals are successfully accomplished through new or adapted
practices. The data come from the context of a development project in a Finnish business organization and
include video-recordings from both face-to-face workshops before COVID-19 and remote workshops during the
pandemic. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, I focus on the fragments where participants are
asked to share their news, ideas, and feelings one-by-one. This common practice both in face-to-face and remote
workshops can be part of an assignment accomplished in the workshop or a more independent task, usually at
the beginning of the workshop. Relying on the prior research (e.g., van Braak et al., 2018) that has shown how
the progressivity of talk may be difficult to manage in virtual multi-party meetings, this study zooms in to the
practices and techniques the facilitator of the workshop and the other participants used to secure progressivity
of ongoing activity.
The study shows how the facilitator had a central role not only in proceeding with the agenda of the remote
workshops but also in instructing the use of technology and guiding the participants to interact in a technology-
mediated environment. At the beginning of the remote work, through orienting to the other participants and
sometimes herself as well as a new user of a video-conferencing platform, the remote work was constructed as
a shared challenge requiring new routines. The findings demonstrate how on-site practices, such as proceeding
with the seating order, were managed to adapt to the technological setting by drawing on the affordances of
the platform (e.g., chat function and a participation list). By using these resources, the facilitator could secure
both the progressivity of the ongoing activity and the intersubjectivity between participants in video-mediated
meetings. However, only some of these new practices stayed in use, while others disappeared as users became
more familiar with the technology and remote practices (see also Mlynář et al. 2018).
References
Due, B. & Licoppe, C. 2021. Video-Mediated Interaction (VMI):Introduction to a special issue on the multimodal
accomplishment of VMI institutional activities. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 3(3).
Mlynář, J., González-Martínez, E. & Lalanne, D. 2018. Situated Organization of Video-Mediated Interaction: A
Review of Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies. Interacting with Computers 30(2).
van Braak, M., Huiskes, M., Schaepkens, S. & Veen, M. 2021. Shall We All Unmute? A Conversation Analysis of
Participation in Online Reflection Sessions for General Practitioners in Training. Languages 6(72).

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Orienting to a problematic text: a longitudinal study of


technology-mediated collaborative writing

Panel contribution

Ms. Reetta Ronkainen 1


1. University of Jyväskylä

Writing in workplace meetings typically features the use of textual and digital objects. Often, writing is also
a collaborative and longitudinal process. Collaborative writing requires constant negotiation on what is writ-
ten (e.g., Nissi & Lehtinen 2022; Balaman 2020). As a new technology, shared screens have brought about two
changes: joint visibility and shared responsibility for the text (Asmuß & Oshima 2012, Nissi 2015). Collaborative
writing has been studied both in co-present and technology-mediated situations in the context of single encoun-
ters such as meetings. However, even though writing in organizations is often a longitudinal process, until now,
research has focused mostly on the situated practices of collaborative writing and ways to advance interaction,
while longitudinal writing trajectories have not received much attention (see, however, Pälli et al. 2009).
Drawing on research on writing-in-interaction (Mondada & Svinhufvud 2016), this study takes a longitudinal
approach to the editing process of an institutional text, and traces how a part of it was framed as problematic.
Using ethnographically informed multimodal conversation analysis, I discuss how over the course of several
meetings two groups responsible for connected parts of the text discussed, revised, and finally deleted the prob-
lematic segment. The study focuses on the interactional practices through which the participants display their
orientation to the text as problematic, and on the meeting-by-meeting trajectories of these practices. The data
were collected over a period of a year and a half at a Finnish education agency, which was updating a policy
text at the time, and the participants represent different governmental agencies and education providers. The
working group was divided into five subgroups, each working independently on a part of the text. All meetings
were held in Teams using screen sharing, with a changing facilitator coordinating the writing. The data were
recorded using a screen capturing program.
The analysis shows how trouble sources in the ongoing interaction emerge and are indicated, for instance, by
silence at moments when a verbal response is preferred. The participants also orient to the unavailability of
analogue affordances such as hand-written drafts. The analysis of the trajectory also shows that before the
solution is found, the participants achieve a shared understanding of the nature of the problem. The study
sheds light on the effect technological mediation has on the writing process, and contributes to understanding
collaborative writing practices and technologized work.

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Running into a robot : “mocking up” as a way to typify an


unexpected encounter

Panel contribution

Dr. Heike Baldauf-quilliatre 1 , Dr. Lucien Tisserand 2


1. ICAR Lab, 2. CNRS, ICAR

Our analyzes draw on data that come from an interdisciplinary project about turn-taking practices in HRI.
As part of the project, a Pepper robot (Aldebaran) has been placed near the reception desk in a university li-
brary. The users did not have instructions and were not encouraged to act with the robot in some particular
way. It was foreseen that the robot would inform or assist them according to previously identified needs.
Entering a library and standing in front of a social robot is admittedly not very frequent, though it does not
necessarily lead to an atypical interaction. Library users could act with the robot accordingly to the desk setting
and treat it as a non-human agent. They could develop an interactional format that is based on experiences in
service encounters with humans (e.g. Asmuß 2007). But this is overwhelmingly not what they do in our data: we
will show how library users treat the robot as an intruder which leads to a participation framework that differs
from service-encounter-interaction.
Interestingly, users stopped and interacted with the robot even if they mostly did not display any need of
assistance. They showed that its presence did not carry any social affordances orienting towards a service
encounter, even claiming that they did not understand what they should do. They treated the robot as useless,
but amusing and categorized it as an entertainer or as an entertaining object; thus, they oriented to a gaming
interaction.

Following a multimodal CA approach we will show some of the “games” the users play with the robot (as a
participant or an object) and the rules they follow. They might treat the robot as a “buddy” who is addressed
and positioned as such. They might play a “service encounter” game by producing questions or requests that test
the robot’s capabilities and its knowledge. The interaction is then designed like a quiz where the library user is
not in the unknowing position (Heritage 2012) but instead the quiz master addressing the robot as a participant
who is applauded when he finds the right answer. As “rules” of these games we have identified so far that (i)
there cannot be more than one action in a turn, (ii) there must be a right and a wrong answer/way to answer
and (iii) the “doing acting” must be seen as such by other humans.
The last rule points to an aspect we want to highlight particularly: most of these games are related to a par-
ticipation framework (Goodwin & Goodwin 2004) where groups of users interact simultaneously or one after
the other with the robot. The users monitor that what they do is perceptible by their fellow humans and that
it can be seen as part of a particular game. In our presentation we argue that these game exchanges are a way
to typify (Garfinkel & Sacks 1969) the initial atypical situation created by the robot’s presence in order to make
sense of it.

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The Atypical Interactant in a ‘Smart Homecare’ Participation


Framework

Panel contribution

Dr. Saul Albert 1 , Ms. Lauren Hall 1 , Prof. Elizabeth Peel 1


1. Loughborough University

‘Smart’ technologies are often advertised as assistive devices for ‘atypical’ users. For example, Amazon Echo’s
2019 adverts show their Alexa virtual assistant ‘enabling’ elderly or disabled users to participate in everyday
activities like sharing music or going for a walk. This promotional strategy uses a techno-medical model of
disability by showing how a product can ‘fix’ a disabled person. Technology-led research often adopts as sim-
ilar model by designing for specific impairments or emphasising the cost-savings of replacing human carers.
An Interactional approach, on the other hand, starts with the participation framework of people’s everyday
homecare routines.
We draw on a corpus of >100 hours of video recorded by a disabled person and their care worker using a virtual
assistant for everyday tasks: eating breakfast, getting out of bed, getting ready etc. We show how they configure
the participation framework of a smart homecare setting to involve the virtual assistant in ways that prioritize
the active involvement of the disabled person. Our analysis focuses on the frequent troubles of mishearing and
misunderstanding by the smart speaker, and on what the implementation of repair in this setting can tell us
about the role, interpretation, and potential uses of smart homecare technologies.
For example, in Extract 1, Ted and Ann have recently reconfigured their smart home system, changing the name
of the voice-activated plug that controls the heater from ‘plug two’ to ‘heater’. Ted summons Alexa, but initially
forgets the plug’s new name.
Extract 1: Watch video: (https://bit.ly/repairex1)
1 TED: Alexa (0.6) turn off plug- (1.4)
2 turn off [heater.]
3 ALE: [A few t]hings share the
4 name plug which one did you want?
5 TED: Heater.
6 (2.5) ((Ted looks up towards Ann))
7 ANN: Alexa (0.6) turn off heater.
8 (1.4)
9 ALE: Okay.

Ted cuts off his turn in line 1 at “plug-” then replaces the reference to “heater”. But Alexa treats the initial TCU
of the command “turn off plug-” as complete by initiating repair, in overlap with Ted’s “heater”. The resulting
repair sequences reveal how Ann and Ted recognize and manage Alexa’s limited ability to use repair. Without
further detail at this stage, it is notable that while Ann’s summons “Alexa” In line 7, and her re-doing of Ted’s dis-
fluent turn from line 1 successfully achieve repair, she uses a strong prosodic emphasis that hearably chastises
Alexa for this ‘failure’. By blaming Alexa while repairing Ted’s disfluent turn, Ann inoculates her repair from
being heard as other-correction, which might call Ted’s competence into question. Alexa’s ascribed incompe-
tence as an interactant thus provides a resource for upholding Ted’s competence, prioritising his participation
in the homecare routine.
This paper contributes to research on the role of technology in ‘atypical’ interaction by examining a situation in
which the technology takes on the stigma of atypicality. Building on our analysis, we argue that this approach
provides a model for assistive technology research and development that moves away from a techno-medical

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model and focuses on how typicality (and atypicality) are achieved interactionally.

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Tracing routinization in interactions with smart speakers

Panel contribution

Dr. Mathias Barthel 1 , Dr. Henrike Helmer 1 , Dr. Silke Reineke 1


1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

We trace the development of the typicality of users’ strategies and routines in using smart speakers. Adopting
a (micro-)longitudinal interactional linguistic approach, we examine types and formats of requests to the de-
vices over time, analyzing user-device interactions we recorded consecutively during the first weeks of use by
initially-inexperienced users. We replicated Porcheron et al.’s (2018) Conditional Voice Recorder (CVR), record-
ing audio snippets of requests to the device and their pre- and post-context. Additionally, we examine the de-
vice’s respective log-files (i.e. lists of transcribed and recorded requests). So far, we have collected CVR-data in
5 German-speaking households, comprising about 300 audio snippets.
Previous studies on human-technology interaction observed how users locally adapt their conduct to the device
in order to get things done (e.g., Pelikan/Broth 2016, Reeves et al. 2018). By comparing different requests to smart
speakers over time, we do not only focus on local adaptions of users based on single case analyses but system-
atically examine “change over time across occasions, that is, across different instances of interaction” (Wagner
et al. 2018: 4). To monitor and describe the accompanying routinization process, we adopt a mixed-methods
approach, combining single-case sequential analyses with quantitative analyses of the recorded requests.
Longitudinal studies on the development of gaining expertise over time so far often focus on complex skills
and systems (like learning a new language (e.g., Hellerman 2008, Berger/Pekarek Doehler 2018)) and generally
report an increase in complexity and a diversification of interactional practices for accomplishing an action or
project (Wagner et al. 2018). Studies on interactions with comparatively ‘limited’ systems like voice-controlled
technological devices suggest the opposite: reduced complexity and less diversity over time. Indeed, first exam-
inations of our data show that speakers initially formulate open requests with a more complex syntax, bigger
variety of lexical items, and for rather ‘individual’ use cases (e.g. “aLExa, wir möchten ein SPIEL spielen? (0.4)
für (.) FÜNFjährige.” (Alexa, we want to play a game for five-year-olds.)). These requests are more ‘atypical’
in that they are often accompanied by disfluencies, repairs and other “frustrations in communication” (An-
taki/Wilkinson 2012: 533). After several weeks, speakers seem to use comparatively fewer and more routinized
formats for more task-oriented, standard procedures and typical use cases like playing a specific song, setting
a timer, or telling the time.
We systematically investigate which kinds of changes over time are observable in terms of:

• the design of open and routinized formats (grammatically, lexically, prosodically, and with regard to the
interactional environment)

• the types of individual vs. typical use cases

• politeness towards the device

• moments of ‘playing’ with the device, e.g. by testing its limits

• the number of failures after requests

We will discuss in how far (in)experienced users behave “(a)typically” and what exactly constitutes the rou-
tinization process: Gaining expertise in formulating (even complex) requests or decreasing complexity by lim-
iting uses to a few typical standard requests that have been learned to work. Our results will shed light on the
systematics and current limitations of human-device interaction in private settings.

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(A)typicality in narrative
forms and practices
(organized by Neal
Norrick)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Direct reported speech in funny stories: observations from


Italian radio phone-ins

Panel contribution

Dr. Daniela Veronesi 1


1. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

As a central activity of human sociability, storytelling in interaction has been examined since the ’80 by several
disciplines, including anthropology, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. While recognizing that
narratives result from an interactive process with teller and recipient playing an active role (Goodwin 1984;
Duranti & Brenneis 1986; Lerner 1992; Ochs et al. 1992; Norrick 1997; Quasthoff & Becker 2005), scholars have
focused on tellers’ contributions such as pre-announcements, recipient design, and reported speech (Holt 1996,
2016; Norrick 2016), on listeners’ ‘story-interventions’ through continuers, questions, collaborative completions
and heckling (cf. Monzoni & Drew 2009), as well as on conarration and epistemics (Mandelbaum 1987; Norrick
1997; 2020a; Monzoni 2005).
Within the field, humorous discourse has also been investigated with analyses of conversational joking and
humor in narratives (Norrick 2002; 2004; Ervin-Tripp & Lampert 2009), usually in ordinary face-to-face con-
texts, while little is still known about non-scripted humorous storytelling in media settings. A case in point
is radio phone-ins, studied primarily with reference to overall structure (Hutchby 1996; Thornborrow 2001;
Dori-Hacohen 2015), problem exposition and advice-giving (Traverso 2008; Hutchby 1995), audience partic-
ipation (Hutchby 1999), membership categorization and intimacy (Fitzgerald & Housley 2002; Rubino 2016),
dual-hosting (Ames 2013), and irony in political broadcasts (Livnat & Dori-Hacohen 2018).
From this background and adopting a Conversation Analysis perspective, in this study I examine a collection
of 50 short narratives (ca. 2 hours) from an Italian entertainment radio show, in which listeners are invited by
the two show co-hosts to share their experiences on a variety of topics presented within a play frame (Bateson
1972; Norrick 2010) – as in “Weird attempts at sanitations during the Covid-lockdown” and the like.
In view of institutional features of radio broadcast such as intentionality, sociability, performativity and inter-
activity (Hutchby 2006), I analyze how the hosts, as unknowledgeable listeners (Norrick 2000b), sustain callers’
live tellings of personal anectodes and co-construct their narratives, in that I focus, among a large array of
hosts’ typical moves – continuers, questions, laughter, repetitions, assessments, advices, pre-recorded applause
– on the practice of direct reported speech (Clark & Gerrig 1990) as particularly common in storytelling (Holt
2000, 2017; Rae & Kerby 2006; Bangerter, Mayor, & Pekarek Doehler 2011). This pratice is also pervasive in
my data, as produced by callers, but also and most relevantly as accomplished by the two hosts, in the midst
of callers’ narratives, both in form of (expanded) repetitions and as ex-novo, imaginary turns-at-talk attributed
to callers/further story participants. I thereby explore how the hosts’ direct reported speech is designed and
implemented in distinct sequential environments (opening and preface, story development, climax, closing) in
the service of different interactional tasks.
Final considerations are devoted to how, through direct reported speech, the hosts – as K- listeners (Heritage
2010) but also as participants in control of the interactional management of the phone-in conversation – enliven
and sustain callers’ storytelling, thus enhancing their potential humor and rendering them as “funny” for the
listening audience.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gesture expressivity in storytelling interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Chris Rühlemann 1


1. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Storytelling is driven by emotion. Its key function is not to share information about events but to share the
emotions evoked by the events, a process referred to as emotion contagion. How emotions in storytellings are
expressed verbally has been shown by Labov. How they are expressed nonverbally is still seriously under-
researched. This paper aims to shed light on the role of gestures in emotion expression in storytelling. Specif-
ically, the paper asks whether an increase can be observed in gesture expressivity toward the story climax.
The data come from the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). Storytellings were identified and
gestures in them were annotated for a number of criteria including gesture size, force, speed, etc. Based on
the Gesture Expressivity Index, the development of gesture expressivity from story beginning to story climax
is measured. It is found that typically gestures gain in expressivity as the storytelling progresses toward the
climax. Counterexamples and reasons for their lack or loss in gesture expressivity are discussed.

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Identity of a story? Similarities and differences in oral history


narrative typicality

Panel contribution

Dr. Jiří Kocián 1 , Dr. Jakub Mlynář 2 , Dr. Karin Hofmeisterová 1 , Mr. Hryhorii Maliukov 1
1. Charles University, 2. HES-SO Valais/Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

Oral history (OH) has become one of the important procedures to connect personal stories with histori-
cal events, while undergoing recent transformations and developments under the conditions of digital “(de-
)contextualization” ([5], [3]). A result of OH digitalization is the simultaneous accessibility of several interviews
conducted with the same narrator under altered circumstances.
Presenting a primarily methodological contribution, this paper deals with typicality in narrative practices by
examining the “identity of a story” in repeated OH tellings. We address a phenomenon that was previously
described as clusters of ideas [1] and as narrative strategies [4], related to “typical” passages in OH retellings. We
provide detailed analysis of interviews with E. B., a Holocaust survivor who had narrated her life story for the
Fortunoff Archive (1979) and for the Visual History Archive (1997). She tells the recognizably “same” episode
both times, illustrating changes introduced by the Nazi Germany’s invasion to Czechoslovakia. Consider the
excerpts below:
“… the German had taken over directing the traffic, and it was kind of a really plastic illustration of the conflict of
power. The two of them standing there and the German taking over. We have had no warning at all.” (FA)
“… there was this German soldier who took over directing traffic from the Czech policeman, and the Czech po-
liceman stood there and didn’t know what to do. So, nobody had known, we had no warning, I do not know why,
because we had radios.” (VHA)
Distinguishing narrative and interactional layer of OH interviews [2], we propose a conceptual scheme for com-
parative analysis. On the narrative layer, the life story segments before and after give clues for sense-making and
reflexively constitute the narrative environment, leading to “structural variation” in the life story. Interaction-
ally, the specific features of OH as a situated praxis contribute to the story’s identity within collective memory
processes, leading to “discursive variation” in the life story. Structural variation underlines similarities and
differences in the sequential ordering of the components of the life story; discursive variation regards each nar-
rative component as locally produced (linguistically/multimodally) during the interview. The variation along
these dimensions is detectable due to the coherence established through the institutional framework, which
provides the warrant for comparability and incorporates the development on a societal temporal scale.
REFERENCES

[1] Chafe, W. 1998. Things we can learn from repeated tellings of the same experience. Narrative Inquiry, 8:
269–285.
[2] Mlynář, J. 2020. “I’ll tell you later on”: Proleptic and analeptic tying devices in oral history interviews.
Narrative Inquiry 30(1): 161–184.
[3] Mlynář, J., Kocián, J., & Hofmeisterová, K. 2022. How “tools” produce “data”: searching in a large digital
corpus of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies. In G. Zaagsma et al. (Eds.), Jewish Studies in the Digital Age (pp.
65–88). De Gruyter.
[4] Norrick, N. R. 2000. Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk. John Benjamins.
[5] Pagenstecher, C. 2018. Testimonies in digital environments: comparing and (de-)contextualising interviews
with Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. Oral History 46(2): 109–118.

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Narrating the present into the past

Panel contribution

Dr. Tanima Bagchi 1


1. Indian Institute of Management Indore

This paper analyzes narrative structures wherein a plot situated in present time is interspersed with past events,
analyzing three Bengali feature films – Nayak (1966), Aakaler Sandhane (1980), and Agantuk (1991) – from a
sociopragmatic perspective. In a dream sequence in Nayak (1966) the main character visualizes himself sur-
rounded by money and later falling into a pit where he dies. This sequence addresses the audience while the
Teller is backgrounded: spatiotemporal distance increases between Teller and Addressee and deceases between
Tale and Addressee. Later, he narrates his dream to with two layers of narration – firstly, decreased distance be-
tween Teller and Addressee within plot itself; secondly, decreased distance between Tale and Addressee (here,
audience). The first layer confirms authority of Teller over Addressee and another power exerted by Addressee
through validation of the narrative. In a second layer of narration, the scene is testimony to authority of Tale
over both Teller and Addressee because the plot remains unaffected, irrespective of any change in power di-
mensions of Teller and Addressee. When the main character utters,
hmmm dekhlam je ami takar chorabalir moddhye dube jachhi shonkor da icche korlei amae tulte parto kintu kintu
tullo na aar…ami…uff sei bibhotsho byaepar
(translation. ‘hmmm, I saw that I am drowning in a quicksand of notes. Brother Shankar could have saved me
but he did not. And…I…uff, such a fearful situation!”)
narration starts with past tense of the verb daekh a ‘to see’ as in ‘dekh -l-am’ (see-PST-1) and continues with present
perfect tense as in ‘dub-e ja-ch -i’ (drown-CNVB go-PRS.PROG-1), again reverts to past tense as in ‘ich e kor-l-e-i ’
(wish do-PST-3-EMPH) and in ‘tul-l-o na’ (bring up-PST-3 NEG). A similar structure is observed again later when
main character narrates a past incident which triggered the beginning of his career,
Jyoti aekbar aekta bhalo offer niye ashe oi debi choudhuranir tate baaper part korto mukundo lahiri aar amar
okhanei lobh edike pujo eshe gachhe club e khub jor rehearsal cholchhe
(translation. ‘One time Jyoti had come with a good offer regarding Debi Choudhurani. Mukund Lahiri was to
play the father’s role, and that made me greedy. Meanwhile Pujo was here, and rehearsal was in full swing at
the club.’)
while most of the verbs appear in present tense, for example: a) niy-e ash-e (take-CNVB come-PRS-3) ‘brings’; b)
esh-e ga-ch -e (come-CNVB go-PRS.PRF-3) ‘has come’; c) chol-ch -e (walk-PRS.PROG-3) ‘is continuing’, the statement
about Mukund Lahiri has a past tense of the verb ‘do’ as in ‘kor-to’ (do-PST) ‘did’. This switching from present
tense to past tense and back corresponds to higher involvement of Teller as compared to scenes where focus is
another entity. To summarize, while typical narrative in Bangla involves both Teller and Addressee leveraging
their individual powers in successful rendition of Tale, plots involving narration of past events assign higher
authority to Tale leading to an (a)typical spatiotemporal relationship between three essential elements of a
narrative.
Keywords: narrative, film, past, spatiotemporal, Bangla

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sharing mishaps and errors: Narrative comments on internet


cooking sites

Panel contribution

Prof. Neal Norrick 1


1. saarland university

In my paper I investigate comments on internet cooking sites reporting errors and mishaps on the way to an
account of failure narratives generally.
Examination of narrative comments on cooking sites finds reports of success typical and reports of mishaps
atypical. Comments are responses to recipes, and they pattern like second pair parts: Reporting success in
response to a recipe (any set of instructions) is like saying yes and agreeing with a foregoing suggestion, as
treated in preference theoretical descriptions, and the typical form is short and direct. Admissions of errors
pattern like dispreferred turns with delays, hedges, and accounts. Even when the miscreant accepts blame,
dispreferred features appear, but attempts to disavow blame are more highly marked.
In keeping with the strategy of brevity and directness, minimal narrative chunks rely on the rich context of
shop talk in a community of practice to establish reference and create coherence. Shared presuppositions about
cooking, ingredients, using recipes and enjoying food enable construction and interpretation of such condensed
comments.
I made this today and YUM!!! It was so delicious and my husband loved it!
By contrast, reports of frustrations and mistakes contain the prefaces, hedges and accounts typical of dispre-
ferred turns, as exemplified below. Comments reporting failures display two alternatives: one accepting blame
and saying what went wrong, another assigning blame to the recipe. This comment includes acceptance of
blame, while the recipe remains unassailable.
1 It’s my fault.
2 the recipe does say to marinate the shrimp for 10 minutes..
3 since it was step 1 that’s what I did first,
4 and the shrimp basically “cooked” in the lemon juice
5 while I was busy cooking the orzo.
6 The flavors in this dish were super yummy,
7 but overall my dish was a flop because my shrimp were so rubbery.
In line with preference theory, this report of failure is longer, less direct, hedged and sprinkled with accounts
like “since it was step 1” and “I was busy with cooking the orzo.” Note details of what she did wrong, and her
goal of helping others avoid the mistake. Comments divulging errors work less like confessions or pleas for
sympathy than sharing experiences in a community of practice.
By way of comparison, I consider parallel comments from other websites and everyday conversation as well
as “Screw up stories” on the internet, often concerning mistakes at work, where much more is at stake than in
trying out recipes at home.
Overall, I find significant differences in narrative strategies between accepting and disavowing blame. Im-
portant factors are perception of relative damage done and stance toward the audience as fellow sufferers,
members of a community of practice or casually interested observers looking for a laugh. In any case, analy-
sis in terms of preference organization profitably applies to narratives of success and failure on instructional
websites, and this extends to narratives of mistakes in other internet interactions and everyday conversation.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social norms for narrative tellability within a


WWII-remembrance community of practice

Panel contribution

Dr. Kim Schoofs 1 , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop 1


1. KU Leuven

Communities of practice (CofPs) are centered around particular “socially relevant traits and activities” (De Fina,
2007, p. 378), in the course of which typical practices emerge. These practices often comprise the construction
of “a linguistic style” (Eckert, 2006, p. 683) which can consist of “specialised terminology and linguistic routines”
(Holmes & Meyerhoff, 1999, p. 176). In this study, the focus will not only be on the linguistic style, but also the
narrative style of a highly specific CofP – i.e. the CofP related to the testimony culture originating from WWII.
Specifically, we scrutinize which social norms exist in the CofP with regards to storytelling and in particular
narrative tellability.
The concept of tellability stipulates it is only worthwhile to tell stories that pass the lower tellability-boundary
by being sufficiently surprising or important (see Sacks, 1992, pp. 773-783), yet not too surprising as they may
otherwise cross into the “dark side of tellability” (Norrick, 2005, p. 323). In particular, we scrutinize tellability-
boundaries in a corpus of WWII-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors. As the social
space of the camps was “a distorted reflection of the normal social space outside the camps” (Suderland, 2013, p.
163), these WWII-narratives offer us a window into how a storyworld defined by a unique and highly complex
set of social norms can affect the specific CofP’s tellability-boundaries.
Methodologically, we apply a narrative as social practice approach (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008) to tap
into the reflexive link between the social norms within the WWII-remembrance CofP and the tellability of its
members’ stories. In particular, our analysis first focuses on the interactional treatment of typically taboo topics
(e.g. scatological themes) and from this emically oriented study of the negotiation of these topics, we could
derive these topics did not cause narratives to cross the upper tellability-boundary, but instead received in-depth
interactional attention. Second, other negotiation sequences between narrators and their interactants revealed
CofP-specific tellability norms which – if not aligned with – did cause narrators’ stories to breach the upper
tellability-boundary. In particular, these CofP-norms require narratives to appear truthful and for identity work
to align with a clear victim-perpetrator opposition. Overall, our analysis thus revealed the WWII-remembrance
CofP to be ruled by a complex and specific set of tellability norms.
References
De Fina, A. (2007). Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice. Language
in Society, 36(3), 371-392.
De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Analysing narratives as practices. Qualitative Research, 8(3), 379-387.
Eckert, P. (2006). Communities of Practice. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2 ed.,
pp. 683-685). Elsevier.
Holmes, J., & Meyerhoff, M. (1999). The Community of Practice: Theories and Methodologies in Language and
Gender Research. Language in Society, 28(2), 173-183.
Norrick, N. (2005). The dark side of tellability. Narrative Inquiry, 15(2), 323-343.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (Vol. 1 & 2). Basil Blackwell.
Suderland, M. (2013). Inside concentration camps: social life at the extremes. Wiley.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Strategic (A)Typical Narratives of Food Trends on Instagram

Panel contribution

Dr. Kelsi Matwick 1 , Dr. Keri Matwick 2


1. University of Florida, 2. Nanyang Technological University

This paper analyzes top food trends on Instagram, the photo and video sharing social media app, through the
type of content and strategies used in creating posts and viral content, which have resulted in new forms of
narrative evidenced by its serial imitation. Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has emerged as a popular social
media app with its own influencer culture where the main audiences are the millennial and centennial gen-
erations. To respond to evolving consumption habits, food influencers have developed new strategies to gain
followers. A multimodal discourse analysis of posts from some of the most popular food trends from 2021-2022
illustrates a variety of typical narrative strategies used to promote recipes, ideas, and products to get noticed,
such as creative recipes and visually stunning posts but also atypical, specifically the deliberate use of branded
music, humor, and audience engagement that encourages sharing. We seek to demonstrate creative new forms
of narrative evidenced in the logic and language of the influential social media platform Instagram.

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The construction of meaning in personal experience


narratives emerging from Portuguese radio phone-in
programs

Panel contribution

Prof. Carla Almeida 1


1. Open University of Portugal

Based on a corpus of verbal interactions carried out on radio in Portugal, we will analyze the construction of
narratives in Portuguese radio phone-in programs. The present work is based on the study of the organization
and functioning of oral interactive discourse processed in conversational narratives (Norrick 2000; Schiffrin
2006) and, within these, the discourse present in narratives of life experience (Ochs & Capps 2001). We will study
specific discourse phenomena, such as accounts (De Fina 2009: 239) and the “alignment phenomena” (De Fina
& Perrino 2011: 9). We will study the interactional context in which these narratives emerged in radio phone-
in programs. So, the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the construction of personal experience narratives
are analyzed: interviewees’ practices of juxtaposed speech, repetitions, the use of the approximate expression
“e tal” (‘and such’), the use of “pronto” (‘ready, quick’) as a discourse marker (Silva 2006), the occurrence of
identities in talk, and the production of evaluative assertions. In this context, acts of self-praise (Speer 2012) with
mitigators and the use in Portuguese of the declarative verb “dizer” (‘to say’) in the third person of the plural
are discourse strategies made by the interviewees to invoke common places to deal with dilemmas brought
by the questions that occur during the conversation in talk radio (Almeida 2012). Interviewers’ evaluation
comments that denote attentive listening and co-narration (Norrick 2001:78) are also analyzed, allowing for
the management of interactional exchanges (Almeida 2019). This work seeks to demonstrate that personal
experience narratives occurring in Portuguese radio phone-in programs are the result of collaborative work in
jointly constructing the sense given by the host and the caller and they are part of a testimonial and emotional
discourse. These narrative forms show the “conversational involvement” (Gumperz 1982:3) of participants and
they are specific discourse practices taking place within these interactional contexts.
References
Almeida, C. A. (2012). A construção da ordem interaccional na Rádio: Contributos para uma análise linguística
do discurso em interacções verbais. Porto: Afrontamento.

Almeida, C. A. (2019). Discourse strategies of mitigation in an oral corpus of narratives of life experience col-
lected in interviews. In K. Roulston (Ed.) Interactional studies of qualitative research interviews (pp. 239-268).
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
De Fina, A. (2009). Narratives in interview — The case of accounts: For an interactional approach to narrative
genres. Narrative Inquiry, 19(2), 233-258.
De Fina, A., & S. Perrino (Eds.). (2011). Narratives in interviews. Interviews in narrative studies. Language in
Society, 40(1), 1-11.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norrick, N. R. (2010 [2000]). Conversational narrative. Storytelling in everyday talk. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living Narrative. Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
Schiffrin, D. (2006). In other words. Variation in reference and narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Silva, A. S. (2006). The polysemy of discourse markers: The case of pronto in Portuguese. Journal of Pragmatics,

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

38, 2188–2205.
Speer, S. (2012). The interactional organization of self-praise. Social Psychology Quarterly, v. 75, n. 1, 52-79.

158
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Typicality and Narration in the Toasts of Georgian Immigrants


in the United States

Panel contribution

Dr. Inola Matthews 1


1. City University of New York, Lehman College

In my paper, I investigate narratives presented in the toasts of Georgian immigrants at a feast party (supra) with
their relatives and friends living in the United States and the Republic of Georgia.
When proposing a toast (also called a speech), the speaker expresses certain thoughts and feelings towards
the person or people the toast is addressed to. The toast (sadghegrdzelo) given by the Georgian toastmaster
(Tamada) is usually full of emotions and is subject to improvisation that makes it more colorful and original.
It requires adherence to strict rules but also reveals the individual style of each speaker proposing a toast.
Georgian toasts usually offer explicit expressions of feelings and learned lessons, as well as reference to the
people who are present, those absent from the supra, and family members. Toasts typically include narratives,
reported speech, proverbs and rhymes, foregrounding the eloquence of the speaker proposing it. In addition,
Georgian toasts typically interweave narrative passages with speech acts of thanking, hoping, blessing, and
wishing, as in:
We got to know Temuri first. Whenever he came to visit us, we were so happy! It was like a celebration. It should
be continued like that when seeing each other.
Examination of narrations in my corpus of toasts revealed a tendency to generalize in structures through
phrases like “a few times,” “would come,” and also “whenever,” as in this excerpt. At the same time, individ-
uals familiar to the participants or even attending the event appear in the narratives.
The degree of formality of the event dictates the level of typicality in Tamada’s behavior, the structure of the
toasts given during the supra, as well as the behavior of the people present. During informal gatherings with
close family members and friends, one can witness relaxed rules with regard to the toast style and structure,
narratives shared by the participants, as well as their overall involvement in the event. In order to show the
peculiarities of Georgian toasts as a communicative genre, I discuss the toasts given by Georgian immigrants
living in the United States through the analysis of formality, typicality, and cultural values projected in the toasts
of the immigrant people.

159
(A)typicality of Japanese
‘sentences’ in
conversational contexts
(organized by Natsuko
Nakagawa, Tsuyoshi Ono)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A grammar of utterances connected to situation

Panel contribution

Prof. Toshiyuki Sadanobu 1


1. Kyoto University

Traditional linguistics has considered language to be separated from the situation of an utterance (Hockett 1960).
However, the connection to the situation of an utterance should be considered extremely important to language.
This is because, at least in contemporary standard Japanese, utterances that would seem unnatural in terms
of traditional grammar can seem natural if they are more strongly linked to the situations in which they are
uttered.
A sentence utterance that lacks sufficient fitness to its context and situation may seem natural if the connection
between the utterance and the situation in which it is uttered (specifically, the authority of the speaker, the de-
gree of immersion into the conversation, and expressiveness) is strengthened. For example, while the sentence
utterance “?Ato sankagetsu de shogatsu desu” (“? It’s three months until the New Year”) uttered to bring up a
new subject abruptly with no relation to the preceding context would sound unnatural because it violates the
maxim of relevance (Grice 1975), it would sound natural in the form of the sentence utterance “Ato sankagetsu
de shogatsu da” (“It’s three months until the New Year”) spoken by a higher-ranking person who has authority.
In addition, the sentence utterance “Ato sankagetsu de shogatsu desu nee” (“It’s three months until the New Year,
isn’t it?”), which is more expressive thanks to the use of a sentence-final particle, also would sound natural.
Such a strong connection to the situation of the utterance is not particularly necessary in a sentence that has
sufficient fitness to its context and situation. For example, a lower-ranking person may say to a higher-ranking
person “Soko, dansa arimasu” (“There’s a step there”) as the first utterance of an adjacency pair even without
any particularly strong degree of expressiveness. It is when making up for something missing that a strong
connection to the situation of the utterance is needed.
Focusing on the connection to the situation of the utterance also is important in differentiating between sentence
utterances and utterances that are not sentences. For example, the unnatural feel of utterances such as “Da”
and “Daro” can be explained using the rule of sentence grammar that a sentence requires a free word. But if
these are placed in a position with a high degree of immersion into the conversation, as the second utterances
in adjacency pairs, and connected to highly expressive sentence-final particles or a rising intonation, then they
could seem perfectly natural (“Da-yo-ne” or “Daro?”) even though they still lack free words. This is because they
are present naturally outside of the scope of sentence grammar, as something other than sentences.
By using surveys and observation of natural conversation, this presentation argues for the need to develop a
grammar that includes connection to the situation of the utterance as a principle, separately from traditional
sentence grammar.
References
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and conversation.” Syntax and Semantics, 3, 41-58. Academic Press.
Hockett, Charles F. 1960. “The origin of speech.” Scientific American, 203, 89–97.

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Continuing and Non-Continuing ‘Sentences’ in Tellings in


Japanese Everyday Conversation

Panel contribution

Dr. Yasuyuki Usuda 1


1. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

This study investigates some features of continuing forms of utterance in tellings in Japanese. In Japanese
narratives, utterances tend to be produced in continuing forms, but at some points, non-continuing forms are
used, which is generally understood as the completion of the ‘sentence’. Among the utterances shown in the
excerpt, the lines marked by ‘#’ are in the continuing forms, while ‘->’ are in the non-continuing form (see
Iwasaki 2013).
In the following excerpt the participants are talking about the behavior of their aunt-in-law who is known for
her drinking habit.
1 B kono mae ne:
A while back,
2 A un.
Yeah.
(0.4)
3 B naruto de ne
at Naruto,
(1.2)
4 A ano: shijukunichi yatta toki ni.
on the shijukunichi.
5 B [un.
yeah
6 A [houyou wo.
At the celemony for the deceased.
7 A un.
Okey.
(0.4)
8 -> B de (.) are yappari (1.3) arukooru ga naito ne tte (0.4) inage no oneesan ga yutta no yo.
And the sister from Inage said, “We need alcohols anyway.”
9 A un.=
Yeah.
10 B =soshitara
Then,
(0.8)
11 # B mo- mottekureba iijanai tte yuttara
(I) said to her, “You can bring it, can’t you?” and
12 # (.) nai no yo sorega tte.
she replied, “There aren’t.”
(0.4)
12 # B zannen toka ittara a (0.7) hitotsu gurai atta kamo shirenai tsutte.
(I) said “It’s a pity, ” and (she) replied, “Oh, there may be at least one.”
(0.3)

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13 # B de uchi no (0.4) danna n ga ni moratte hh.


Then my husband gave it to her,
14 -> B de hitori de nondete sa a ii iindesuka toka i(h)i(h)na(h)ga(h)ra(h) hitori de nondeta.
and she drank it alone, asking “Oh, is it OK?”
15 A hahaha
The lines in continuing forms are in the middle of the telling, where the components of the event are presented
in a chronological order approaching the end. Therefore, it can be suggested that the continuing forms are used
as resources for joint construction of turn-taking of the telling based on an understanding of the continuation
of the narrative. In other words, the syntactic continuity of the continuing forms can make it understandable
that the narrative is still continuing.
Then, it can be questioned what the two lines in non-continuing forms are for. In the excerpt, non-continuing
forms are employed at the final line of the entire telling (14) and the final position of the preface (8). In line 8,
the settings of the telling has just been told and the main content of the narrative is yet to be told. Therefore, we
have found non-continuing forms to end sections of the telling, similar to what Chafe (1987) says about English
narratives.
In sum, when the telling is ongoing, continuing forms tend to be used to demonstrate the continuity of the telling,
while in some position non-continuing forms are utilized. From the data, non-continuing sentence may be used
in a position that the section is divided.

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Japanese noun modifying clauses are more like sentences:


structure and use in conversation

Panel contribution

Dr. Natsuko Nakagawa 1 , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono 2


1. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 2. University of Alberta

Japanese relative clauses, often called noun modifying clauses (hereafter NMCs), have been portrayed with
constructed examples like the following:
1) [yasu ga yaita] keeki o tabemashita
Yasu NOM baked cake ACC ate
‘(Someone) ate (the) cake Yasu baked.’
The clause in the square brackets modifies the NP keeki ‘cake’ and identifies a specific concrete referent. The NP
is marked with the accusative particle o and serves as the direct object in the main clause (i.e., the cake eaten).
Our examination of conversation data (four conversations totalling 40 minutes, randomly selected from The
Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese 2004) reveals a different picture. In our data, 2) is a typical example of an NMC,
where R answers the question how she prepares meals:
2)
1 R: a=no= tabemono o katte
‘Well, buying food’
2 nde [denshirenji de chinshite tte iu] kanji
and microwave with zap QUOT say feeling
‘and (it’s the) feeling of zapping (it) with (the) microwave.’
3 L: hee
‘Ahh.’ (D01F0002)
The clause in the square brackets in line 2 modifies the NP kanji ‘feeling’ which occurs without being part of a
larger clause. This results in the answer ‘Well, buying food, and like zapping (it) with the microwave’ where
kanji ‘feeling’, similarly to English like, is used to present the meal preparation in a more hedged manner.
It should be noted that the head kanji is considered a light head as it contributes a relatively small amount of
meaning compared to a head like ‘cake’ in 1). In our data, the 10 most frequent head nouns (accounting for 75%
of head nouns) are light, including koto ‘thing’, toki ‘time’, and hito ‘person,’ replicating the findings by Takara
2012 and Ono and Thompson 2020. We further found that many of these NMCs function more like main clauses
(i.e., sentences). For example, in 2), the light head kanji ‘feeling’ ends R’s answer without being part of a larger
clause, suggesting its completeness. This is demonstrated further by L’s immediate acceptance hee ‘Ahh’ in line
3.
The above observation is further supported in our data in that NMCs often contained elements such as inter-
rogative pronouns (termed WH pronouns). These elements, not representing presupposed information, are
known to be tied to the function of main clauses, such as nani ‘what’ which seeks specific information, further
demonstrating that NMCs function more like sentences in conversation.
Thus, conversation data reveals that Japanese NMCs, though subordinate grammatically, often stand alone and
function similarly to main clauses, thus more like sentences. These findings underscore the idea that grammat-
ical constructions need to be studied in actual use not only to describe their function but also to establish their
structure as actually employed by speakers (e.g., Laury and Ono 2019). Language use constantly challenges the
standard units and categories that have been taken for granted not just in models and methods based on static
views of language but also in studies that focus on use.

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Mobilizing syntactic rules for discourse organization: A case


study of utterances starting with a dependent element in
Japanese

Panel contribution

Dr. Fumino Horiuchi 1 , Dr. Toshihide Nakayama 2


1. Daito Bunka University, 2. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

In traditional linguistic studies, discourse is often thought to be made of a combination of grammatically com-
plete linguistic expressions, i.e., ‘sentences’. However, as pointed out in many studies of grammatical patterns
observed in spoken conversation, conversational discourse contains numerous utterances with grammatically
incomplete or deviant forms. The following is an example of a grammatically deviant utterance, where the
utterance starts with a grammatically dependent case particle.
(1) o gojukko ‘50 of (them)’
OBJ 50-pieces
The fact that we can observe utterance forms that are not ‘complete’ according to the syntactic rules established
for written discourse does not of course mean that spoken conversation is not governed by syntactic rules.
In this presentation, we examine the grammatically deviant utterance pattern that starts with a dependent
element (as illustrated in (1) above) and argue that the apparent ‘deviance’ is due to a difference in the way
syntactic rules are utilized between written and conversational discourse. Specifically, syntactic rules are pri-
marily used in written discourse to build complex sentence structures, whereas in conversational discourse
they are actively mobilized to organize interactional structures.
According to common grammatical descriptions of Japanese, a case particle is a grammatically dependent el-
ement that must occur with an accompanying noun phrase in the structure of [noun phrase + case particle].
However, in the above example (1), the utterance appears to ‘violate’ established grammatical rules in that (a)
a dependent particle, the object case particle o, occurs without a head NP and that (b) the utterance starts with
the dependent particle. However, this is hardly an isolated exception or performance error. Instead, as we will
show in this presentation, this pattern represents a strategy that is systematically employed to organize inter-
action, i.e., closing and setting aside the ongoing interaction in order to shift the topic. One typical situation in
which this construction is used is when the speaker is trying to realign the discourse topic after the interaction
has become side-tracked. For example, the utterance (1) above occurs in a context where two people are sharing
a story with a friend about buying a 50-piece pack of candles. Then the conversation gets side-tracked into a
discussion about what kind of candles they are. At the end of the side-tracked exchange, the speaker produces
(1) to close the discussion of the details about the candles and realign the topic to the fact that they bought nu-
merous candles. The isolated case particle effectively guides the hearer to interpret the preceding exchanges as
the unmentioned head. The preceding exchange is forced to be packaged as a head NP and is closed as a topic.
This ingenious way to exploit dependent particles to organize discourse suggests that we do not use grammar
only for building sentences; instead, we can exploit many aspects of grammatical structure, including structural
dependencies, to organize discourse.

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Morpheme-based sentence co-construction in Japanese


conversation

Panel contribution

Dr. Daisuke Yokomori 1


1. Kyoto University

It has been long reported that, in conversation, one sentence can be collaboratively constructed by multiple
speakers (Lerner, 1991; Ono & Thompson, 1996; Lerner & Takagi, 1999; Kushida, 2002; Hayashi, 2003; Helasvuo,
2004). In the literature on the phenomenon “joint utterance construction” or “co-construction” in interaction,
much attention has been paid to the role of syntactic structures such as bi-clausal constructions (e.g., if-then) and
argument constructions (e.g., SVO). A less documented aspect is that sentence co-construction can be realized
inside one lexical unit, relying on morphological structures. The present paper aims to describe the ways in
which morpheme-based sentence co-construction occurs in Japanese conversation and thereby to shed light on
the dynamic and fluid nature of sentence construction in naturally-occurring interaction. An examination of 38
cases collected from Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (Koiso et al., 2022) shows that there are at least
two types of morpheme-based sentence co-construction in Japanese. One is where a speaker produces a bound
morpheme marking epistemic modality such as -yooda ‘seem’ or -hazuda ‘must,’ connecting it back to a verb in
a preceding turn by a different speaker. As shown in examples (1) and (2), this type of sentence co-construction
occurs after the preceding speaker has come to its completion and constitutes a weak confirmation of the just-
provided proposition. Another is where a speaker starts his or her utterance with an inflectional suffix such as
-teru (progressive) or a compounding suffix such as -kakeru (inchoative), forming one lexical unit with a verb in
a prior turn, as shown in (3) and (4). This type occurs during the interlocutor continues talking and contributes
to jointly produce one utterance unit together, claiming speakership without launching a new utterance unit.
In both types, it has been shown that the agglutinating morphology in Japanese serves as a resource to finely
coordinate sentence construction to deal with various interactional tasks that speakers are faced with.
(1) [T001_019. 9:30~]
01 Hus: atta?
Was it there?
02 (0.3)
03 Wife: yoona ki ga shi ta
I thought so.

(2) [K004_012, 26:00~]


01 Kiba: demo are mo kimatteru yone
But it’s already decided too.
02 Nagato: u:n. hazuna ndesu kedo ne
Well, must have been, but, you know.
(3) [S002_014, 32:00~] ((K and Y are talking about a cause of traffic accidents))
01 K: de, uwa tte natteru [tokini jikoru nda.
and oh.my.god QT become-PROG when cause.accident SE
And then, when in a panic (lit. ‘’when they are like “Gosh!” ’), they cause an accident.
02 Y: [teru tokini baan tte:, jikoru.
PROG when IDP QT cause.accident
Then they cause an accident, like “Baaang!”

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(4) [K004_022, 16:00~] ((S is explaining how he came to enjoy a conversation with a stranger on his trip))
01 S: mukoono hito ↑kara sono hana[shi’kakete’ki[te’kure’te:][:, u:n. ]
that person from um talk-INCH-DEICTIC-BENEFACTIVE-CONJ yeah
That lady was the one who started talking to us, yeah.
02 G: [n. [kake(te)-][a, ka]=
ITP INCH oh PRT
Mm. …Started … Oh, I see.

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The Multiple Clause Linkage Structure of Japanese speech

Panel contribution

Dr. Takehiko Maruyama 1


1. Senshu University

In Japanese sentences, subordinate and coordinate clauses are marked by non-final predicates in isolation or
predicates of various inflections followed by conjunctive particles. Clauses immediately following these may
be main, subordinate, or non-final coordinate clauses. A structure in which a clause is grammatically linked to
another is called a clause linkage structure (Van Valin 1984; Haiman, Thompson 1993; Hasegawa 1996).
The clause linkage structure is one of the basic sentence structures that are generally observed in various lan-
guages. What is characteristic of the clause linkage structure in Japanese (and perhaps SOV languages in gen-
eral) is that sometimes extremely long clause chains are formed by the concatenation of clauses using a surpris-
ing variety of clause linkage markers.
Just as indefinitely long sentences can be generated by the recursive embedding of complement clauses, there
is no limit to the length of sentences produced by the application of clause linkage. While from the point of
view of prescriptive grammar extremely long clause linkage structures are to be avoided, very long utterances
with multiple clause linkage structures do appear in spoken Japanese. Nevertheless, there have been almost no
research that quantitatively investigates and describes the extent to which this phenomenon can be found in
different registers of Japanese.
In this presentation, I will quantitatively and qualitatively describe the distribution of the multiple clause link-
age structure within actual spoken and written Japanese. I will examine three Japanese corpora: BCCWJ, CSJ,
and CEJC, which correspond to text corpus, monologue corpus, and conversation corpus, respectively. The fol-
lowing two research questions are posed:
- What types of clauses are connected to form the multiple clause linkage structure and in what order?
- What factors bear on the variable use of the multiple clause linkage structure?
By identifying distributions of multiple clause linkage structures in three corpora, a model for the incremental
production of multiple clause linkage structures will be introduced.

168
(Im)politeness on written
discussion websites:
Relational work in
Reddit-esque
communication
(organized by Daria
Dayter, Thomas Messerli)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Are you being rude, sarcastic or both? Sarcastic questions as a


tool for conveying impoliteness

Panel contribution

Ms. Efrat Levnat 1 , Prof. Agnes Celle 1


1. universite paris cite

Sarcasm is one of the most sophisticated linguistic phenomena, implicitly and humorously conveying contempt
(Savini & Caragea, 2022) while showing the speaker’s dissociation from others (Lozano & Mendoza, 2022). De-
spite its importance in understanding human cognition and interaction, how sarcasm is encoded remains an
open question. We aim to illuminate this by studying sarcastic interrogatives.
Sarcasm is a scalar meaning inversion communicating transposition of a pretended commitment. While al-
legedly making an assertion, the sarcastic speaker assumes an evaluative standard, implicating its violation
(Camp, 2011). Some constructions, like questions, are particularly sensitive to sarcasm because they lend them-
selves extremely well to meaning inversion. While the conventionalized function of questions is information
seeking (Sadock & Zwicky, 1985), the sarcastic speaker performs meaning inversion, indirectly showing criti-
cism, ridicule, insincerity, humor (Camp, 2011) and impoliteness.
We focus on three interrogative constructions that convey both literal and sarcastic meanings, exploring how
they encode sarcasm:

• Split interrogatives[1] (who are you, my mother?)


• Alternative questions (are you sleeping or dead?)
• Disjunctive polar questions (are you stupid or something?)

We search a spoken, non-scripted, TV-corpus (COCA)[2], and a written, forum-based, web-corpus (NLDS)[3],
manually analyzing 2,264 utterances.
First, we compare the distribution of sarcastic questions between the corpora. Results suggest that sarcasm
is much more prevalent in the written web-corpus than in the spoken TV-corpus. Next, the role of context in
conveying sarcasm is studied. Questions that can be understood sarcastically regardless of their surrounding
(written or spoken) context are marked as context-independent. Results suggest that context doesn’t play a
significant role in the sarcastic interpretation of these interrogatives. Lastly, the distribution of question types
is examined. Results indicate that split interrogatives are the most sarcastic construction of the three.
Examination of the web-corpus reveals that these sarcastic questions are often used to show impoliteness and
rudeness. This observation differs from a previous study (Jorgensen, 1996), which found that sarcasm is com-
monly used to be more polite when criticizing close friends, especially concerning trivial mistakes. In such cases
sarcasm saves face for the speaker, because direct criticism of a trivial mistake makes them appear insulting
and rude. This different usage of sarcasms in conveying (im)politeness can stem from two factors.
First, the discursive arena and its participants. Jorgensen (1996) examined everyday spoken language used by
close intimates. Contrastingly, we examined an online web-forum about religion and politics, in which partici-
pants are strangers prone to arguments, thus use sarcasm to be impolite and hurtful. Secondly, the criticism in
question is different. Jorgensen (1996) states that speakers use sarcasm to be more polite mostly in conveying
trivial criticism. However, in the web-forum criticism is usually very personal and non-trivial, hence used for
impoliteness rather than politeness.
Findings are intriguing, novel and non-trivial, offering new insights regarding the discursive arenas and strate-
gies in which speakers use sarcasm, thus making an important step forward in understanding its essence.
[1] A two-part construction – (i) WH-interrogative (ii) self-answer (Michaelis & Feng, 2015).
[2] Corpus of Contemporary American English

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[3] Natural Language and Dialogue Systems

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How norms of proper behaviour are defined, constructed and


maintained on discussion fora: the case of one Macedonian
internet forum

Panel contribution

Ms. Fevzudina Saračević 1 , Prof. Liljana Mitkovska 2


1. Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, 2. AUE-FON University in Skopje

Internet fora as discussion platforms allow for mainly informal communication among people who share sim-
ilar interests. Most fora are open to viewing, but only registered users who accept to comply with a set of rules
can contribute posts and thus participate in discussions. Despite the fact that such communication is asyn-
chronous, semi-public, anonymous, and many-to-many, discourse on the fora still manages to remain coherent
and meaningful most of the time, and in effect leads to the creation a community with shared values and ex-
pectations.
This study is an attempt to examine how this is achieved: how discourse is managed in argumentative dis-
cussions in which discussants express their opinions and stances on a controversial topic on which opposed
opinions are inescapable, but they must do so in a way acceptable to other discussants and in compliance with
forum rules. If not, users risk being ignored, ridiculed, attacked, or even banned, since discussions are regulated
by forum moderators as well as by forum users themselves.
In this research, we take a pragmatic approach to interpersonal discourse, specifically following the pragmatic
study of interpersonal language as defined through the concept of relational work (Locher & Watts, 2008; Locher
& Graham, 2010). We analyse one Macedonian internet forum, femina.mk, specifically three discussion threads
which consist of no more than 1,000 posts and whose initial post contains a statement of opinion. For this study,
we focus our attention on the relations constructed among discussants, the creation of like-minded groups, and
the communication within and between emerging groups. We examine the level of politeness in posts and its
impact on the need for discussants or moderators to intervene with meta-comments about behaviour in order
to (re)define how norms are discursively constructed and negotiated.
We intend to show that although the forum can be considered a community on its own and members are sup-
posed/required to follow certain rules of behaviour, each discussion is still subject to more local principles,
defined by the topic, the initial post, the participants in it and their evaluative positions. All these factors in-
teract and are constantly being negotiated during the discussion, with fluent identities, roles, power hierarchy
and solidarity (Arendholz, 2013).
Additionally, we aim to contribute to a more global picture of forum-talk, by studying discourse in Macedonian.
These findings can be compared to research in other languages to see whether basic pragmatic principles are
equally valid and how sociocultural and language differences are displayed.
Arendholz, J. (2013). (In)Appropriate online behaviour: a pragmatic analysis of message board relations. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Locher, M. A., & Watts, R. J. (2008). Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour.
In D. Bousfield and M. A. Locher (Eds.), lmpoliteness in Language. Studies on its interplay with Power in Theory
and Practice (pp. 77–99). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Locher, M. A., & Graham, S. L. (2010). Interpersonal pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

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In or out? perceiving identities through translanguaging


practices in the Hong Kong protest

Panel contribution

Ms. Vivian Yip 1


1. City University of Hong Kong

While scholars have theorised how social actors agentively perform their identities and challenge national
boundaries through creative linguistic practices characterised as translanguaging (Li & Zhu, 2013; Duff, 2015;
Canagarajah, 2013), less attention has been paid to how these practices – and their consequences for identity
– are perceived by participants themselves in relation to particular local contexts (see: Rymes & Smail, 2020).
Drawing on Hong Kong netizens’ metalinguistic comments in online forums about “loose Cantonese romanisa-
tion” (LCR), I aim to reveal how this practice – which has previously been categorised by scholars as “translan-
guaging” (Li et al., 2020; Jones and Chau, 2022) – takes on particular local meanings and is used to establish
in-group and out-group categories in the context of the Hong Kong social movement in 2019.
The data for this study come from discussions of LCR on the online forum LIHKG – the main online space through
which netizens organised demonstrations during the social movement. While LCR is a common “romanisation”
practice by which Hong Kongers deal with the requirements of writing vernacular Cantonese (a variety of Chi-
nese) via alphabetic keyboards – it took on new social saliency when netizens proposed to use it as an “in-group”
form of communication for those involved in anti-government protests. I examine the resulting online metalin-
guistic commentary about who is perceived as understanding LCR, and how this (lack of) understanding relates
to imaginations of group identities in relation to the protest movement.
In order to unpack participants’ views on the social meaning of “understanding LCR”, I discuss their comments
in terms of the “metapragmatics of inaccessibility” building on scholarship that has defined accessibility of lin-
guistic forms in relation to the access one has to particular spatiotemporal configurations, i.e. chronotopes
(Blommaert, 2015; Karimzad, 2021). I analyse how netizens make metalinguistic comments about the imagined
types of people who do (or do not) have access to the linguistic forms related to LCR and to its associated chrono-
topes. The findings reveal that these metapragmatics of (in)accessibility with respect to LCR are central to the
formation of in-group and out-group identities, but also that these metapragmatics are contested and negotiated
through interactions between netizens. Furthermore, netizens evaluate the varying degrees of (in)accessibility
of LCR in relation to particular chronotopically situated protest events and Hong Kong local culture – further
complexifying the formation of multiple exclusionary Hong Kong identities. In this way, this study adds to our
understanding of how “translanguaging” practices are used not only to contest, but also to construct, boundaries
between different imagined groups of people.

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Interpersonal function of concessives in the R/ChangeMyView


argumentative discourse.

Panel contribution

Dr. Thomas Messerli 1 , Prof. Daria Dayter 2


1. University of Basel, 2. Tampere University

Within social media more generally and Reddit more specifically, the subreddit changemyview (CMV) holds
a special place: Rather than following trends of outrage culture and polarisation, r/changemyview’s original
posters invite commenters to change their view and reward those that persuade them with an award called
‘delta’. Topics of submissions and persuasive comments range from films to gender, from politics to household
chores, and usually provoke lively discussion rich both in transactional and relational communication.
For a series of contrastive studies, we draw on examples from our large corpus of CMV posts and comments,
structured according to whether a particular comment has been awarded a ‘delta’ or not (and therefore has
been judged successfully persuasive by the original poster).
An earlier investigation of a small sample of posts in each category has demonstrated that, first of all, an analy-
sis of relational work in original submissions is not feasible due to the lacking context. As a result, the present
study focuses on two categories of Reddit posts only: non-delta-awarded comments; and delta-awarded com-
ments. Secondly, the earlier research has shown indications that while delta comments are overwhelmingly
“non-polite” or appropriate, non-delta comments show a variety of relational work strategies. Finally, it has
been shown that concessives and appraisals of potential competing views play an important role in persuasive
discourse on CMV.
In the present paper, we build on these findings by looking specifically at concessive moves (identified using
corpus methods) in a large sample of delta and non-delta comments. Using a corpus-derived taxonomy of con-
cessives followed by first, second or third person pronouns, we examine whether their addresseeship corre-
sponds to the interpersonal goals. We classify the utterances according to the relational work function they
play vis-à-vis other commenters and post authors: polite, non-polite, or impolite. The findings demonstrate that
the interpretation of the relational function of language is highly context dependent, and concessives can fulfil
all three functions. This underscores the crucial importance of qualitative, linguistic theory-informed analysis
of persuasive discourse to obtain insights about interpersonal effects of persuasion.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Misunderstandings involving a mismatch between


expectation and perception of politeness on Reddit

Panel contribution

Ms. Alisa Kavetska 1


1. Jagiellonian University in Krakow

The study presents a qualitative analysis of misunderstandings in text-based conversations which arise from
a mismatch in the expectation and perception of politeness of the interactants. Theoretical analyses are con-
ducted within the framework of relevance theory and in particular the comprehension heuristic, postulated in
the relevance-theoretic framework to underlie meaning production and reception, called on to explain also dif-
ferent types of communicative failure (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95; Wilson & Sperber 2012). A special attention
is given to breakdowns related to (un)intended non-propositional effects (Moeschler 2009; Wilson and Carston
2019; Yus 2017, 2021) and communication of affective attitude (Yus 2021) on discussion forums.
Being deprived of many paralinguistic cues present in face-to-face communication and providing a limited ac-
cess to the interlocutors’ cognitive environments (Yus 2011, 2021), digital communication is notoriously sus-
ceptible to misunderstandings of different types. This is so because non-propositional information is normally
conveyed non-verbally, and this behaviour is not readily available to Internet users, which may influence the
way politeness is expected and understood. Following Jary’s (1998) argument, the notion of politeness in this
study is conceptualised as the attribution of intentions underlying communication and not as something be-
ing communicated, hence only manifest infringement of sociocultural norms is taken to result in impoliteness
becoming part of the communicated content.
Several cases of politeness-based misunderstandings were identified on the online forum platform Reddit by
applying key search terms signalling that the addressee acknowledged the incompatibility between the aspects
of the adresser’s verbal behaviour and the addressee’s assumptions about the addresser’s attitude, i.e. that
the addresser was held “in higher or lower regard than he had assumed” (Jary 1998: 11). These are taken to
be instantiated by repair expressions like “I didn’t mean to be rude”, “I didn’t want to offend you/to sound
offensive”, etc. The bottom-up/data first analytic approach was followed.
The preliminary analysis reveals that such factors as language proficiency, linguistic underdeterminacy and
cultural differences in politeness expectation as well as different text-altering strategies can contribute to a mis-
interpretation of users’ affective attitude and perceived impoliteness. In addition, it is shown that (un)intended
failure to conform to the established relational work norms (Locher 2013) within a discussion forum community
often leads to communicative breakdowns and negative non-propositional effects, like the feelings of offence
and hostility.
Selected references:
Jary, M. 1998. Relevance theory and the communication of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 30. 1-19.
Locher, Miriam A. 2013. Relational work and interpersonal pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 58. 145–149.
Moeschler, J. 2009. Pragmatics, propositional and non-propositional effects: can a theory of utterance interpre-
tation account for emotions in verbal communication? Social Science Information 48 (3). 447-464.
Wilson, D. and Carston, R. 2019. Pragmatics and the challenge of ‘non-propositional’ effects. Journal of Prag-
matics 145. 31-38.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yus, F. 2011. Cyberpragmatics: Internet-Mediated Communication in Context. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Yus, F. 2021. Smartphone Communication. Interactions in the App Ecosystem. New York: Routledge

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negotiating relational work and (im)politeness: The use of


creative forms of address and terms of reference in
female-only/dominant subreddit communities

Panel contribution

Dr. Shengnan Liu 1


1. Lancaster University

On 14/04/2022, following a guideline targeting problems incited by online fandom communities issued by Cy-
berspace Administration of China (CAC), a community consisting of roughly 680,000 members (⾖瓣鹅组, Douban
Goose Group) on Douban.com was banned. Douban.com is a Chinese online database and social networking ser-
vice launched since 2005. Initially founded as a fandom community in 2010, Douban Goose Group had accumu-
lated a large female-dominant membership. Overtime, many members have engaged in heated discussions on
feminism and gender issues. Following the ban, some members sought refuge on Reddit.com, and formed new
female only/dominant subreddit communities (as explicitly prescribed by the rules of each subreddit). This pa-
per focuses on three subreddits formed by previous members of Douban Goose Group —-r/LiberalGooseGroup
(a female dominant subreddit with 7896 members), r/DoubanGoosegroup (a female only subreddit with 43,637
members) and r/DoubanFeministGroup (a female only subreddit with 5118 members) to study how relational
work and (im)politeness are negotiated within each community of practice through the use of creative forms
of address and terms of reference. Previous research has studied forms of address in relation to politeness
(Nevala, 2004; Hamzeh Mousavi, 2020), and power and solidarity (Yusra et al., 2022). However, the use of forms
of address and terms of reference in relation to impoliteness is rare. This is not surprising as previous research
on address terms mainly focus on interpersonal conversations where impolite address terms are not likely to be
frequent. In the case of the chosen female only/dominant subreddits, the discussions among members demon-
strate a clear preference of in-group (mostly females) and exclusion of out-group (mostly males) through the
uses of creative (im)polite forms of address and terms of reference such as 鹅们 (fellow gooses), 姐妹 (sisters),
娇妻 (trophy wives), 蝈蝻 (a creative derogative term for “国男”, i.e. Chinese men but with the Chinese radical “⾍”
meaning worms), 驴 (donkey, a derogative term for married women coined by self-proclaimed radical feminists)
etc. Such terms were created intentionally and used repeatedly in the chosen subreddits to negotiate relational
work and (im)politeness with in-group and out-group and have become characteristic of the language use of
these female-only/dominant communities. This is in line with Locher and Watts’ (2005) proposal that relational
work comprises the entire continuum of verbal behaviour from direct, impolite, rude or aggressive interaction
through to polite interaction. This study aims to address three questions: i) What are the most frequent forms
of address and terms for reference used to negotiate relational work and (im)politeness in each community?
ii) How are such terms used to negotiate relational work and (im)politeness? iii) What are the differences of
the uses of such terms among the communities and why? To address questions i) and ii), #LancsBox (Brezina et
al., 2020) —- Lancaster University corpus toolbox is adopted to analyse the frequency and collocation networks
of such creative forms of address and terms of reference. Question iii) is answered through critical discourse
analysis (CDA).

176
A contrastive analysis of
potentially
face-threatening acts in
different linguacultures
(organized by Weihua
Zhu, Xinren Chen)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Contrastive Study of Chinese and American English


Stand-up Comedy

Panel contribution

Ms. Jie Zhang 1


1. University of Wisconsin - Madison

Stand-up is a modern form of comedy that originated in Western society. It features a single comedian’s predom-
inant use of verbal humor, accompanied by some acting, but not always, to entertain the audience. In addition,
the jokes told are often at someone’s expense and can appear aggressive on the surface. Inspired by Western
stand-up comedy, Chinese stand-up began to rise and has continued to thrive over the past decades. However,
few studies have been done to reveal how stand-up is performed in Chinese culture and society, how it dif-
fers from the Western world, and what the differences might tell us. This study is the first attempt to compare
Chinese and Western stand-up comedy from the pragmatics perspective.
Two sets of data were collected: the American data were obtained from seasons 9, 10, and 11 of Comedy Central
Stand-up Featuring, and the Chinese data were randomly taken from the first two episodes of Rock and Roast
Season Five. Both shows enjoy great popularity in American and Chinese society, respectively, and can be easily
accessed on the Internet through YouTube. All the videos were posted online in 2022. Finally, the data, consist-
ing of 36 five-to-ten-minute-long stand-up routines performed by various comedians from each program, were
primarily analyzed using a content-based/thematic approach with the aid of Nvivo, a qualitative data analytical
tool. This thematic approach allows me to identify each show’s most salient features and compare them. My
analysis of the data involves at least three tiers of coding procedures. The transcriptions were coded into vari-
ous nodes and further grouped into broader categories in the second and third coding cycles. Additional steps
such as merging, deleting, and renaming the codes were involved in finalizing the coding organization.
As a result, several themes emerged from the coding process. First, regarding discourse features, teasing and
third-party putdown humor stood out as the most frequent verbal acts in both programs. Further analysis of
teasing instances reveals that teasing could be categorized as self-directed, hear/audience-directed, and third-
party-directed, depending on the target. The putdown humor mainly levels at a third party, but it differs from
the third-party-oriented teasing in that it contains genuinely offensive meanings toward the third party. More-
over, the contrastive analysis shows that Chinese stand-up comedians are more engaged in self-directed teasing.
In contrast, American comedians are more inclined to target third parties. Second, in terms of topics, American
stand-ups tend to disclose private matters and comment on sensitive topics, such as sex, religion, politics, drug,
death, race, gender, and social class. In contrast, Chinese comedians rarely touch upon these topics. Lastly, it
is observed that stand-up comedy has the potential to serve various functions, such as educating, encouraging,
criticizing, and representing.
The results suggest that the sociocultural context may shape the way stand-up is performed in China. How-
ever, thanks to its relatively lower threshold, stand-up comedy welcomes everyone to participate and can be a
prospective form to embrace and promote cultural diversity and mutual understanding.
(500 words)

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conflict or Solidarity? Discursive Practices and Social


Functions of Complaints in Chinese and English TV Series

Panel contribution

Mr. Shuyang Ye 1
1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

The speech act of complaining, especially its social/interpersonal function, is still under-studied for social in-
teractions and intercultural communication. Previous contrastive pragmatics research has focused more on
complaints with negative interpersonal meaning/functions in confrontational settings, which are potentially
face-threatening acts (FTAs), but much less on the positive functions of complaints, which might be able to en-
hance rapport/solidarity between interlocutors. Evidence of pragmatic norms in many languages also reveals
that even potentially FTAs could at times enhance solidarity, rather than only engender conflicts. Thus, both
negative and positive social/interpersonal functions (Halliday, 1978) of complaints are worth exploring through
their discursive practices within/across different linguacultures.
Based on the two comparable TV drama datasets—Huanlesong, ‘Ode to Joy’ (Chinese) and Sex and the City
(American English), this paper adopts qualitative methodologies to identify and summarize the normative struc-
tures/discursive practices regarding the language use of complaints among intimate friends in daily contexts for
each linguaculture. The speaker-hearer relationships in the given contexts and the social/interpersonal func-
tions of relevant utterances (including responses to the prior complaints) are analyzed in an interpretive way
following the methodological tradition of Discourse Analysis. Other qualitative approaches including Compara-
tive Case Study and Narrative Analysis are also used for further examination of televisual characterization and
narrative development in this particular genre.
In the TV dialogue, the Chinese speakers tend to make much more hearer-oriented (than non-hearer-oriented)
complaints, which may not necessarily result in social conflict based on the intimate relationships between
characters (social distance). Instead, solidarity could be created between characters especially females (gender
difference). Although the Chinese employ more direct head act strategies for complaints, they prefer to add ex-
ternal linguistic build-ups (esp. grounder/justification) as a compensation to attend to the hearer’s face and en-
hance social harmony. On the other hand, much less hearer-oriented complaints (potentially FTAs) are observed
in American English discursive practices; therefore, potential conflicts may be avoided or counteracted in this
way. Unlike the Chinese speakers, the American English speakers do not seem to recognize the positive inter-
personal functions of potentially FTAs even for intimate relationships. Additionally, more direct strategies for
non-hearer-oriented complaints are also found in the English dataset, thus enhancing solidarity between inter-
locutors. One interesting finding is that in the same “reminder” context (during friends’ informal talk), Chinese
tends to use strong linguistic forms to show the complainer’s sincere solicitude for the complainee/hearer, which
may enhance their friendship in the long run, whereas English tends to use relatively soft or indirect speech act
strategies plus internal/external modification to “politely” trigger conflict-related interpersonal functions.
In conclusion, this paper sheds new light on the process of meaning making in TV series discourse and different
functions/effects of speech-behavior practices on the construction or destruction of social/interpersonal rela-
tionships within or across relatively distant language/cultural groups just like Chinese and American English
(as in the East-West divide). This may further help us avoid intercultural misunderstandings.
Reference:
Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Lon-
don: Edward Arnold.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Cross-cultural speech act creation on Twitter: an examination


of Spanish and English complaint production

Panel contribution

Ms. Macy Floyd 1


1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Complaint realization in Speech Acts is an understudied area in Pragmatics (Hidalgo et al„ 2014), especially in
relation to cultures and languages with differing values. Speech Acts have been thoroughly researched (Austin &
Urmson, 1962; Searle & Searle, 1969); however, there are no studies analyzing complaints in Computer-Mediated
Communication (CMC) within Spanish and English. As two of the five most spoken languages, they are prime for
comparison as low-context (LC) and high-context (HC) cultures. This research presents evidence that Complaint
realization is significantly different when produced by Spanish and English participants using CMC.
The goals of this study were to identify differences in Complaints between cultures in CMC, to analyze sup-
portive moves, and to evaluate if Complaint realization corresponded with values associated with HC and LC
cultures (Bai, 2016). This research employed a mixed-methods approach as using qualitative and quantitative
data should provide a comprehensive analysis (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006). 180 tweets were collected, and Head
Acts and supportive moves were coded following House and Kádár (2021). Head Acts were scored for aggres-
siveness, while the quantitative portion included mean length of tweets, rate of occurrence of supportive moves
and head acts, and a Chi-square test for significance of length of tweets.
In this dataset there are noticeable differences in Complaint realization in English and Spanish. English used
more aggressive head acts, while Spanish used less forceful ones. English Tweets were ~37% longer and had
a 28% higher rate of supportive moves. A Chi-square test between Head Act category and language demon-
strated statistical significance between the two. Results of this study align with existing research on HC and LC
languages, with English and Spanish Complaint realization patterning with values of each culture. This is im-
portant, as not understanding pragmatic norms across cultures may cause stereotyping or misunderstandings
(Gumperz et al., 1981).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Requesting Behaviour in British and Greek Service


Encounters.

Panel contribution

Ms. Antonia Tsiakiri 1 , Dr. Federica Barbieri 2


1. ESL Teacher, 2. Swansea University

Requests, a directive speech act (Searle, 1969), are generally regarded as a potentially face-threatening (Blum-
Kulka et al, 1989), and have therefore been studied intensely from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective in
several languages, including Greek (Sifianou, 1999). Economidou-Kogetsidis (2002) study of Greek and English
requests in phone calls found a significantly higher degree of directness in requests by Greek callers, along
with cross-cultural differences in style, morphology and structure. Sifianou (1989) showed that in several in-
teractions English and Greek speakers judge each other according to their norms and interpret utterances as
impolite.
Requests are ubiquitous in service encounters, and given their face-threatening nature there is potential for L2
English speakers to commit pragmatic failure. However, while studies have investigated requests in telephone
interactions (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2002) and newsagents (Antonopoulou, 2001), cross-cultural research in
the requestive behaviour of L1 Greek speakers in service encounters is limited.
The present study aims to address this research gap by investigating requests strategies in Greek and English
in service encounters (in the hospitality sector) in Greece and the UK. Specifically, 34 service encounters were
audio-recorded in 22 medium-priced restaurants and cafés in Greece and Wales. These service encounters rep-
resent interactions among 39 and 22 Greek and British English speakers. Interactions between waiters and the
participants during the main ordering process were audio-recorded and transcribed. Requests were extracted
from the transcribed interactions, and coded following an adapted version of Blum Kulka’s (1989) taxonomy.
Findings reveal that Greek speakers relied primarily on direct strategies. NAMING ( ‘Μια πατάτα τηγανιτή’:
One fried potato) was the most common strategy indicating strong in-group relations. Directness, friendliness
and informality characterize Greek interactions and speech act production. Only a small proportion of Greek re-
quests included a supporting move; however, internal, modification, such as minimization (‘Και ένα τζατζικάκι’:
And one tzatziki +dim), was used. In contrast, British speakers used conventionally indirect strategies, indirect-
ness and formality. The majority of requests were formed using ABILITY, and reinforced with modality and
the interrogative form in order to minimize threat, e.g. ‘Could we have two pink smashes?’ Over half of the
requests included a supporting move (usually, ‘please’).
Overall, the findings are consistent with previous studies suggesting that Greek speakers utilize positively-
oriented requestive strategies, while British English prefer negatively-oriented ones (Sifianou, 1999). Requests
are influenced by each language orientation and display different levels of directness, which can lead to prag-
matic failure.
References:
Antonopoulou, E. (2001). Brief service encounters: Gender and Politeness. In. A. Bayraktaroglou &
M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish, (pp. 241–
270).https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.88.10ant
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane, and Kasper, Gabriele (1989) Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and
Apologies. Norwood, NJ:Ablex.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2002). Requesting strategies in English and Greek: Observations from an Airline’s
Call Centre. Nottingham Linguistic Circular, 17, 17–32.
Searle, John R. (1969) Speech Acts. London: Cambridge University Press.
Sifianou, M (1989). On the telephone again! Differences in telephone behaviour: England versus Greece. Lan-

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

guage and Society,18,527-44. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500013890


Sifianou, M. (1999). Politeness phenomena in England and Greece: A cross-cultural perspective. Oxford:Oxford
University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Her behaviour was disgusting”: Emotion and morality in


online complaint discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Lindsay Yotsukura 1 , Mr. Ayodele Akinola 2 , Mr. Jonathan St-Onge 3 , Mr. Will H W Thompson 3 , Dr.
Simon DeDeo 4 , Mr. Sanshiroh Ogawa 1
1. University of Maryland-College Park, 2. Michigan Technological University, 3. University of Vermont, 4. Carnegie Mellon
University/Santa Fe Institute

How do people complain online? Recent research examining complaint discourse by consumers in computer
mediated communication (CMC) has focused on online hotel reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, and
Yelp, examining basic features such as positive and negative evaluative comments, and references to expecta-
tions (Vásquez, 2011). Substantial variation has been identified in linguistic and semantic features, as well as
ratings, sentiment, and usefulness (Xiang et. al. 2017), and how specific online platform affordances affect the
degree of negativity in reviews (Ruytenbeek et. al., 2021). While some research has been conducted on com-
plaints in airline reviews (e.g., Rita et. al. 2022), it has focused on responses by, and impact on, the industry,
rather than on the linguistic elements of how consumers express themselves. Moreover, most research has
evaluated CMC complaints in English, but not in other linguacultures.
Our paper presents the results of a computational-linguistic study of over 22,000 airline reviews posted on Tri-
pAdvisor between 2016 and 2023. To reflect a range of airline companies and consumer cultures, we collected
reviews in different languages from passengers geotagged from Canada, Nigeria, and Japan who complained
about flagship and budget carriers in Canada (AirCanada and AirTransat), Nigeria (Arik and Air Peace), and
Japan (Japan Airlines and Peach Aviation), i.e., a separate set from those investigated in Rita et. al.’s study. Our
research questions were as follows: (1) “complaint” is a diverse genre, ranging from frustration and disappoint-
ment to allegations of injustice, abuse, and emotional harm. What can simple linguistic features reveal about
this spectrum? (2) how do different consumer cultures—in our data, Canadian, Nigerian, and Japanese—make
distinct use of the genre?
Based on topic modeling and multilingual embeddings of negative reviews, we find that emotional and
moral concepts vary depending on country/culture/airlines. (Im)politeness was the focus of more complaints
regarding Canadian airlines, whereas a greater focus of complaints regarding Nigerian airlines was conduct of
airline staff, and negative reviews of Japanese carriers had a relatively higher percentage of topics involving
expectations. Many negative reviews adopted extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986), possibly as a way
to seek compensation from the airlines. Other reviews seem to function as public displays of disappointment
and exasperation, without a compensation-seeking goal per se.

References

Pomerantz, A. (1986). Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claims. Human Studies: A Journal for
Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 9(2-3), 219–229.
Rita, P. et. al. (2022). The impact of COVID-19 on tourism: Analysis of online reviews in the airlines sector.
Journal of Air Transport Management, 104.
Ruytenbeek et. al. (2021). Exploring the impact of platforms’ affordances on the expression of negativity in
online hotel reviews. Journal of Pragmatics 186(12), 289-307.
Vásquez, C. (2011). Complaints online: The case of TripAdvisor. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1707–1717.
Xiang, Z. et. al. (2017). A comparative analysis of major online review platforms: Implications for social media

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

analytics in hospitality and tourism. Tourism Management, 58, 51–65.

184
Arts of distancing in
talk-in-interaction
(organized by Akira
Takada, Emi Morita)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Making distance with the fetus; conversation analysis on


prenatal genetic counseling

Panel contribution

Dr. Michie Kawashima 1 , Prof. Hiroki Maeda 2 , Dr. Akane Kondo 3


1. Kyoto sangyo university, 2. Rikkyo University, 3. Aiiku Clinic, Aiiku Maternal and Child Health Center

Relating with the fetus poses different kinds of interactional challenges. During pre-natal genetic counseling the
challenge is even bigger since some parents face a task of discussing prenatal genetic testing for the fetus. This
study attempts to deal with interactional management of “distance” with the fetus during the prenatal genetic
counseling.
The study analysis is based on 12 video recordings of prenatal genetic counseling conducted by registered clin-
ical geneticists (CGs) in a tertiary hospital in Japan. During the prenatal counseling, the clients were required
to decide which prenatal genetic test they would prefer to take—noninvasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT),
amniocentesis, or any others. In our data set, some clients had been referred from local obstetricians because of
abnormal findings (e.g., Nuchal Translucency [NT]). Since the likelihood of a miscarriage occurring rises during
early pregnancies in NT cases, CGs are more careful about unpacking such possibilities during their talks with
parents.
The distance management is taken place especially during a decision-making process for the possible tests and
its implications. While explaining related evidences and data to decide which test to take, CGs attempts to stay
neutral to support parents’ decision-making. One way of keeping the neutral stance is to present the options with
objective information. For example, during the explanations of percentile of having certain kind of disabilities
with NT condition of a fetus, the focus of discussion centers around numbers from the scientific data and how
to interpret the numbers. The focus maintains certain distance from the fetus when discussing the general
tendency and the interpretation of the frequencies. Maintaining such distance support both CGs and the parents
to be impartial in the decision-making.
At the same time, the distance with the fetus is often drawn to a closer side when the participants are just
about to decide what to do. For example, when the parents ask a question like “Does it apply to our baby?”, the
discussion becomes more closer to the fetus by applying the objective information to the specific and their fetus.
In different occasions, CGs can pose a closer stance like “An important thing is how you think of the baby” after
discussing the objective numbers. By managing the distance with the fetus interactionally, the CGs and parents
process their decision-making not only with the objective/medical reasoning but also personal stance toward
the fetus.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Nominalizer nun-ke in Korean conversation: Impersonalizing


through distancing

Panel contribution

Prof. Kyu-hyun Kim 1


1. Kyung Hee University

From a conversation-analytics perspective, the present study explores the interactional meaning of the Korean
nominalizing construction involving the general noun -ke(s) (‘thing’). As a “defective” noun form, -ke(s) is used
with the adnominalizer/attributive marker –(u)n, nun, and (u)l, which each expresses anteriority, concurrence,
and irrealia/not-yet-fulfilled state, respectively. On the basis of an examination of audio- and video-recorded
ordinary Korean conversations, the present study illuminates the actional upshot of nun-ke constructions in
terms of the practice of “distancing”, enabled through formulating a verbal process into a form of “established
fact/reality”.
The “impersonalizing” import of the distancing practice organized by the nun-ke construction is observed most
saliently as features of actions organized as various forms of “overplay” (Goffman, 1971). For instance, the
mirative use of nun-ke emerges in the narrative contexts where the speaker presents the reported action/event
as “tellable” despite the coarse granularity of description, often relying on the use of hyperbole or extreme
case formulations mediating detachment and newsworthiness (M. Kim, 2015). The action/event is formulated
as a fact/reality, whose deviant or extraordinary features are used as a basis for enticing the recipient to co-
experience it as an externally positioned co-evaluator through sharing the speaker’s loaded stance displayed
to it, e.g., surprise, irony, or emotional stress attributed to it (“(You know what?) It was the case that the car
suddenly cut in in front!”) (cf. Sacks, 1992).
Other examples involve the use of nun-ke as a component of negative questions (formatted with nun-ke ani),
where it renders them a resource for organizing a range of overplay in the form of “mock-actions”. For instance,
veiled as a request for confirmation, they may construct an act of the recipient or third party as the butt of mock-
teasing, for which the speaker is not shown to be personally accountable (“Isn’t it the case that you did not buy
the TV because you wanted to spend time doing more productive things? (but now you are thinking of buying
one?)”) (K. Kim, 2022).
The findings are supported by nun-ke’s use in modal expressions such as (u)n/nun/(u)l-ke(s) kat (‘it seems’), with
which the speaker’s epistemic claim is often “overly” (or unnecessarily) mitigated (e.g., “It seems that I am
thankful to you all.”/“It seemed pretty warm in the past few days.”). Similar distancing effects are observed
in the use of (u)lke(s) (‘gonna’), marked with the irrealis mood. It is routinely used in the context where the
speaker’s promise of a future action is made in the form of an overstatement made “pro forma”, i.e., adumbrated
but not fulfilled immediately (e.g., mother to her child: “We’re gonna leave soon (so stop bugging me).”) (Suh
and Kim, 1991).
The distancing practice that nun-ke implements organizes the participation framework in which the recipient
is externally positioned as a trusted co-member to affiliate with and collaboratively register the speaker’s vari-
ously overstated, nuanced, ironic stance displayed through overplay. Implications of the findings are discussed
in terms of socialization process (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989), action formation (Levinson, 2013), and cross-
linguistic analysis (Sidnell, 2009).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmaticization of the Japanese honorific suffix -haru as a


resource to mark agentive “distance”

Panel contribution

Dr. Emi Morita 1 , Dr. Akira Takada 2


1. National University of Singapore, 2. Kyoto University

This study examines the use of the Japanese honorific verbal suffix -haru as a tool to acknowledge and negotiate
social distance among participants in Japanese talk-in-interaction, especially in situations involving young chil-
dren. This suffix appeared as an honorific marker in the mid 19th century in the Western part of Japan, which
was a cultural and political center at that time. It is still commonly used in that region as an honorific suffix,
and it can be used to create social distance between the speaker and the referent, as many honorific expressions
do. However, our naturally occurring everyday conversational data reveals that its pragmatic function is also
diversifying beyond that of a mere honorific suffix.
We observe that young children in the regions where the Western Japanese dialect are spoken start using -
haru frequently in their talk as early as 3 years old, at a time when other verbal honorific suffixes and honorific
forms have not yet appeared in their linguistic repertoire. Moreover, they use -haru in situations where there
is no evidence to suggest that they are displaying “respect” or acknowledging some kind of differential social
status of the referent. Moreover, not only are such non-honorific uses often not corrected by the caregivers, but
often the caregivers, in the subsequent sequence, themselves use -haru for the same referent as child just did –
indicating that -haru has been pragmaticized beyond its original honorific-only status.
In this study, we analyze the use of -haru in several different social actions performed by young children when
they are: 1) describing a toy’s action in imaginary play; 2) describing the actions of their siblings (including
infants and fetuses); 3) telling caregivers about the someone else’s doings; 4) talking about outsiders (such as a
policeman, friends, visitor, etc.); 5) asking about a second person’s action. We notice that the use of -haru is not
determined by the social status of referent, as would be the case with a genuine honorific, given that the same
referent’s actions are not marked with -haru even within the same activity. Rather, our analyses of specific in-
stances where -haru is used in quite different action types reveal how explicitly marking the measure of agency
being attributed to the referent through the use of -haru accomplishes a number of very specific pragmatic ef-
fects (e.g., blaming, animating, ostracizing, etc.) that ‘distance’ the agency and responsibility of the speaker from
the agency and responsibility of the person (or personified toy or animal) being spoken of.
In this way, this once honorific verbal suffix for denoting pre-established social distance has now also been prag-
maticised as a way to proclaim distance one’s own differential measure of agency, social responsibility, and/or
intentionality from that of another in reference to a certain specifically denoted act.

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Social and spatial distancing in preschool groups in Sweden


and Japan: Locating place of self and other in group activities

Panel contribution

Prof. Matthew Burdelski 1 , Prof. Asta Cekaite 2


1. Osaka University, 2. Linköping University

Across the globe, social distancing and personal space—while not new to academic interest (Hausendorf, 2014;
Pütz & Dirven, 1996)—have boomed during and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, impacting the ways
people interact with each other (Katila, Gan & Goodwin, 2020; Mondada et al., 2020;). Young children exhibit a
propensity to engage in social and spatial distancing in relation to others. This paper explores ways in which
preschool children, ages two to three years old, in two cultural contexts—Sweden and Japan—engage in prac-
tices that seek to put social and spatial distance between themselves and peers. Based on approximately 100
hours of audio-visually recordings of naturally occurring interaction, the analysis shows how children mobilize
a range of communicative resources, including verbalization, pointing, gaze, interpersonal touch, and material
objects to produce pragmatic acts that attempt to re-locate other children from a physical space that they are
currently occupying to an alternative physical space. Our analysis shows that these acts include directives (e.g.,
“You don’t sit here”), gestures (e.g., deictic pointing to mean “over there”), and interpersonal touch (e.g., pushing
on another’s shoulder, stepping on another’s foot). It suggests that children’s pragmatic acts of social and spatial
distancing simultaneously entail social proximity, including displaying resistance and alignment in forming so-
cial relationships. We argue that these acts reveal children’s dynamic and interactional understanding of bodies
in relation to physical space, institutional norms, and the social and moral order.
References
Hausendorf, H. (214). On the interactive achievement of space – and its possible meanings. In P. Auer, M.
Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock, B. Szmrecsanyi (Eds.), Space in language and linguistics: Geographical, interactional,
and cognitive perspectives (pp. 276-303). De Gruyter.
Katila, J., Gan, Y., Goodwin, M. H. (2020). Interaction rituals and ‘social distancing’: New haptic trajectories and
touching from a distance in the time of COVID-19. Discourse Studies, 22(4), 418-440.
Mondada, L. et al. (2020). Human sociality in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic: A systematic examination of
change in greetings. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24, 441-468.
Pütz, M. & Dirven R. (Eds.) (1996). The construal of space in language and thought. De Gruyter.

189
Boko Haram terrorism in
Nigeria and atypical
discourses (organized by
Ruth Karachi Benson Oji,
Akin Odebunmi)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Deconstructing Nuanced Perspectives in The Nigerian Boko


Haram Experience: A Critical Socio-Pragmatic Consideration

Panel contribution

Dr. Oluwatomi Adeoti 1


1. Kwara State University, Malete

Terrorism, whether homegrown or transnationally imported, is a threat to the peace and stability of any loca-
tion where it operates. It has been described and (re)presented in a variety of ways, particularly by political
cartoonists who use sociopolitical and cultural knowledge of Nigerian events to capture terrorist activities and
their consequences on Nigerians in specific frames. This study investigated how the cartoonists and, by ex-
tension, the Nigerian media perceive the Boko-Haram terrorists, how their activities are communicated to the
audience, and how the effect of their activities is perceived by Nigerians. Twenty cartoons on terrorism (with
a particular focus on Boko Haram) were purposively sampled from online sources such as Google, Facebook
and online newspaper sites. They were subjected to critical examination using insights from various socio-
pragmatic approaches as a theoretical basis. The study found that members of the Boko Haram sect are labelled
as terrorists, extremists, enemies of the Nigerian state, anti-education, and invariably anti-progressives. This
was accomplished through vivid language and graphic depictions of the sect’s actions. The government was
also charged with being partly responsible for the sect’s activities, as the cartoonists emoted the implications of
Boko Haram’s operations by drawing from Nigerian sociopolitical realities to typify the consequences of these
activities. The study concluded that the cartoonists used a rich stockpile of common ground to present the Boko
Haram sect in specific frames, query or highlight the (in)sincerity of the government, and portray the devasta-
tion caused by the sect.
Keywords: Terrorism, Boko-Haram, Cartoons, Socio-Pragmatics, Common ground

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From Terrorists to Mere Bandits: Atypical Discourse


Representations of the Diachronic Boko Haram Nomenclature
in selected Nigerian Newspapers

Panel contribution

Dr. Daniel Nwogwugwu 1


1. Bowen University, Iwo

The continuous rise in the deadly activities of the dreaded Boko Haram sect in Nigeria calls for continuous con-
cern. The media framing of the activities of this dreaded sect and the government’s rapid mutations of the sects’
nomenclature reflects, to a large extent, muted intentions and the levels of control on the audience’s beliefs.
Several studies have examined the sect’s activities vis-à-vis their operations, newspaper framing and discourse
issues, and linguistic strategies with less attention to the recently changing nomenclature and representations
of this sect. Therefore, this study identifies the discourse representations of the diachronic Boko Haram nature
in selected Nigerian newspapers. Data would be gathered from news headlines and content in two purposively
selected newspapers, Daily Trust (published in Northern Nigeria) and Punch (published in Southern Nigeria),
from 2014 to 2020 . These newspapers are also selected because they are widely circulated in the Northern and
Southern regions and report extensively on Boko Haram activities. The study period will reveal the continuous
mutations in the nomenclature of the notorious sect. The analysis is guided by Ruth Wodak’s Discourse Histor-
ical approach to critical discourse analysis and the transitivity aspect of systemic functional grammar (SFG).
Data will also be subjected to critical discourse analysis. The findings will reveal the atypical discourse repre-
sentations and diachronic nomenclature of the Boko Haram sect with depictions such as terrorists, insurgents,
gunmen, bombers, abductors/kidnappers, negotiators, fundamentalists, and currently bandits. These discourse
representations are through the material, mental, relational, and verbal processes. The paper concludes that
an in-depth understanding of atypical representations and mutating nomenclature of the dreaded sect over the
years will reveal the muted intentions and agenda set by the media on how citizens should interpret the sect’s
activities.

192
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Linguistic Landscape of Public Signages in Nigeria Security


Formations as Metaphorical (Re-)Construction of Readiness
Culture in the Fight against Insecurity

Panel contribution

Dr. Chuka Ononye 1 , Dr. Christabel Onyema 2


1. University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 2. Imo State University, Owerri

The prevailing insecurity across Nigeria and the seeming inability of the Nigerian security forces to secure
lives and properties of citizens have not only prompted all regions of the country to resort to such ‘self-help’
initiatives as Hisbah Corps (in the North), Amotekun (in the West) and Ebube Agu (in the East) (Nwoko, 2021),
which have rather received widespread criticism (Olaniyi, 2011; Yahaya & Bello, 2020). Interestingly, this has
triggered a conscious effort at reforming the Nigerian security operations to deal with this reality and regain
citizens’ confidence. One of the results is the formation of different security outfits in various states, the slogans
of which are carefully chosen, privileging emotive words and concrete metaphors from English and indigenous
languages, to represent the security challenges in various states/regions and strategies devised by the force in
tackling them. Some of these outfits include Operations Wabaizigian (Edo State), Kpochapụ (Anambra State), Buje
Ekun (Osun State), Yaki (Kaduna State), Hattara (Gombe State), Puff Adder (Sokoto State), Lafia Dole (north-east
region), Safe Heaven (Niger-delta region), etc.
In this study, we critically examine the extent to which, and in what ways, metaphorical thought is relevant to the
understanding of the motives, uses and contestations of multiple forms of ‘languages’ as they are used in public
signages of the Nigeria police and army (henceforth the force). Through this, we intend to explain how public
signages on police/army vehicles and posts, for example, are cognitively structured in English and indigenous
languages to conventionally apply to certain target domains that (re)construct a culture of readiness that has
over the years observably been lost in the force. The study therefore seeks to answer two cogent questions: (a)
what are the conceptual mappings used in the public signages, and how are they patterned? and (b) how do the
cognitive mechanisms to regulate experience and trigger emotional conviction in the Nigerian citizenry?
We will apply qualitative method, which involves collecting qualitative data. First, the process of observation
will be employed, and accompanied with such instruments as a video and still cameras to comprehensively
document the force’s public signages, such as on their vehicles and sign posts. The texts are translated and
transcribed from native Nigerian languages and Nigeria Pidgin to English for wider consumption, annotated
and organised in a Word processing document, and coded based on the research questions. Other ethnographic
techniques such as one-to-one interview with selected public relations officers of the forces will be utilised to
respectively obtain perceptions on specific institutional goals of the public signages. Data analysis will be com-
pletely descriptive and interpretive with insights from a synergy of Charteris-Black’s (2004) Critical Metaphor
Analysis (CMA) (which combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis), Kress and Van
Leeuwen’s (2006) Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), and Landry and Bourhis (1997) concept of Linguistic
Landscape (LL). We utilise the knowledge derived to advance a cognitive model that includes field-based evi-
dences in realising what Nigeria’s contributions at combating insecurity across Africa are.

193
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic Presupposition of Newspaper Headlines on


Children’s Involvement in Terrorism in Nigeria

Panel contribution

Dr. Ezekiel Opeyemi Olajimbiti 1


1. Federal University Lokoja, Nigeria

Terrorism discourse in Nigeria, with its different manifestations, nomenclatures, and dynamics, has continued
to attract investigations, particularly on how to curb the act but the involvement of Nigerian children as child
soldiers in this phenomenon has received less scholarly attention, although previous studies have pointed to
it. This lacuna if investigated can unveil how and to what extent children are available to and engaged by
terrorist groups. This paper addresses this gap by examining the pragmatics of media portrayals of child sol-
diers in the context of current terrorism in Nigeria. The data, consisting of 55 headlines from five Nigerian
newspapers- The Punch, The Nation, The Guardian, The Tribune, and The Premium Times- between 2014 and
2021, were analyzed using the framework of pragmatic presuppositions. Findings reveal predominantly three
presupposition triggers, namely recruitment, usability, and donation as signposts to child soldiers in Nigeria;
which manifest existential and lexical presuppositions. The triggers index context of terror with the ostensible
use of words characterizing activities such as bombing, killing, and attacking innocent Nigerians and inferenc-
ing how children are deployed by different terrorist groups in the country because of their availability. With
the presupposed component of intentionality, the headlines not only inform, condemn, lament, sensitize, and
blame but also assert the indisputable involvement of children in terrorist acts. From the findings, it can be
inferred, as a pragmatic orientation, that media reportage presupposes the vulnerability of Nigerian children
in the hands of terrorists and assumes that they should be denied access to Nigerian children.
Keywords: Child soldiers, Terrorism discourse, Media portrayal, Presupposition triggers, Context of terror.

194
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Recruitment strategies and loyalist ideology in terrorist


rhetoric in Africa and the Middle East

Panel contribution

Dr. Ayo Osisanwo 1


1. Department of English, University of Ibadan, Ibadan

Terrorist groups in Africa and the Middle East publicise their rhetoric through the social media, using different
ideologies and strategies to recruit new members, retain old members and achieve other gains. The recruit-
ment strategies and ideologies deserve critical examination since existing linguistic studies have concentrated
on media representations of terrorism, neglecting the examination of terrorists’ rhetoric. This study, therefore,
linguistically engages the speeches of terrorist leaders (ISIS, Al-qaeda, Boko Haram and Al Shabaab), with empha-
sis on their recruitment rhetoric in order to identify the discourse issues, rhetorical strategies, loyalist ideologies
and explore the forensic propensities in them. Using transcribed speeches from online video clips, which com-
prised about 250,000 word-corpus, of four terrorist leaders in the world, covering mainly the GTI 2016-rating
of the most affected places by terrorists, including Africa (Abubakar Shekau of Boko Haram, Ahmad Umar
of Al-Shabaab) and the Middle East (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIL/ISIS, Osama Bin Laden of Al-Qaeda)
are selected. The transcribed speeches and the video clips, sourced from Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and
other online platforms are subjected to quantitative and qualitative analyses. For quantitative analysis, corpus
linguistics which enables the study of wider patterns and collocation of words, and allows analysis of multiple
parameters at the same time, is deployed. For qualitative analysis, data is mainly subjected to discourse analysis,
borrowing largely from CDA and other relevant theories which reveal the recruitment strategies like religious
blackmail, promised remuneration to new converts, subtle threat, complimenting old membership; goals and
loyalist ideologies like religious radicalism, anti-statism and pro-jihadism. The study, which should be of im-
mense benefit to security outfits, the Nigerian state and terrorism-prone countries in Africa, will, expectedly,
introduce a new dimension to the examination of terrorists’ speeches and possibly give a counter orientation
to the youths who are the most easily won victims of the recruitment.
Keywords: Terrorist rhetoric, Recruitment strategies, Loyalist ideology, Africa, Middle East

195
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Terrorism in Flux: A Historical Pragmatic Tracing of


Boko-haram Operations in Nigeria

Panel contribution

Prof. Akin Odebunmi 1 , Dr. Ruth Karachi Benson Oji 2


1. University of Ibadan, 2. Pan-Atlantic

Terrorism in Nigeria, largely iconised by Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād, and more popularly
known as the Boko-Haram (BH) terrorist organisation, has demonstrated several operational manifestations
both through its activities and its nomenclatures, which have implications for the understanding of the vio-
lence it unleashes and the Nigerian government’s attitude to it. Several linguistic studies on BH in Nigeria have
investigated its discourses more in terms of their communicative devices, pragmatic resources, and ideological
orientations than in terms of the group’s historically-tied nomenclatural and operational fluxes. This study takes
up this omitted task by historicising BH’s identity labels and connecting the occurrences of these to usage con-
texts, the activities of BH, and the dispositions of the media and Nigerian government to them. Data consist of
200 editions of two Nigerian-national newspapers, Vanguard and Punch, between 2017 and 2022. Insights from
three theoretical platforms were found useful in data analysis: historical pragmatics, social-identity theory, and
stance model. The newspapers, the headlines, and the news contents sampled were selected on stratified and
purposive bases. Findings indicate that nomenclatural diachrony swings between BH’s initial Arabic-Islamic-
coloured preference and the government’s blackmail-tainted and ideologically-grounded BH preference. Group
nomenclatural preference and its attendant initial fuzzy ideology were matched with localised and controlled
small-scale violence. With the label, “BH” widely mediatised and ideologised, complicated with government of-
fensives and clamp down, violence, contextualised in defensive religious extremism and equity question, rose
and was weighed as full-scale terror. Thus, the label “terrorist” and “BH” took turns as alternative terms. Deep
common ground knowledge between BH and Government, leaked through the media, softened government
disposition and heralded labels such as “bandit”, “gunmen” and “kidnappers”, all integrated into epistemic ev-
idential and affective stances disproportionately displayed by Government and the media.

196
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Pragmatics of terrorism in Ahmed Yerima’ Pari

Panel contribution

Dr. Simeon Ajiboye 1


1. Bowen University, Iwo

Terrorism has been a phenomenon of main concern in the global space, and this has made it to be a subject
of discourse among scholars in various fields of study. Previous studies on terrorism have focused on framing,
ideology, identity construction, pragmatics mechanisms, and pragmatic functions from news headlines, media
reports, and tweets, neglecting the discursive and discourse manifestation of terrorism in literary texts. This
study, therefore, unpacks different discourses and discursive manifestations of terrorism in Ahmed Yerima’s
dramatic text Pari, which centers centrally and mainly on the acts and impacts of terrorism specifically, in
Northern Nigeria. The study adopts a combination of Levinson’s notion of Activity types and Sarangi’s concept
of Discourse types. The data, sourced from selected conversations in the texts, were subjected to pragmatic
analysis. Five discursive manifestations of terrorism characterized Ahmed Yerima’s Pari: rape, kidnapping,
forced marriage, forced conversion, and destruction. Destruction manifests in form of killing and burning.
These discursive manifestations occurred in the contexts of religion, violence, and family. Both the discursive
manifestation and contexts projected poverty and government hypocrisy as factors responsible for terrorism,
especially in Nigeria. The study concludes that understanding the discursive manifestation of terrorism through
pragmatic resources will help not only in combating terrorism but will also help in finding a panacea to any
acts of terrorism in Nigeria, and the world at large.
Keywords: Ahmed Yerima, terrorism, discursive manifestation, forced marriage, religion

197
Children’s language
creativity, emergent
performativity and
heteroglossia in
multilingual settings
(organized by Ann-Carita
Evaldsson, Amelia
Kyratzis)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Doing humor in a linguistically heterogeneous peer group.


Children’s creative wordplay during on-task and off-task
activities

Panel contribution

Mr. Nicola Nasi 1


1. University of Bologna

This study investigates children’s humorous practices in a linguistically heterogeneous peer group, focusing
on wordplay during both on-task and off-task activities in the classroom. Data were collected during video-
ethnographic research in two primary schools in Italy and involve 8- to 10-year-old children with different
linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The video-recorded peer interactions are analyzed with an approach that
combines Conversation Analysis and the use of ethnographic information (Maynard 2006).
The study draws from the paradigm of peer language socialization (Kyratzis & Goodwin 2017), and builds upon
previous research on children’s language play (Cekaite & Aronsson 2004, Cekaite 2018) and shared laughter in
the peer group (Strid & Cekaite 2021). The focus is on children’s creative transformation of the verbal elements
of previous turns in an attempt to make peers laugh. As the analysis illustrates, both native and non-native chil-
dren recycle previous lexical items by ingeniously transforming some of their morphologic and/or phonologic
characteristics. These humorous recyclings can be inscribed within the current didactic task, but they can also
run parallel (and possibly transgressive) to it (Sterponi 2007).
It is argued that this kind of humorous wordplay is relevant to children’s refinement of their metalinguistic
awareness (Duranti 1997) and to the local co-construction of the social organization of the peer group. As re-
gards the latter, through this practice children manage to build and maintain affiliative relationships with their
classmates and to create a collective sense of the group (Corsaro 2003). The analysis has implications for teach-
ers’ professional practice: the affordances of specific didactic tasks seem to facilitate the emergence of this kind
of practice, which is also favored by teachers’ ‘loose’ normativity regarding the appropriate ways of using lan-
guage in the classroom.
References

• Cekaite, A. (2018). Microgenesis of of language creativity: Innovation, conformity and incongruence in


children’s language play. Language Sciences 65, 26-26.
• Cekaite, A. & Aronsson, K. (2004). Repetition and joking in children’s second language conversations:
playful recyclings in an immersion classroom. Discourse Studies 6(3), 373-392.
• Corsaro, W. (2003). The Sociology of Childhood. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kyratzis, A., & Goodwin, M.H. (2017). Language Socialization in Children’s Peer and Sibling-Kin Group
Interactions. In P. Duff & S. May (Eds.), Language Socialization, (pp. 123-138). New York: Springer.
• Maynard, D. (2006). Ethnography and Conversation Analysis: What is the Context of an Utterance? In S.
Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Emergent Methods in Social Research (pp. 55-94). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Sterponi, L. (2007). Clandestine interactional reading: Intertextuality and double-voicing under the desk.
Linguistics and Education 18, 1-23.
• Strid, E. & Cekaite, A. (2021). Embodiment in reciprocal laughter: Sharing laughter, gaze, and embodied
stance in children’s peer group. In J. Robles & A. Weatherall (Eds.), How emotions are made in talk, (pp.
163-187). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

199
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language play and code-switching in bilingual preschoolers’


playtime interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Younhee Kim 1


1. University of Macau

Children’s peer interaction has been regarded as a key locus where childhood peer culture is constructed and
where children learn language as well as how to participate in social interaction (Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver,
& Teubal 2014). Compared to adult-child interaction, unsupervised peer interaction seems to provide more free-
dom and less structure in the way play interaction develops and unfolds, which seems to lead to more instances
of language play including non-word and nonsense word repetition. The current study examines bilingual
preschoolers’ spontaneous play interaction based on twenty-four hours video recordings. Preliminary analysis
reveals porous nature of the transition between private speech/self-talk and mutual conversation. It is observed
that while the children construct his or her own imagined world in their own private speech, it easily spills into
the playmate’s narrative scenario. Orientation to the playmate’s play scenario is made most visible when one
of them initiates a shift to joint play. Constant movement between repetition and improvisation constitutes one
distinctive feature of the play interaction as well as code-switching practice. Orientation to multiple linguistic
codes and respective worlds that it invokes are observed in their practice of negotiating transition between pri-
vate speech and mutual conversation. Using different codes allows them to map and navigate through cultural
landscapes as well as to deal with varying interactional contingencies. Two seemingly opposite features, i.e.,
massive amount of repetition and onomatopoeia words on one hand and intricate coordination of collaborative
turns across different language codes on the other hand are observed in the interaction, based on which the
study concludes with reflection on the value of unstructured play and ludic language, and inseparable link be-
tween language code and cultural domains it invokes. The focal children observed are Korean-English bilingual,
based in Singapore.
Cekaite, S. Blum-Kulka, V. Grøver & E. Teubal (2014).(Eds). Children’s Peer Talk: Learning from Each Other.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

200
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Translanguaging in Welsh traditional storytelling activities

Panel contribution

Dr. Amanda Bateman 1 , Prof. Friederike Kern 2


1. University of Waikato, 2. University of Bielefeld

The importance of understanding historical cultural connections to land and teaching of cultural histories and
identity is imperative in the new Curriculum for Wales to support children’s holistic wellbeing and positive
national identity. Storytelling about traditional Welsh legends in early years classrooms can support such issues
and is explored here in relation to the use of the Welsh collection of stories in The Mabinogion in a new entrant
classroom in Mid-Wales.
An ethnomethodological paradigm highlights how a teacher and her class of five-year-old children make sense
of their world in terms of the storytelling activity. Video data totalling two hours and eight minutes were col-
lected over two days in a Welsh medium new entrant classroom in mid-Wales when the Mabinogion was being
read. Specific moments of interest were transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis and membership
categorisation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1973).
Focusing on the beginning of a storytelling activity, we are especially interested in the translanguaging practices
that are embedded in a rich multimodal environment. While the teacher makes efforts to set up an environment
in which Welsh cultural and linguistic heritage can be multimodally reproduced to create a sense of belonging
and identity (Bateman & Davies, 2021), several cases of translanguaging practices (Garcia & Wei, 2014) occur. In
these, English is used as a linguistic code even though the teacher has established Welsh as the main classroom
language. A closer look at the practices reveals two orderly aspects: (1) children’s routine use of English, espe-
cially when providing candidate answers to the teacher’s questions; (2) the regular translation of place names
that are thus treated as objects oriented to as significant for everybody to know in English and in Welsh. Build-
ing on research on translanguaging as a pedagogical practice in Welsh classrooms (cf., e.g., Williams, 1996), the
aim of the presentation is to explore the systematics of translanguaging as fluid, multiimodal practices of mak-
ing meaning (Bonacina et.al., 2021) during the Welsh traditional storytelling activity, and situate them in the
wider context of the Curriculum of Wales. Such practices built around traditional Welsh legends connected to
place and identity support efforts for language revitalisation in ways that are key to the holistic development
of the child, particularly for belonging and identity (Bateman & Davies, 2021)
Bateman, A. and Davies, M. (2021). Traditional storytelling for identity framing. Paper presented for the Early
Years Research Centre (virtually), The University of Waikato, 6th Nov 2021
Berger, J. H. & Johnston, K. (2015). Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Bonacina-Pugh, F., Da Costa Cabral, I., & Huang, J. (2021). Translanguaging in education. Language Teaching,
54(4), 439-471. doi:10.1017/S0261444821000173
Williams, C. (1996). Secondary education: Teaching in the bilingual situation. In C. Williams, G. Lewis, & C.
Baker (Eds.),The language policy: Taking stock (pp. 39–78). Llangefni, UK: CAI.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Language 50(4), 696-735. doi:10.1353/lan.1974.0010.

201
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Translanguaging, Language Creativity and Belonging in Boys’


Peer Group Play in a Bilingual Spanish-English Preschool

Panel contribution

Prof. Amy Kyratzis 1


1. Department of Education, University of California

Children often adopt language practices to mark affiliation with a peer group (Rampton 2017; Zentella 1997).
This paper explores how members of peer group of four boys, two having stronger English than Spanish lan-
guage competencies, and two having stronger Spanish than English language competencies, socialize one an-
other to English and Spanish language practices as well as heteroglossia and translanguaging (García & Leiva
2014; Kyratzis, Reynolds & Evaldsson 2010), in classroom peer play interactions. Data are drawn from a multi-
year videoethnography which followed the classroom friendship group interactions in a bilingual Spanish-
English Head Start preschool classroom. One of the boys with stronger Spanish competencies led in play in-
volving enregistering (Agha 2005) adult male voices (e.g., Padre and Compadre), indexing these as powerful
peer registers appropriate for school and influencing even peers with less strong Spanish language competen-
cies to adopt the registers. As the peers attempted to enter these plays, they would use features of the registers.
They would also use Spanish language forms and translanguaging, combining English and Spanish resources
to build Spanish phrases and heteroglossic ones (“I speak Spañol and Inglés”) by way of gaining access to the
play and indexing belonging. Concomitantly, a boy with stronger Spanish competencies would also use English
language forms and heteroglossic phrases, to participate in play influenced by American popular media and
video games (e.g., Fruit Ninjas), (e.g., “Son bombs!”). Results illustrate how children’s multilingual play provides
a site for their exploration of new language forms and registers and for their exploration of how language forms
index social roles, identities, and belonging.
Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 38-59.
García, O. & Leiva, C. (2014). Theorizing and Enacting Translanguaging for Social Justice. In A. Blackledge, A.
Creese (eds.), Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy, Educational Linguistics 20, pp. 199-213.
Kyratzis, A., Reynolds, J. & Evaldsson, A.-C. (2010). Heteroglossia and Language Ideologies in Children’s Peer
Play Interactions, Pragmatics, 20(4): 457- 466
Rampton, B. (2017) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Routledge.

202
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Young boys’ heteroglossic practices in afterschool social


networking: Creating social spaces for exploring linguistic
varieties and language norms in heterogeneous peer group
settings

Panel contribution

Prof. Ann-Carita Evaldsson 1


1. Department of Eucation, Uppsala University

This study applies a language socialization approach to the multilingual peer group as a socializing agent for
children’s language learning, creativity and sociality (cf. Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011). It explores children’s cre-
ative language use (language play, style-shifting, crossing, code-shifting, verbal performances) in a multilin-
gual afterschool/social network setting where language users navigate between multiple and sometimes con-
flicting linguistic and cultural resources while enacting their multicultural experiences (Kyratzis, Reynolds &
Evaldsson 2010). The analysis takes its point of departure in research on children’s language creativity that un-
derlines the interrelationship between language practices of bi/multilinguals in terms of heteroglossia (Bailey,
2007; Minks, 2010) and polycentricity (Blommaert, 2010). It demonstrates how a group of boys (with Swedish-
Turkish-Kurdish backgrounds) make use of and manipulate diverse linguistic/ communicative features and
styles, including i) an urban youth register and ii) heritage language forms (their social values and pragmatic
uses) in a social media context, while orienting iii) to standard language norms for proper Swedish use and
orthography. It is argued that such hybrid linguistic practices (Rampton, 2017) – located and enacted within ev-
eryday on/offline peer interactions contribute to cultural linguistic variety while simultaneously reproducing
different normativities (both peer generated norms and standard norms for language use).
The selected data are based on a video ethnographic study in an afterschool program (for 7- to 9-year-olds) in
Sweden with a multilingual policy, that offers daily spaces for children to socialize with peers and relate their
home and school experiences. In this context children’s friendship and creative language use are (re-) config-
ured through their daily engagement with social media. The boys’ on/offline communication involves mocking,
joking and heteroglossic practices of speech and writing, language play with linguistic features (phonetic, mor-
phological and syntactic) characterized by plurality, heterogeneity and polycentricity of semiotic and linguistic
resources (Blommaert, 2010) and “multiple layers of normativities” (Agha, 2007). The findings highlight the
aesthetic, interactive and socially constitutive role of young boys’ creative agency and how children in playing
with and juxtaposing features from different registers/genres for social entertaining purposes, simultaneously
appropriate, explore and challenge existing language hierarchies and ideologies.
Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bailey, B. (2007) Heteroglossia and boundaries. In M. Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 257-74.
Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, M. H. & Kyratzis, A. (2011) Peer socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin (Eds.) The
handbook of language socialization, pp. 365–390. Malden,
MA: Wiley Blackwell.

Kyratzis, A., Reynolds, J. & Evaldsson, A.-C. (2010). Heteroglossia and Language Ideologies in Children’s Peer
Play Interactions, Pragmatics, 20(4): 457- 466
Minks, A. (2010) Socializing heteroglossia among Miskitu children on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. Prag-
matics20(4): 495-522

203
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rampton, B. (2017) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Routledge.

204
Clause combining at the
discourse-grammar
interface: Answers from
coordination,
subordination and
insubordination
(organized by Liesbeth
Degand, Victor Royo
Viñuales, An Van linden)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Clause linkage strategies in colloquial Ancient Greek: The


case of hṓste in documentary papyri

Panel contribution

Dr. Giuseppina di Bartolo 1


1. University of Cologne

Recent linguistic research has pointed out that phenomena emerging from spoken language often challenge the
canonical dichotomy of syntactic hierarchies (among others Maschler et al. 2020; Van Valin 1984). That is to say,
the categories of coordination and subordination are often found lacking in describing the full range of usages
emerging in spoken language, including the dependency of clauses beyond sentence-level syntax.
This paper, which is part of a broader study on clause linkage strategies in ancient Indo-European languages,
aims at contributing to the analyses on syntactic and discourse relations, addressing data from Ancient Greek.
It specifically focuses on a corpus of Greek documentary papyri which belong to the most copious sources for
the study of ancient colloquial varieties. With a continuity of more than a millennium, these sources allow us to
detect general linguistic trends in texts from everyday life. They include constructions that challenge traditional
structure-based linguistic analyses and show the emergence of new uses in clause combining patterns.
A case in point is provided by hṓste ‘so that’, traditionally defined as a subordinating conjunction used for ex-
pressing consecutive relation. By means of examples, I will firstly show that hṓste can occur with the imperative
or the indicative in order to express results, exhortations or commands which do not depend on a previous ma-
trix clause. In this respect, it does not introduce a subordinate clause, but rather it connects two syntactically
independent discourse units, behaving like a discourse particle, operating beyond the sentence level syntax,
and contributing to the whole discourse coherence (Mithun 2008; Ruiz Yamuza 2021). Secondly, I will consider
the instances of the collocation hṓste + be.INF.PRS in specific types of texts (i.e., sale contracts and receipts).
Thirdly, I will explain to what extend the different types of analyzed hṓste sentences can be explained as cases
of insubordination (Beijering et al. 2019; Evans–Watanabe 2016). I will therefore address the factors which
have led to these usages (Cristofaro 2016). The final data discussion, which includes a cross-linguistic compari-
son with modern languages, will highlight that Greek documentary papyri are not only significant sources for
detecting synchronic varieties, but also a useful test bench for investigating more general linguistic phenomena
which are found in modern as well as in ancient languages.
Selected references
Beijering, K., G. Kaltenböck and M. S. Sansiñena (eds.). 2019. Insubordination. Theoretical and Empirical
Issues. Berlin/Boston.
Cristofaro, S. (2016). ‘Routes to insubordination. A cross-linguistic perspective’, in N. Evans and H. Watanabe
(eds.), 393–422.
Evans, N. and H. Watanabe (2016). Insubordination. Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Maschler, Y., S. Pekarek Doehler, J. Lindström and L. Keevallik (2020) eds. Emergent Syntax for Conversation.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Mithun, M. (2008). ‘The extension of dependency beyond the sentence’. Language 84 (1), 264–280.
Ruiz Yamuza, E. (2020). ‘Insubordination in Ancient Greek? The case of ὥστε sentences’. In M. Leiwo et al.
(eds.), Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics, 383–402. Helsinki.
Van Valin, R. D. (1984). ‘A typology of syntactic relations in clause linkage’. Proceedings of the Tenth annual
meeting of the Berkley Linguistic Society, 542–558.

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Clause-combining at the grammar-discourse interface in


French

Panel contribution

Dr. Wout Van Praet 1 , Prof. Liesbeth Degand 2


1. UCLouvain, 2. UC Louvain

This paper examines how clause-combining at the grammatical level maps onto relation types between units
established at the discourse level. It focuses on adverbial subordination in French, with the aim to compare the
interaction between syntactic integration and discursive dependence.
The data consist of 250 examples of adverbial subordination from LOCAS-F, a PoS-tagged and richly annotated
corpus of spoken French. An exhaustive extraction of subordinating conjunctions was taken from the ortho-
graphic transcriptions, then paired with the corresponding soundbites (analysed in Praat).
To investigate clause-combining at the grammatical and the discursive level, two coding schemes are used. The
grammatical scheme assesses the degree of syntactic dependence, based on the syntactic properties of clefting,
pronominal proportionality, and fronting [1]. The degree of discourse dependence is established based on
discourse-oriented features like speech-functional value, modality, prosodic integration [2-5].
In a second step, different types of grammatical and discourse linkage are charted through a cluster analysis,
thus refining in a systematic fine-grained manner existing clause-combining clines.
Thirdly, the resulting configurations are related to the semantic function of the conjunction (e.g. cause, conces-
sion) and their domain of use (Ideational, Rhetorical, Sequential, Interpersonal) [3]. A multifactorial analysis
will reveal which features (discursive, grammatical, semantic) are the best predictors of the domain in which a
conjunction is used. Conversely, a hierarchical cluster analysis will provide the degree of “polygrammaticality”
for the different conjunction lemmas, viz. the range of configurations a conjunction may occur in. A low degree
of polygrammaticality is expected to be indicative of conventionalized grammatical status, while a high degree
points to a bridging context towards new discourse uses.
Preliminary findings from a pilot study of 100 examples suggest an interaction between a clause’s syntactic
(in)dependence and the discourse relation it establishes: grammatically fully integrated clauses typically estab-
lish ideational relations, whereas clauses expressing interpersonal relations are grammatically independent.
Moreover, conjunctions expressing cause, concession and condition are more polygrammatical than those ex-
pressing temporality, which are characterised by greater grammatical and discursive dependence. Finally,
when the same discourse function can be coded by conjunctions with similar meanings (e.g. parce que, puisque),
the two tend to occupy different functional niches (with puisque used predominantly in the rhetorical domain).
Ultimately, the findings in this study will improve our understanding of clause-combining at the grammar-
discourse interface, describing how grammatical affordances of subordination are bent to new uses that come
to expression in discourse.
References
[1] Smessaert, H., B. Cornillie, D. Divjak, and K. van den Eynde. 2005. Degrees of Clause Integration. Linguistics
43: 471–529.
[2] Elvira-García, W., P. Roseano, and A.M. Fernández-Planas. 2017. Prosody as a Cue for Syntactic Dependency.
Journal of Pragmatics 109: 29–46.
[3] Crible, L. and L. Degand (2019). Domains and functions: A two-dimensional account of discourse markers.
Discours 24 : 3-35.
[4] Verstraete, J-C. 2007. Rethinking the Coordinate-Subordinate Dichotomy. Interpersonal Grammar and the
Analysis of Adverbial Clauses in English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
[5] Debaisieux, J-M, ed. 2013. Analyses linguistiques sur corpus: Subordination et insubordination en français.

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Paris: Hermes Science publications.

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Context-dependent grammar: The Japanese sentence-final


tteyuu in Twitter

Panel contribution

Dr. Michiko Kaneyasu 1


1. Old Dominion University

Different communicative environments afford different patterns of interaction and language use. This study in-
vestigates how the affordances and constraints of Twitter as a communicative space interact with the sentence-
final use of tteyuu [ʔtejɯː]. Tteyuu is a lexicalized combination of the quotative marker tte and the verb yuu
(‘say’) and is considered a type of complementizer. In sentence-level grammar, it links a modifying clause to
a modified head noun (kay ga tokyo ni sunderu tteyuu uwasa ‘a rumor that Kay lives in Tokyo’). In spoken
discourse, however, tteyuu also appears utterance finally.
In Kaneyasu (2023), I examined varied speaking environments and identified three related usages of the
utterance-final tteyuu: (1) clarifying the preceding utterance in response to different local contingencies such
as responding to a clarification question, (2) recasting the prior unit of talk in a way that highlights its relevance
to the main communicative purpose of the ongoing speech activity, and (3) delivering a key action (e.g., discus-
sion summary, story climax) for the ongoing speech activity. The first clarifying usage is most general in that
speakers in all examined speech activity types utilize it. The second and third usages, in contrast, only appear
within specialized speech activities, such as topic-based discussion and funny storytelling with activity-specific
overarching goals. In addition, while the first and second usages are dependent on the preceding discourse, the
third usage makes an independent move in discourse. From the perspective of language change, the specialized
speech activities can be considered “bridging contexts” (Evans and Wilkins 1998), where the use and interpreta-
tion of recasting tteyuu give rise to activity-bound pragmatic inferencing that the tteyuu-ending utterance does
something essential to achieving the activity-specific communicative purpose.
Twitter shares with spontaneous spoken discourse a temporally unfolding nature and a varying degree of col-
loquialism. It is therefore not surprising that we find the sentence-final use of tteyuu in tweets. At the same
time, tweets offer a unique set of situational and organizational characteristics, which likely influences the use
of linguistic and other multimodal resources. The current study examined 140 samples of sentence-final tteyuu
in tweets posted in 2022. Its most common usage is to annotate something expressed in the preceding text and
tweet, or a photo or screenshot appearing within the same tweet as the tteyuu-ending sentence. This usage has
overlapping characteristics with the clarifying use and recasting use found in the spoken discourse: adding
subsidiary information and explicating the noteworthiness of the given text or image. I will present examples
of this and other usages and discuss how they relate to one another as well as to the communicative purposes
and constraints of Twitter.
References
Evans, Nicholas & David Wilkins. 1998. The knowing ear: An Australian test of universal claims about the seman-
tic structure of sensory verbs and their extension into the domain of cognition, Arbeitspapier Nr. 32 (Neue Folge).
Cologne: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.
Kaneyasu, Michiko (2023). Formulaicity and contexts: A multimodal analysis of the Japanese utterance-final
tteyuu. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 39(1).

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How does insubordination relate to subordination? A


constructional cline of discourse uses of comme si-clauses in
French

Panel contribution

Mr. Víctor Royo Viñuales 1 , Dr. Wout Van Praet 2 , Prof. Liesbeth Degand 2
1. Université de Liège - UCLouvain, 2. UCLouvain

Previous studies have explored insubordination as the “conventionalized main clause use of what […] appear to
be formally subordinate clauses” (Evans 2007:367) and proposed different explanations for its linguistic arising
in discourse. Those proposals range from the reanalysis of an elided main clause (Evans 2007) to an extension
of the dependency scope from syntax to discourse (Mithun 2008, D’Hertefelt and Verstraete 2014), also including
explanations in terms of hypoanalysis (Van linden and Van de Velde 2014).
This paper aims to understand the linguistic nature of insubordination by assessing how it relates to differ-
ent subordination patterns. More precisely, it explores the discursive behaviour of comme si-clauses in order
to identify which syntactic, semantic and prosodic parameters define insubordinate uses compared to their
subordinate counterpart. Thus, our work ultimately aims to posit a cline of the different comme si-clauses in
discourse and investigate how they relate to one another.
Our analysis pertains thus to three dimensions: i) syntactic dependence is assessed through several tests (e.g.
proportionality and anteposition), providing different dependency patterns (Debaisieux 2016); ii) a seman-
tic characterization is parallelly conducted to identify to which macro-function domain these clauses belong
and which semantic value they convey (Crible & Degand 2019); and iii) prosodic analyses allow us to investi-
gate how different intonational patterns correlate with the resulting syntactic-semantic configurations (Elvira-
García et al. 2017). To these ends, our paper analyses a set of 642 comme si-clauses, randomly extracted from
three corpora, i.e. frTenTen17 (online written data), ParCoLab (literary writing) and Orféo database (conversa-
tional speech).
We observed that the semantic types expressed by comme si-clauses do not evenly distribute over the
subordinate-insubordinate interface. More precisely, it appeared that ‘manner’ clauses (1) are restricted to
subordination and ‘denial’ clauses (2) to insubordinate cases – in turn, ‘cause’ (3) and ‘attribution’ (4) clauses
are found in the two categories. Based on the notion of ‘bridging contexts’ (Evans and Wilkins 2000:550; Heine
2002), we claim that insubordinate comme si-clauses expressing ‘denial’ discursively arise from subordinate
clauses encompassing both the expression of ‘manner’ and ‘denial’ (1), i.e. through hypoanalysis (Van linden &
Van de Velde 2014).

• (1) Je lui ai souhaité un bon anniversaire comme ça m’intéressait. (ParCoLab)

‘I wished him/her a happy birthday as if I cared.’

• (2) A: Je vais arrêter de fumer. B: Comme si t’allais réussir ! (TCOF in Orféo)

‘I’m gonna quit smoking’ ‘As if you would succeed!’

• (3) La porte s’ouvre avant qu’il ne la touche, comme si quelqu’un l’avait tirée de l’intérieur. ‘The door
opens before he touches it, as if someone had pulled it from inside’ (ParCoLab)

• (4) C’est comme si tu allais voir un film, sauf que c’est toi l’acteur. (TCOF in Orféo)

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‘As if you went seeing a movie, except you are the actor.’
These findings were indeed supported by prosodic analyses, as i) different syntactic-semantic configurations
were found to correlate with different intonation patterns and ii) a significant number of bridging examples
like (1) proved to display a rising-falling tone typically associated with ‘denial’ insubordinate clauses.

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Insubordination and discourse structure: on Spanish


insubordinate conditionals

Panel contribution

Dr. Pedro Gras 1


1. Universiteit Antwerpen

Several functional studies have shown that grammatical constructions which express relations between clauses
usually tend to occur in a specific discourse position (Fillmore 1989, Evans 1993). Adopting a Construction
Grammar perspective, discourse position could be understood as a feature of a construction’s form, analogous
to the syntagmatic position of other constructions that work within the sentence boundary, such as attributive
adjectives in relation to a noun, for example. In this line, Linell (2009) proposes that the external syntax of a
construction must specify its restrictions regarding the contexts in which it can appear.
The goal of this paper is to discuss the role of discourse information in the representation of grammatical con-
struction trough the analysis of Spanish insubordinate conditionals, exemplified in (1).
(1) A. ¿Vamos a la playa?
‘What about going to the beach?’
B. ¡Si está lloviendo!
Lit. If it’s raining! ‘But it’s raining!’
From a formal point of view, these constructions pair two conflicting features: on the one hand, they superfi-
cially resemble conditional sentences, in that they are headed by the conditional marker si ‘if’; but, on the other,
they are behave syntactically and prosodically as main clauses, in that they generally constitute a turn in con-
versation –without possible main clause material in the preceding turn—and have non-continuation prosody
(Elvira-García et al. 2017). From a semantic point of view, these constructions introduce propositions that ques-
tion some aspect of the previous turn, and therefore, tend to occur as dispreferred second parts of an adjacency
pair (Montolío 1999). Indeed, this is what happens in example (1), in which speaker B questions the appropri-
ateness of the speaker A’s proposal to go to the beach.
Using interactional data from a corpus of colloquial conversations, each token has been analyzed according to
the discourse unit in which the construction occurs (turn, utterance, preface, extension, etc.) and the discourse
positions in which the construction is placed in relation to these units (independent, initial, medial, or final).
The results of the analysis show that it is not possible to assign to all tokens of the construction a single discourse
position, but they occur in several positions, although not all occur with the same frequency. The results can
be taken as evidence for a radial representation of constructions, in which the discourse information is not
represented in the general schema, but in basic level constructions that exhibit different levels of prototypicality,
according to their frequency.
References

Elvira-García, Wendy et al. (2017): «Prosody as a cue for syntactic dependency». JoP 109, 29-46.
Evans, Nicholas (1993): «Code, inference, placedness and ellipsis». In Foley, William, ed., The role of theory in
linguistic description, Berlin: Mouton, 243-280.
Fillmore, Charles (1989). «Grammatical construction theory and the familiar dichotomies». In North-Holland
Linguistic Series: Linguistic Variations. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 17-38.
Linell, Per (2009): «Constructions in dialogue». In Alexander Bergs and Gabriele Diewald, eds., Context and
Constructions, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 97-110.
Montolío, Estrella (1999): «¡Si nunca he dicho que estuviera enamorada de él! Sobre construcciones independi-
entes introducidas por si con valor replicativo». Oralia 2, 37-70.

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Ob-Clauses in Old High German: Factors in the Divergence of


Complement and Adverbial Clauses

Panel contribution

Mr. Michael Redmond 1


1. Université de Neuchâtel

The Present Day German (PDG) subordinator ob ‘if’ is most commonly associated with complement clauses
forming indirect questions. It is also used in attributive clauses and in complex syntactic patterns and subor-
dinators expressing irrelevance-conditionality, unreal comparison and concession (ob…oder… ‘if..or…’; als ob
‘as if’, obwohl ‘although’ respectively) as well as in insubordinate clauses expressing a range of illocutionary
forces. Many of these types evidence historical conditional functions, which is the most prominent function
of ob-clauses in Old High German (OHG), cf. (1), (Schrodt 2004). There are, however, other attested types
similar to those found in PDG expressing complement clauses (2) and attributes, irrelevance-conditionality (3),
concession and temporality (4).

1. Oba ír furlazet mannun iro sunta, thanne furlazit íu íuuar fater thie himilisco íuuara sunta. [T 34,7]
‘If you forgive people’s sins, then your heavenly Father will forgive your sins.’
2. Tho quad her: oba her suntig ist ni uueiz […] [T 132,15]
‘Then he said, “I don’t know if he is sinful […]” ’
3. Tho antlingita Petrus, quad imo: inti oba sie alle bisuihane uuerdent in thir, ih nio in altere ni uuirdu
bisuihan […] [T 161,3]
‘Then Peter answered and said to him, ”Even if they all betray you, I will never betray [you] […]’
4. Ob ih in kárkare wás, ir biríwetut thaz, wísotut min ouh in thíu, [O V.20,77]
‘As I was in prison, you regretted that, and visited me therefore,’

This study is an investigation of the relationships between OHG ob-clauses based on the Otfrid, Tatian, and
Notker subcorpora of the Referenzkorpus Althochdeutsch 1.1 (Donhauser/Gippert/Lühr 2018; Krause/Zeldes
2016). The polyfunctionality of ob-clauses is an indicator for historic morphosyntactic and semantic ambigui-
ties, which may have lead to innovative interpretations and new clause-combining possibilities. Through the
investigation of such ambiguities, the study is intended to reveal both similarities between types as well as fac-
tors in their divergence pointing to their hypothesised diachronic relationships. It is specifically hypothesised
that, in addition to semantic factors associated with matrix verbs, syntactic factors play a particularly impor-
tant role in the development of complement clauses, whereas innovation among adverbial clauses is motivated
predominantly by semantic-pragmatic effects.
Notably, as in PDG, several types found in OHG appear to be disambiguated by lexical and syntactic means.
One of the aims of this study is to identify formal markers found in innovative ob-clauses, asking the question
if such formal features are a motivation for or consequence of emergent clause types, thus investigating the
relationship between lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic strategies in clause combining.
Donhauser, K.; J. Gippert and R. Lühr. 2018. Deutsch Diachron Digital. Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch. Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin. Website: http://www.deutschdiachrondigital.de/rea
Krause, Th. and A. Zeldes. 2016. “ANNIS3. A New Architecture for Generic Corpus Query and Visualization.”
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31(1): 118–139. Website: https://corpus-tools.org/annis/download.html.
[O] Erdmann, O. (ed.). 1973. Otfrids Evangelienbuch, 6th ed.. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Schrodt, R. 2004. Althochdeutsche Grammatik II: Syntax. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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[T] Sievers, E. (ed.). 1966. Tatian: Lateinisch und altdeutsch mit ausführlichem Glossar, 2nd ed.. Paderborn:
Ferdinand Schöningh.

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Periodic style and the syntax of clause linkage in Early New


High German and Early Modern Danish

Panel contribution

Prof. Pierre-Yves Modicom 1


1. Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3

While most core morphosyntactic features of Present-Day Standard Germanic languages were already in place
in the written varieties of the late 16th century, written discourse in the early modern languages of Western and
Northern Europe were under the influence of a rhetorical writing code often named “periodic style” (which I
take to be a discourse tradition; Siouffi, 2019). In this kind of writing, the core syntactic units of written lan-
guage are not the clause and the utterance, but the period and its components, the protasis and the apodosis
and an optional constituent, the clausula (today’s protasis-apodosis conditional constructions are a remnant of
this pattern). The aim of the talk is to investigate the rendition of Early New High German (ENHG) periodic
structures in Early Modern Danish (EMD), using a 1587 ENHG chapbook, the Historia von Dr. Fausten, and its
EMD translation (1588).
In part 1, I present the major typological differences between both languages. Both ENHG and EMD are V2
languages, but Danish displays consequent VO features and allows only limited scrambling; on the other hand,
ENHG has stronger OV features and is a scrambling language; ENHG and EMD both allow left dislocation.
In part 2, I investigate parallel extracts from the corpora. I show that the clause is a more consistent and
compact unit in EMD than in ENHG, where (multiple) left-dislocation appears to be a crucial feature of periodic
constructions (which is not the case in the EMD subcorpus); in EMD, periodic syntax is essentially reduced
to (i) correlative constructions with a conjunction and an adverbial correlate (der p, da q) and (ii) additive
constructions using the linking word og (p og q). The item og is both an additive coordinator (“and”) and an
additive adverbial particle (“also”) with a different syntax. In the corpus, clause-linking og is used only as a
coordinator. ENHG makes a much more extensive use of subordinators, whereby these subordinators often
behave like coordinators regarding the syntax of the clausal constituent they introduce (Lefèvre, 2017). The
ENHG corpus also displays more recursive periods (with a sub-apodosis and a sub-protasis inside of each of the
two major components; Rinas, 2019). This kind of recursive period is almost absent in Danish.
Conclusion: “periodic style” and the various types of grammatical strategies involved in the Ausbau of the
corresponding rhetorical discourse tradition, including clause-linkage but not restricted to it, can be used to
distinguish the typological profile of two languages: ENHG is representative of a discourse-configurational
language. Information-structural and argumentative regularities overdetermine clausal grammar. Danish,
on the other hand, is clause-configurational: information-structural and argumentative regularities hold only
within the borders of clausal syntax.

References

Rinas, Karsten. 2019. Affinite konstruktionen im kontext der älteren Rhetorik und Stilistik. Sprachwissenschaft
44/1. 73-109.
Siouffi, Gilles (ed.). 2019. Phrase et période entre les XVIe et XVIIIe siècles (=Verbum 46/2).
Lefèvre, Michel. 2017. Rhetorik in Romanen? Binäre Satzstrukturen in Romanen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts.
In Claudia Wich-Reif (ed.), Serialisierungsregeln und ihre Geschichte vom 8. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert , 207-230.
Weidler.

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Spanish ‘que’-constructions from an


interactional-constructional perspective: patterns, levels, and
degrees of (in)dependence

Panel contribution

Prof. María Sol Sansiñena 1


1. KU Leuven

Spanish que-constructions can function as syntactically dependent as well as insubordinate constructions


(Evans 2007) and the empirical evidence shows that there are types and degrees of (in)dependence available
for these constructions (Sansiñena 2015). Moreover, Spanish que ‘that’ has a multiple functional load in that
it marks the finiteness of the clause but also signals a pragmatic meaning to the speech participant when it is
used without a matrix verb. This study discusses the interconnectedness of diverse functions associated with
que by addressing the phenomenon of ‘semi-insubordination’ (Van linden and Van de Velde 2014) in Spanish,
illustrated in (1), and discussing it against the pattern que-clause>, as in (2), and the case of so-called ‘causal’
que, as in (3).
1) [Friends signing a petition]
G03: si me invento un DNI no lo comprueban no/
G02: claro que lo comprueban Lucas
‘G03: If I make up an ID, they won’t check it, right?
G02: Of course [that] they check it, Lucas’
(MAESB2-02, COLA M)
2) [Friends watching TV]
J01: ah cállate Pepa y Miguel vete que me duele la cabeza eh/
G02: si a ti te duele la cabeza es que
1[a mí imagínate]
J01:1[mira (.) que te pires tronco]
‘J01: Oh, shut up, Pepa, and Miguel, go away, [QUE] my head aches, eh!
G02: Right, if you have a headache, like
1[imagine how I feel]
J01: 1[Look, [QUE] go away, man]’
(MALCC2-07, COLA M)
3) [Friends talking about a minidisk recorder]
G01: cuidado (.) que se cae
‘G01: Be careful, [QUE] it will fall.’
(MAESB2-01C, COLA M)
Specifically, this study focusses on the relations established between que-clauses and immediately preceding
elements in the turn, as well as on what types of premodifying elements contribute to the interpretation of the
que-clause. Based on the interactional-constructional analysis of conversational data extracted from the COLA
and the oral components of the CREA and CORPES XXI, and considering the structure of the turn-intervention, I
argue that the relation between the que-clause and the preceding element is essentially different depending on
whether they constitute two turn-constructional units or only one. Moreover, the preceding element is classified
according to its function in discourse, either as preface, element with illocutionary force, or modal element.
Criteria to determine which of these cases we are facing include the number of TCUs in the turn, the potential
for an intonation break between the que-clause and the preceding element, and the function of such element in

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relation to the que-clause. This study presents a typology that is in its own right suggestive of a gradient between
some semi-insubordinates leaning close to subordination and others approximating insubordination.
References
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In Irina Nikolaeva (ed.), Finiteness: Theoretical and Empir-
ical Foundations, 366-431. Oxford: OUP.
Sansiñena, María Sol. 2015. The multiple functional load of que. An interactional approach to insubordinate
complement clauses in Spanish. Leuven: University of Leuven dissertation.
Van linden, An & Freek Van de Velde. 2014. (Semi-)autonomous subordination in Dutch: structures and
semantic-pragmatic values. Journal of Pragmatics 60. 226–250.

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Stand-Alone Nominalization in Modern South Arabian

Panel contribution

Dr. Fabio Gasparini 1


1. Freie Universität Berlin

This talk will provide an analysis of the phenomenon of ‘stand-alone nominalization’ (Yap et al. 2011) – i. e.
nominalization in a syntactically-independent context – in two Modern South Arabian languages (henceforth
MSAL – Semitic, Afroasiatic), namely Mehri and Baṭḥari. Data is taken from Rubin (2018), Morris (Forth.) and
original field data.
Stand-alone nominalization can be understood as a broad case of insubordination (Evans & Watanabe 2016: 1).
This innovative structure likely developed because of the diachronic loss of participial forms, which in turn are
widely attested elsewhere in Semitic. The comparison between Mehri and Baṭḥari is relevant because, although
they are two closely related varieties of MSAL, they present some important differences which deserve a closer
look.
Stand-alone nominalized clauses in MSAL are main clauses headed by an associative particle – ḏ(ǝ)= in the case
of Mehri and (ǝ)l= for Baṭḥari – commonly used as genitive/relative/attributive markers. I describe the particle as
a nominalizer (Shibatani & Makhashen 2019), according to its substantial/determinative nature (Huehnergard
& Pat-El 2018).
A stand-alone nominalized verb encodes a durative (1), progressive (2) or anterior (3) aspect depending on
verbal Aktionsart and TMA properties:
(1) Baṭḥari
el fēzʕ-ak
nmlz be_scared\pfv-1s
‘I am terrified’
(2) Mehri
ḥā=bū ḏǝ=yǝ-ṣ́ḥáyk mǝ́n=ǝh
det=people nmlz=3m-laugh\ipfv from=3s.m
‘people were laughing at him’
(3) Mehri
ḏǝ=xtáwn ḥǝ=bǝ́n=ihǝm
nmlz=circumcize\pfv.3pl.m det=son\pl=3pl.m
‘they circumcized their sons’
Nominalization is significant in relation to discourse structure and textual organization since such clauses are
mainly used to convey background information (Gasparini 2021). The different patterning of nominalized
clauses within the information structure of Mehri and Baṭḥari will be dealt with in order to demonstrate how
two related varieties can develop the same construction from the same input (i.e. the loss of the participle) while
at the same time showing variation in its properties.
References
Comrie, Bernard & Sandra A. Thompson. 2007. Lexical Nominalization. In Shopen, Timothy (eds.), Language
Typology and Syntactic Description 3. 334-381. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, Nicholas & Honoré Watanabe. 2016. The dynamics of insubordination: An overview. In Evans, Nicholas
& Honoré Watanabe (eds.), Insubordination, 1-38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gasparini, Fabio. 2021. Nominalizzazione indipendente in Sudarabico Moderno. In: Ballarè, Silvia & Guglielmo
Inglese (eds.), Tipologia e sociolinguistica: verso un approccio integrato allo studio della variazione. Atti del

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workshop della Società di Linguistica Italiana, 10 settembre 2020, 177–206. Milan: Officina ventuno.
Huehnergard, John, & Na‘ama Pat-El. 2018. The origin of the Semitic relative marker. Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 81(2). 191-204.
Morris, Miranda J. Forthcoming. A collection of Baṭḥari texts.
Rubin, Aaron D. 2018. Omani Mehri: a new grammar with texts. Leiden: Brill.
Shibatani, Masayoshi & Khaled A. Bin Makhashen. 2019. Nominalization in Soqotri, a South Arabian language
of Yemen. In Wetzels, Leo W. (eds.), Endangered languages: Contributions to Morphology and Morpho-syntax,
9-31. Leiden: Brill.
Yap, Foong Ha, Karen Grunow-Hårsta & Janick Wrona. 2011. Introduction: Nominalization strategies in Asian
languages. In Yap, Foong Ha, Karen Grunow-Hårsta & Janick Wrona (eds.), Nominalization in Asian languages:
diachronic and typological perspectives, 1-57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Subordination and insubordination in if/si-constructions:


Evidence from spoken and written English and Spanish

Panel contribution

Dr. Cristina Lastres-Lopez 1


1. Universidad de Sevilla

This paper explores two patterns of clause combining – subordination and insubordination – in constructions
introduced by if in English and their equivalents in Spanish, introduced by si. The analysis comprises, on the
one hand, instances of subordination, namely, conditional constructions, as in (1) and (2). These include both
prototypical conditional constructions in which the protasis indicates the cause and the apodosis expresses the
consequence, as in (1), as well as other constructions which express a wider range of functions in discourse and
in which the conditional meaning is weaker (Ford & Thompson, 1986; Ford, 1997; Warchal, 2010; Lastres-López,
2020, 2021), as in (2). On the other hand, the analysis also encompasses cases of insubordination (Evans, 2007),
introduced by the same conjunctions, as illustrated in (3) and (4).
(1) Si la inyección económica no viene, lo vamos a pasar mal (CONTRAST-IT cnt_es_mun_dep_006)
‘If the economic injection does not arrive, we are going to have a hard time’
(2) So there’s two different patches there if you see what I mean (ICE-GB:S1A-076 #094:1:B)
(3) If anyone would like some ice cream (ICE-GB:S1A-073 #285:1:A)
(4) Si le viene bien trabajar (C-ORAL-ROM efamdl14)
‘*If working is good for him’
Prior research has examined conditionals and instances of insubordination introduced by the same conjunc-
tions independently. This paper will bridge the gap between these two constructions by examining cases of if/si-
subordination and insubordination in parallel, analysing both spoken and written discourse. The aim is to offer
new light on the characterization of these constructions and, more broadly, on clause combining patterns at the
discourse-grammar interface. The theoretical framework adopted to explore the functional-pragmatic proper-
ties of these constructions is based on the three metafunctions distinguished in Systemic Functional Linguistics
(Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), allowing us to distinguish if/si-constructions at the ideational, interpersonal and
textual levels.
The methodology adopted is corpus-based. Data from spoken discourse are extracted from the conversation
subcorpora of the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) (Nelson et al., 2002) and the
Spanish component of the Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages (C-ORAL-ROM) (Cresti
& Moneglia, 2005). On the other hand, written data are retrieved from the English and Spanish components of
CONTRAST-IT (De Cesare, 2018), which comprise data from online newspapers. Corpus findings unveil differ-
ences between the two modes and the two languages examined and allow us to determine how subordination
and insubordination operate in speech and writing in English and Spanish.

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The discourse-grammar interface in the development of new


adversative connectives

Panel contribution

Ms. Luisa Ferrari 1


1. Sao Paolo State University

The discourse-grammar interface in the development of new adversative connectives


In the literature on clause combining, it is generally acknowledged that speakers/writers are constantly in search
of new and more expressive means to convey contrast relations, which results from their highly intersubjective
meaning. Their development, among several other phenomena, provides evidence of the emergent nature of
grammar (Bybee, 2010).
In contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, two originally subordinating temporal connectives, enquanto (que) and
ao passo que, both similar to English while, can be found in contexts where they seem to behave as coordinating
adversative connectives. For instance, (1) shows the original temporal use of enquanto, whereas (2) corresponds
to the new adversative use.
(1) Em quanto Larcy está fallando, apparece Guilherme. (19th century)
[While Larcy is speaking, Guilherme shows up.]
(2) Osório atrairia para seu lado centenas de voluntários enquanto a ação dilatória de Caxias não lhe permite
arranjar um só recruta. (20th century)
[Osório would attract hundreds of volunteers while Caxias’ dilatory behaviour doesn’t enable him to obtain not
even one supporter.]
In this paper, my main goal is to investigate the evolution of enquanto (que) and ao passo que focusing on the
pragmatic factors that lead them to be used for the expression of contrast and that cause their grammatical
structure to be reanalyzed. The study aims to answer the main question of how the discourse-grammar interface
can affect clause-combining patterns, driving a subordinate construction to be reorganized as a coordinate one.
I consider language change to occur in the usage of language and to be mainly driven by pragmatics (Bybee,
2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). Thus, I focus on the contexts in which the temporal meaning of enquanto (que)
and ao passo que is enriched with inferences of contrast, over the period from the 18th to the 21st century. The
data are taken from strongly argumentative texts and texts produced in spontaneous interaction, both these
types of contexts favouring the development of contrast markers in general.
I argue that enquanto (que) and ao passo que undergo change in their patterns of clause combining in bridging
contexts where they express a semantic-pragmatic relation that is grounded both in the meanings of simultane-
ity and adversativity. Although adversativity is still a pragmatic inference in these contexts, they exhibit several
functional parallelisms and features that are typical of coordination relations. I suggest that the inferences of
contrast are accompanied by an important change in how the events relate both in space and time, with a
gradual dissociation between them being observed in both dimensions. Exploring the bridging contexts as well
as the contexts in contemporary Portuguese in which the markers appear to express exclusively contrastive
meanings, I will claim that their evolution provide evidence that pragmatic contingencies might affect cate-
gory boundaries between coordination and subordination, which prove to be non-discrete clause combining
patterns.
Bybee, J. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, E. C. & R. B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The semantics and pragmatics of insubordinate conditional


clauses in Hungarian

Panel contribution

Dr. Csilla Ilona Dér 1


1. Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

Conditional insubordinate (independent) clauses are quite common in several languages of the world (Evans
2007, D’Hertefelt 2018), and can have many different pragmatic functions. Based on informant’s opinion some
of their types are missing in Hungarian: according to Brdar-Szabó (2006: 85–88) stand-alone dependent con-
ditional clauses – compared to English (1) and German (2) – don’t work as indirect directives (request, offers,
wishes) (3). Instead, they appear as independent sentences starting with an optative particle (4):
(1) If we could get rid of him!
(2) Wenn wir ihn (doch) bloß loswerden könnten!
(3) *Ha meg tudnánk szabadulni tőle!
conj verb.pfx know.cond.pres.Pl1 get.rid.inf him
(4) Bárcsak meg tudnánk szabadulni tőle!
part verb.pfx know.cond.pres.Pl1 get.rid.inf him
(Brdar 2006: 86)
However, corpus analyses indicate that there are insubordinate versions of these requests (5) and wishes in
Hungarian, but they are rare, and in the case of wishes (6) they always start with the interjection ó ’oh’:
(5) Ha megtenné, hogy megindokolja nekem, hogy miért van szükség pontosan ezekre a kitételekre
’ If you could please explain to me why exactly these passages are necessary’
(https://www.parlament.hu/naplo40/085/n085_0078.htm)
(6) Ó, ha visszatarthatnánk az időt, de csupán a boldogot!
’Oh, if we could hold back time, but only happy time!’
(MNSz2, doc#1496, Hungarian, lit)
The main aim of my research is to explore the prevalence, the constructional semantic types (cf. D’Hertefelt
2018) and pragmatic functions of stand-alone conditionals in Hungarian based on large corpora (MNSz2, BEA).
In doing so, special emphasis is given to the variants that start with interjections (6) and discourse markers (7),
because of their contribution to the independence of these constructions:

(7) – Szívesen meghallgatnálak – mondta a kerítés. Hát ha igazán úgy gondolod…


’I’d like to hear you, said the fence. Well, if you really think so…’
(MNSz2, doc#500, Hungarian, lit)
In addition to corpus analyses, questionnaire survey method is used to examine speaker attitudes to different
insubordinate and non-insubordinate forms of wishes and requests in Hungarian.
References
BEA = Magyar Spontán Beszéd Adatbázis [Hungarian Database of Spontaneous Speech].
http://www.nytud.hu/adatb/bea/index.html
Brdarné Szabó, Rita 2006. Stand-alone dependent clauses functioning as independent speech acts: A crosslin-
guistic comparison. In Réka, Benczes− Szilvia, Csábi (szerk.) The metaphors of sixty: Papers presented on the
occasion of the 60th birthday of Zoltán Kövecses. Eötvös Loránd University, Department of American Studies.
Budapest. 84−95.
D’Hertefelt, Sarah. 2018. Insubordination in Germanic: A typology of complements and conditional constructions.
Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Evans, Nicholas 2007. Insubordination and its uses In: Nikolaeva, Irina (ed.) Finiteness. Theoretical and
empirical foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 366–431.

MNSz2 = Magyar Nemzeti Szövegtár 2. változat [Hungarian National Corpus 2.0.5]. http://clara.nytud.hu/mnsz2-
dev/

224
Cognitive and
interactional
perspectives on
conversational humour
(organized by Michael
Haugh, Béatrice
Priego-Valverde, Amir
Sheikhan)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“It seems you are offended by my joke”: Negotiating


attributions of offence to humorous language

Panel contribution

Dr. Chi-He Elder 1 , Dr. Eleni Kapogianni 2 , Dr. Isabella Reichl 2


1. University of East Anglia, 2. University of Kent

What happens when someone tells you that you are offended by a joke, even though you have not expressed
your offence? Attributions of offence to humorous language provide an interesting testing ground for whether
a speaker is held committed to having intended to display their offence, and how others can hold speakers
accountable for being offended, even in the absence of their own linguistic display of such. In this talk, we
consider the phenomenon of attributions of offence to ask:

1. Can a speaker be held responsible for ‘being offended’ even when the speaker doesn’t feel any feelings
of offence?
2. To what extent can a speaker attempt to deny being offended, without in turn appearing to, indeed, be
offended?

Addressing these questions can tell us about speaker meaning, commitment and accountability more broadly,
as they contribute to our understanding of the role of speakers’ intentions in meaning attribution. On the one
hand, appealing to speaker intentions is an intuitive way of delineating meanings that speakers are committed to
(e.g. Moeschler 2013). However, speakers’ utterances can communicate a range of possible meanings of greater
or lesser salience, and hearers can infer aspects of meaning that speakers didn’t intend to communicate (e.g.
Ariel 2019). Work in interactional pragmatics has made use of the idea that hearers’ responses can evidence the
inferences that they hold speakers accountable to (e.g. Haugh 2008, Elder & Haugh 2018). We present examples
from a corpus of offensive jokes on Twitter, examining instances of participants attributing feelings of offence
to others. We examine (a) the linguistic evidence that licences these attributions of offence, and (b) how the
attributions of offence are subsequently negotiated, in order to shed light on the relative primacy of speaker
intentions and hearer inferences in determining what has been communicated.

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Doing humour: Humour as behaviour

Panel contribution

Dr. Henri de Jongste 1


1. Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts

Doing humour: Humour as behaviour


“Doing humour” involves deliberately and playfully showing or narrating one’s own, and/or others’ non-
normative, quasi-inappropriate behaviour, or its residue (the discernible product of humorous behaviour in
the form of a humorous text or a sitcom). An essential factor in defining someone’s act or utterance as humor-
ous by the hearer/observer is the attribution of a humorous intent on the part of the “speaker”. Attributing a
humorous intent (Dynel et al., 2016) depends on hearers postulating a tension between what the speaker utters
and what they really think, and reconstructing a likely motive for the difference; in other words, hypothesiz-
ing what the underlying intent in making the adaptation is, and defining this as humorous. This necessitates
detecting the non-sincerity as well as the inappropriateness of the utterances and the playful breaking of the
descriptive and/or injunctive norms involved (compare Bergson, 1900/2002; McGraw and Warren, 2010).
Such a process requires mind reading skills (Schurz et al., 2020), independent from the discourse, enabled by
referring to a set of norms shared by speaker and hearer, and by context-related knowledge, such as event
schemas, role schemas and/or personality schemas (Fiske and Taylor, 1991; Taylor et al., 1981), as well as empa-
thy. The evaluation of humour is likely to depend on the nature of the creativity shown in the norm breaking
(de Jongste, 2018); its acceptance may involve fundamental moral choices.
Linguists can study forms of humorous behavioural residue, such as canned humour, and its non-normative
nature [e.g., as “non bona fide communication”, (Raskin, 1985)] as well as the humorous behaviour and playful
norm breaking by the speaker, plus the nature of the detection and the acceptance of a humorous intent by the
hearer.
Using recordings of conversational humour, I will demonstrate how texts can be inferenced as humorous and
non-humorous, and how the inferencing process can be reconstructed. Such reconstructions are, however,
always hypothetical, even though they can be solidified by supporting evidence.
References
Bergson, Henri, 1900/2002. Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. J.-M. Tremblay, Chicoutimi.
de Jongste, Henri, 2018. Mental models, humorous texts and humour evaluation. Review of Cognitive Linguistics
16 (1), 98–128.
Dynel, Marta, Brock, Alexander, de Jongste, Henri, 2016. A burgeoning field of research: Humorous intent in
interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 95, 51–57.
Fiske, Susan T., Taylor, Shelley E., 1991. Social cognition, 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill, New York.
McGraw, A. P., Warren, Caleb, 2010. Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny. Psychological Science
21 (8), 1141–1149.
Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic mechanisms of humor. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Schurz, Matthias, Radua, Joaquim, Tholen, Matthias G., Maliske, Lara, Margulies, Daniel S., Mars, Rogier B.,
Sallet, Jerome, Kanske, Philipp, 2020. Toward a hierarchical model of social cognition: A neuroimaging meta-
analysis and integrative review of empathy and theory of mind. Psychological Bulletin.
Taylor, Shelley E., Crocker, Jennifer, 1981. Schematic bases of social information processing, In: Higgins, E. T.,
Herman, C. P., Zanna, Mark P. (Eds.), Social cognition. The Ontario symposium. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J., pp.
89–134.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Effects and functions of humour in selected talk shows

Panel contribution

Dr. Agnieszka Piskorska 1


1. University of Warsaw

This study scrutinizes humorous exchanges between the host and guests in four long-running television talk
shows (The Jonathan Ross Show, The Graham Norton Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel
Live!). The goal of the analysis is to tease out the characteristics of the respective shows in terms the main social
functions of humour (Ziv 2010) and a range of weak propositional or non-propositional effects (Wilson and
Carston 2019; Ifantidou 2021; Wharton 2021) induced by humorous utterances, the two being hypothesized to
be connected. In this way, the methodology applied here brings together the perspectives of the sociopragmatics
of humour and relevance theory in order to address the question whether humour patterns of particular shows
can be accounted for in terms of weak effects and corresponding functions.
A body of 100 humorous exchanges (25 from each show) were collected and analyzed descriptively with respect
to the following parameters:
- who initiates a humorous exchange;
- who produces a humorous utterance;
- who is the victim (the speaker, the addressee, the third party).
Then, the following questions were addressed:
- what functions are fulfilled for the participants of the speech situation, i.e. the speaker (Ziv’s 2010 “individual
within a group”, the participants of the show (Ziv’s “relations within a group”), and the participants of the show
and the audience (which is taken to correspond to Ziv’s “society as a whole”).
- what weak implicatures and non-propositional effects arise in the interpretation of the humorous stimuli.
The descriptive analyses of the conversations were subsequently compared within each show and across shows.
On this basis, individual profiles of humorous effects and functions were obtained for each show and its host,
with fairly consistent patterns between the above-mentioned parameters, especially the victim, function, and
weak effects.
References
Ifantidou, Elly. 2021. Non-propositional effects in verbal communication: The case of metaphor. Journal of
Pragmatics 181, 6–16.
Wharton, Tim. 2021. Relevance: Communication and cognition and…? Pragmatics & Cognition 28:2, 321-346.
Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2019. Pragmatics and the challenge of ‘non-propositional effects. Journal of
Pragmatics 57, 125–148.
Ziv, Avner. 2010. The social function of humor in interpersonal relationships. Society 47, 11–18.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

From humor in the lab to humor in the wild: neuro-linguistic


studies dialoguing with the approaches of conversational
humor

Panel contribution

Dr. Luca Bischetti 1


1. University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia

Humor is purposefully used in conversation to accomplish a range of functions, including amusing and teasing
others. Historically, verbal humor has been studied as fixed units with a taxonomical approach [Attardo, 1994].
Recently, scholars described the dynamics of humor in interaction [Dynel, 2009], as spontaneously generated
in conversations [Haugh, 2014; Priego-Valverde et al., 2020]. Despite being studied “in the wild”, little is known
about the processing stages of conversational humor. Moreover, the empirical study of different categories of
humor used in conversation is still a research niche [Levisen 2008].
This contribution aims at reviewing previous works while bridging the domain of conversational humor and
neurolinguistic perspectives on verbal humor. Concerning humor comprehension/processing, previous liter-
ature investigated humor response with behavioral or neuroscientific methods. Promising research lines in
neurolinguistics are the recordings of brain electrical activity (with electroencephalography, EEG, Canal et al.
[2019]) or facial muscles (with electromyography, EMG, Bischetti et al. [2019a]) during the comprehension of
verbal humor, also of different types. In addition, studies began describing the impairment in understanding
humor in a range of clinical conditions, from psychiatric (e.g., schizophrenia) to neurodegenerative conditions
(e.g., Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, see Bambini et al. [2020]). This experimental literature also investigated a
range of individual differences in humor processing (Canal et al. [2019]; Bischetti et al. [2019b]), a promising
frontier also for conversational humor.
As a whole, neurolinguistic literature on humor fostered limited exchanges with the field of studies on conversa-
tional humor. By presenting data on humor processing and the role of individual differences both in typical and
atypical populations, this contribution will discuss points of overlap and possible exchanges between domains,
aiming at linking the neurolinguistic approach with the framework of studies on conversational humor.
Attardo (1994). Linguistic theories of humor. Mouton de Gruyter
Bambini, Bischetti, et al. (2020). Beyond the motor account of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Verbal humour and
its relationship with the cognitive and pragmatic profile. International Journal of Language & Communication
Disorders, 55(5):751–764
Bischetti, Canal, et al. (2019a). Cracking smiles by different joke types: the zygomaticus major response. In F.M.
Bosco, I., Gabbatore, V., Bambini, & F. Domaneschi, Book of Abstracts - XPRAG.it2020(21)
Bischetti, Ceccato, et al. (2019b). Pragmatics and theory of mind in older adults’ humor comprehension. Current
Psychology:1–17
Canal, Bischetti, et al., (2019). ‘Honey, shall I change the baby? – Well done, choose another one’: ERP and
time-frequency correlates of humor processing. Brain and Cognition, 132:41–55
Dynel (2009). Beyond a Joke: Types of Conversational Humour. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(5):1284-
1299
Haugh (2014). Jocular Mockery as Interactional Practice in Everyday Anglo-Australian Conversation. Australian
Journal of Linguistics, 34(1):76-99
Levisen (2018). “Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor ”. Intercultural Pragmatics,
15(4):515-531
Priego-Valverde et al. (2020). “Cheese!”: a Corpus of Face-to-face French Interactions. A Case Study for Ana-
lyzing Smiling and Conversational Humor. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation

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Conference, pp. 467–475

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

GIFs and conversational humour in Chinese instant messaging


interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Jia Qiu 1 , Prof. Xinren Chen 2


1. Jiaxing University, 2. Nanjing University

The development of technology has provided people with various forms of multimodal resources in technology-
mediated communication (TMC), such as emojis, stickers, image memes, and GIFs, the popularity of which has
started to attract increasing attention in pragmatics in recent years. While many studies have explored the social
functions these novel resources may perform in communication in general, recent work has also demonstrated
that they may contribute to the interactional accomplishment of conversational humour (e.g. Cruz-Moya &
Sánchez-Moya, 2021; König, 2019; Messerli & Locher, 2021; Sampietro, 2021a, 2021b; Yus, 2021). However,
compared to studies focusing on emojis and image memes, research on GIFs (see Bourlai & Herring, 2014, and
Tolins & Samermit, 2016, yet neither of them specifically examining GIFs’ role in humour) is still in its infancy
and deserves further investigation.
In this study, we aim to explore systematically how GIFs, animated images widely available on different social
media platforms and messaging apps, are used in conversational humour sequences in the context of Chinese
instant messaging interactions. While our approach is mainly discourse-pragmatic, focusing on the features of
GIFs, the pragmatic functions performed and multiple meanings achieved through employing GIFs in conver-
sational humour sequences, we also attempt to explore how such interactional perspective can contribute to
our understanding of some cognitive mechanisms underpinning the multimodal construction of conversational
humour in TMC.
Keywords: conversational humour, multimodal construction, GIFs, (Mandarin) Chinese, instant messaging,
technology-mediated communication (TMC)

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Inference in conversational humor

Panel contribution

Prof. Laura Alba-Juez 1


1. UNED

Recent and present studies on conversational humor (Norrick 1993, 2003, Dynel 2008, Priego-Valverde 2016,
Haugh 2014, Haugh & Priego Valverde forthcoming) characterize conversational humor as a co-construction
among the participants and point to the need of analysis drawn upon cognitive-pragmatic and discourse-
pragmatic approaches.
According to Attardo (2020), from a cognitive perspective conversational humor necessarily involves the recog-
nition and resolution of incongruities, which give rise to the making of inferences for which normally the
speaker will be held accountable. However, as Haugh (2017) points out, many of these inferences remain ‘em-
bedded’ in the course of actions that the participants perform, and only some of them can be completely at-
tributed to the speaker’s intention, for there is a wide array of inferences that are never exposed (and of which
no one of the participants in the humorous practice are normally aware), to which scholarly research has not
yet given enough attention.
In order to throw some light on the fuzzy zone of the inferential substrate of conversational humor, in this pre-
sentation I explore the types of inference and inferential frameworks that can be found in this type of discourse,
and propose an interaction-oriented, sociopragmatic approach to its study so as answer the following research
questions:

• 1) What kind of conversational practices serve as the basis and trigger for conversational humor?
• 2) What kind of inferential substrate can be found in these practices?
• 3) What types of inference are strategically invited by conversational humor practices? What are the
strategies used in this case?
• 4) What types of inference are part of the inferential substrate but are not invited by the speaker?

The data used for this analysis consists of ten television interviews (a practice where humor is often used to build
rapport and camaraderie among the participants) and ten episodes of two comedy series: Curb your Enthusiasm
and Seinfield. In these interviews and episodes, I have explored how humor relies on the working of both
semantic or pragmatic inferences, the latter being obviously the most relevant in conversational joking. Here, I
have looked not only into what is ‘implicated’, but also ‘implicitudes’ and ‘subplicit’ inferences (Bertuccelli Papi,
2000). I have also observed, as Ehmer and Rosemeyer (2018) point out, that these inferences can be based on
various kinds of indexical cues and are not limited to verbal stimuli.
As a result of all these observations and analysis, I present a (non-exhaustive) typology of inferences, being
conscious of the fact that, as Haugh (2017) has stated, implicatures are not simply cognitive constructs, but
“social actions in their own right”. I also present a typology of the practices (e.g.: Joint imitation of a person,
sarcasm) and strategies (e.g.: Being frank about moral taboos, taking language formulas at face value) in which
the inferences are embedded, within a context-sensitive model that includes not only speaker and hearer, but
also other possible participants (e.g.: the audience).

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Making Learner Agency and Interactional Competence


“Visible” by Examining the Dynamic Construction of
Interactional Humor in a Multilingual Classroom

Panel contribution

Dr. Yumi Matsumoto 1


1. University of Pennsylvania

This study examines complex, dynamic interactional sequences in which multilingual students co-construct im-
provisational humor in an academic writing classroom at a U.S. university. Combining multimodal conversation
analysis (e.g., Mondada, 2018) with ethnographic information (see Maynard, 2006), it demonstrates in depth the
dynamic way that conversational humor emerges among multilingual students when the students encounter
miscommunication (e.g., nonunderstanding, misunderstanding) with their instructor or peer in classroom in-
teractions. It also illustrates the multiple activities besides humor construction that the multilingual students
and their instructor engage in while the humorous sequences emerge. Particularly, this study attempts to eluci-
date how humor sequences are influenced by a complex network of interlocutors (e.g., classmates, instructor)
and heterogenous interactional resources—including micro and macro components like gestures (e.g., point-
ing), facial expressions (e.g., smile), multiple languages (e.g., English, Arabic), nonunderstanding, interactional
history among friends, and shared knowledge like public discourse—simultaneously within the classroom in an
unpredictable manner. The analysis suggests that humor construction can be a powerful resource for express-
ing and enacting multilingual learner agency (e.g., Larsen–Freeman 2019) in adapting diverse linguistic and
other multimodal elements within the classroom. Such analyses can project multilingual students as competent
English users and demonstrate their pragmatic and classroom interactional competence (see Walsh, 2011). In
fact, illustrating multilinguals as competent English users provides an alternative, non-deficit perspective of so-
called non-native speakers in English as a second language classrooms, which aligns with more empowering
views of multilingual English users (see also Taguchi & Ishihara, 2018 for recent second language pragmatic
research based on “non-deficit” views toward multilinguals’ English use). This study can have important impli-
cations for research on conversational humor by examining it particularly among multilingual interlocutors. In
fact, constructing conversational humor among multilinguals in and through interaction can be more complex
and requires more negotiation and collaboration in identifying and building shared knowledge or achieving
co-laughing from scratch than that among monolingual counterparts. That is because interlocutors, including
students and instructors, come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, which provides unique inter-
actional contexts from monolingual settings, where interlocutors have at least shared linguistic backgrounds.
Furthermore, more investigations of humor in multilingual settings (e.g., English as a lingua franca contexts)
are necessary since such investigations are still limited compared with those of monolingual contexts (Pullin,
2018). Finally, this study can also help further advance the field of conversational humor by taking multimodal
approaches to analyzing interactional humor (e.g., Attardo & Pickering, 2011; Attardo et al., 2013; Matsumoto,
Lee, & Kim, 2022; Tabacaru, 2019) because diverse heterogenous resources (e.g., smile, laughter, gaze) that in-
volve humor construction do not become fully visible without multimodal analysis.

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Micro-conversations and ephemeral community in YouTube


humorous comments

Panel contribution

Prof. Salvatore Attardo 1


1. Texas A&M University-Commerce

Despite the asynchronous, largely decontextualized, nature of YouTube comments, we find micro-conversations
between commenters and the creation of ephemeral communities of discourse which display many of the fea-
tures associated with face to face communication (Herring, 2010). In this paper I will focus on humorous ex-
changes and the soft assembly of fleeting discourse communities. The examination of a sample of about 4000
YouTube comments on one video finds teasing (Haugh, 2017), echoic irony and sarcasm (Sperber & Wilson,
1981), and humor support (Hay, 2000), for example.
YouTube is predominantly not a community (Rotman et al, 2009). Most YouTube comments lack “an identifi-
able audience” (boyd & Heer, 2006, i.e., they are never answered and thus are essentially monologic in nature.
However, commenting is recursive, i.e., comments can be commented upon, and, when they are replied to, they
form a thread, Some develop a fairly “deep” tree of commentary (as comments on comments get commented
on, recursively) (Jones & Schieffelin, 2009, p. 1062). These displays of online community are ephemeral, since
they generally do no continue beyond the commentary sequence. However, within the comments we find a
discourse community (held together by the common interest in the video and by the medium of the comments).
Technically, Youtube comments would not fully meet Swales (1990) criteria for a discourse community, unless
we want to consider YouTube comments as a genre and emoticons as lexis, but they come close enough to Swale’s
definition to be considered “impoverished” or “fleeting discourse communities.”
First, the shared attention to the video being commented also provides a shared context. Obviously the stances
of the users vis-à-vis the content may differ radically. Indeed, often the often remarked upon conflictual aspect
of commentaries emerges precisely from this difference. Naturally, some context is provided by the handles
of YouTube users (for example, the user handle “João victor” posts in Portuguese, thus triggering the inference
they are Portuguese or Brazilian). Moreover, various linguistic and paralinguistic features (ranging from word
choice to use of emoticons, etc.) allow inferences on the enregistered characteristics of the commenter. Some
social ties are established by the use of vocative “@” used to address directly another commenter, directly ad-
dressing a comment to them. All these features, and many more, afford the soft assembly of a “context” within
which the interaction can take place.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal teasing in face-to-face interaction: a corpus-based


approach.

Panel contribution

Ms. Clarissa de Vries 1 , Prof. Bert Oben 1 , Mr. Geert Brône 1


1. KU Leuven

When asking how people construct and negotiate what is ironic in interaction, the multimodal context is crucial.
This has long been recognized in theoretical work that argues that multimodal markers (especially prosody) are
used to signal ironic intent (e.g. Clark & Gerrig, 1984; Grice, 1978). More recently, it has been claimed that the
multimodal marking of irony has interactional functions as well (e.g. author, 2021).
In this contribution, we present an empirical investigation of multimodal irony in face-to-face interaction, fo-
cusing on a specific form of irony: teasing. During teases, which are potentially face-threatening, multimodal
marking is hypothesized to play an important role in both communicating the pretense and monitoring up-
take by other participants. Potentially this becomes even more obvious in sequences of teasing with multiple
contributions, in which the target of the tease changes rapidly from one participant to the other, present in
the conversation (internal teases) or not (external teases). We analyze multimodal resources that are deployed
during these teases, such as gaze behavior, shoulder shrugs, and head movements, both at the level of the indi-
vidual utterance and at the level of larger sequences with multiple contributions. In our analysis we are guided
by the following questions:

1. How does the multimodal marking differ between internal teases and external teases?
2. How does the multimodal marking of ironic teases develop during sequences of teases when the target
shifts?

We take a corpus-based approach, investigating spontaneous triadic interactions in which participants wear
head-mounted eye-trackers (authors, 2015). With this methodology, we situate ourselves at the crossroads of
psycholinguistic, cognitive, and interactional approaches to irony (Gironzetti, 2022).
In a first step, we found that gaze behavior differs significantly between internal and external teases (authors,
in preparation). During internal teases, speakers show sustained stretches of gaze at the target, thereby not
just verbally, but also visually targeting the co-present participant. Targets avert their gaze more often, and
third participants often gaze at the target, monitoring uptake. In external teases, speaker gaze behavior is more
equally distributed over participants, and addressees adhere to a more ‘default’ gaze pattern.
Following up, we aim to extend this analysis in two ways. Firstly, we systematically investigate other differences
in multimodal marking of internal versus external teases. We hypothesize that targets (during internal teases)
display multimodal resistance to the tease, using e.g. shoulder shrugs and head movements. Shared laughter of
all participants, however, may be more prominent during external teases. Secondly, we will extend the analysis
to sequences with multiple contributions, in which the target shifts. Here, we ask if participants adapt their gaze
behavior as well as other multimodal marking to the change of the teasing constellation.
Taken together, these results will contribute towards building a more nuanced, and multifaceted picture of the
multimodal marking of irony in face-to-face interaction.
Selected references
Gironzetti, E. (2022). The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor. John Benjamins.
Clark, H. H., & Gerrig, R. J. (1984). On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,
113(1), 121–126.

235
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negotiating Common Ground in Conversational Humor: The


Case of Indonesian Humor Talk Show

Panel contribution

Mrs. Hyunisa Rahmanadia 1


1. Eötvös Loránd University

The aim of this research is to take a deeper look at common ground as a critical factor in humor interpretation.
In conversation, it is evident that the inference process plays an essential role in guiding the interpretation
by the hearer. The process is also applicable when we talk about conversational humor. However, process-
ing inference is not sufficient to understand why the inference result stimulates laughter in the hearer. This
problem led the investigation to reveal how inference could become incongruent or surprising in the hearer’s
cognition. Here, common ground plays an important role. In this research, common ground is defined as the
accumulation of knowledge that people assume to share which may include world views, shared values, beliefs,
and situational context (Kecskes, 2014). The question then can be specified into what types of common ground
enables humor interpretation, how common ground can be accessed to get the correct interpretation, and what
linguistic devices help the hearer reach the necessary context. An in-depth qualitative corpus-based analysis
using Indonesian talk show dataset has been conducted in an attempt to answer these questions focusing on the
turn-taking humor conversation and the audience’s reaction. The corpus consists of 239 turn-taking conversa-
tions from 2.904 words that are manually transcribed with annotation from randomly chosen humorous talk
shows in Indonesian.
The relevance-theoretical approach (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and socio-cognitive approach (Kecskes & Zang,
2009) are adopted in the analysis process. As a result, this research suggests that the investigated conversational
humor is creatively created with the high frequency of activating the emergent common ground and bringing
private knowledge to create incongruity to fill the conversation with unexpected or even unrealistic ideas that
people never imagine. This investigation also indicates that the use of some pragmatic markers can directly
influence the hearer to find the context intended by the speaker.
Keywords: conversational humor, common ground, relevance theory, socio-cognitive approach, pragmatic
markers, Indonesian talk show.
References
Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kecskes, I., & Zhang F. (2009). Activating, seeking, and creating common ground A socio-cognitive approach.
Pragmatics & Cognition 17(2), 331–355.
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

236
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Not bloody funny: Rhetorical resources for laughter in


interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Christine Howes 1 , Dr. Vladislav Maraev 1 , Dr. Ellen Breitholtz 1


1. University of Gothenburg

Despite previous attempts to the contrary, we argue that humour cannot be understood – or analysed – without
considering the interactional and cognitive resources, including low-level repair mechanisms and higher-level
inferences, which underpin any conversational exchange. Following Breitholtz and Maraev (2019), we claim
that incongruity in jokes can be cast in terms of enthymemes (arguments occurring in a dialogue or text) and
topoi (rules of thumb that underpin implicit arguments in interaction; Breitholtz, 2020). This perspective
means that we can analyse non-humorous laughter events under the same framework. Laughter is often
intrinsically linked with the performative aspects of humour, but is also an interactive phenomenon that
should be studied within the same cognitive system. In this regard it is important to draw a distinction between
laughters related to pleasant incongruities (the humorous type) and social incongruities, which are related to
non-humorous laughter, such as nervous or embarassed laughter (Mazzocconi et al., 2020).

We argue that although laughter can be evoked by a non-humorous event, it is still the case that the cognitive
resources that are necessary for calculating incongruities are the same as those used in humorous situations.
We look at how the same knowledge resources are used to underpin contrasting interactional experiences.
For instance, topoi which are evoked in humorous situations may be the same as the ones that cause embar-
rassment. One such discourse situation is conversations about menstruation. We analyse a related joke from
the BNC alongside with conversational data concerning non-humorous mentions of this topic. In addition we
present some tellings of the joke in different conversational contexts (text-chat and zoom) to illustrate how
presentations of the joke differ depending on the social context and medium used.

References:
Breitholtz, E. (2020). Enthymemes and topoi in dialogue: the use of common sense reasoning in conversation
(p. 161). Brill.

Breitholtz, E. & Maraev, V (2019). How to put an elephant in the title: modeling humorous incongruity with
topoi. In Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Full Papers.

Mazzocconi, C., Tian, Y., & Ginzburg, J. (2020). What’s your laughter doing there? A taxonomy of the pragmatic
functions of laughter. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

237
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sequential organization of conversational humor:


comparison of conversations among friends and strangers

Panel contribution

Dr. Béatrice Priego-Valverde 1


1. Aix-Marseille University

Within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974) and Interac-
tional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2018), and focusing both on humor produced and on the reactions
obtained, the aim of this study is to analyze the sequential organization of conversational humor, whether the
participants know each other or not.
Most studies on conversational humor or teasing have focused on interactions between close participants
(whether they are friends or members of a same family). Some researchers even go so far as to say that in-
timacy is, in some way, the ‘cradle’ of humour (Straehle, 1993; Boxer and Cortés-Conde, 1997). However, such
an intimacy does not mean that humor appears by chance, nor in an anarchic manner. As already shown,
humor is sequentially organized (see Drew, 1987 for teases). More recently, a few studies appear on teasing
in getting acquainted people (Haugh and Pillet-Shore, 2018), highlighting that, not only teasing sequences can
appear between strangers, but also that these humorous sequences are sequentially organized.
In line with this last study, hypothesizing that the nature of the relationship between participants can impact
the sequential organization of humor, the aim of this study is twofold: (1) identify this organization in con-
sidering both its production and its reaction; (2) compare this organization in two kinds of face-to-face French
conversations: between friends (corpus “Cheese!”) and during initial interactions between strangers (corpus
“Paco”).
Analyzing both corpora (22 interactions lasting around 15 minutes each), 340 humorous sequences have been
extracted. Based on previous work (Priego-Valverde, 2018), these humorous sequences have been ranged on a
continuum from the minimal to the most elaborated sequence. 4 structures have been identified: isolated utter-
ance (minimally answered, e.g., with laughter), successful sequence (humorously answered), co-constructed se-
quence (humorously answered which leads to further elaboration), and joint fictionalization (a co-construction
based on a fictive scenario).
The first results show three findings: (1) humor is more frequent in “Cheese!”, both in its total duration (17% of
the time, all interactions included, vs. 11% in “Paco”), and in its total number of the humorous sequences (190
in “Cheese” vs. 150 in “Paco”). (2) The 4 structures of the humorous sequences can be found in both corpora. (3)
Their distribution seems to be different, suggesting that the more participants know each other, the more they
tend to jointly construct their humorous sequences.
In this presentation, we will discuss the complexity of the links between humor and participants’ relationship
which emerges from these first results. Indeed, this relationship does not seem to have an impact on the sequen-
tial organization of humor. This suggests that whether the participants know each other or not, the sequential
organization of the entire interaction shapes the way humor appears and the way it is interactionally achieved.
But since the distribution of the 4 structures is different, this result suggests also that the participants’ relation-
ship may have an impact of the preferred humorous structure.

238
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What’s the preferred response to humour? Responding to


conversational humour in initial interactions

Panel contribution

Mr. Amir Sheikhan 1 , Prof. Michael Haugh 1


1. The University of Queensland

Linguistic studies of responses to humour commonly make a basic distinction between recognising humour and
appreciating humour (Hay, 2001). The former is said to be grounded in cognitive mechanisms, including access
to common ground, and regarded as a component of humour competence, while the latter is said to be a property
of the situated context and thus primarily a matter of humour performance (Attardo, 2020). Notably, there also
appears to be normative pressure for recipients to respond with laughter or some other mechanism by which
they show, at least ostensibly, appreciation for humour in conversational settings (Norrick, 1993, 2003). In short,
the preferred response to conversational humour is to affiliate with it through laughter and the like. It follows
that cases in which recipients disattend humour in conversational interaction, the recipient in question can be
taken as lacking the relevant (common) knowledge required for recognising the humour in question (a matter
of humour competence), or that the recipient recognises the humour but is nevertheless disaffiliating with it (a
matter of humour performance). In this paper, we argue that the lines between competence and performance
are not so easily drawn when it comes to conversational humour.
Our analysis focuses on responses to conversational humour identified in 25 initial interactions taken from the
Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations corpus (ViMELF, 2018) and the Intercultural Initial
Interactions in English corpus (IIIE, 2022). Using the framework of interactional pragmatics, an approach to the
analysis of pragmatic phenomena that is informed by research and methods in ethnomethodological conversa-
tion analysis (Haugh, 2012), we carefully examine how participants respond to humour bids, and the sequential
and moral implications of those responses. We suggest in the course of our analysis that while the preferred re-
sponse to conversational humour may indeed be to display appreciation of that humour in some shape or form
(e.g. through smiles, laughter, agreement, furthering the humour etc.), this preference structure is mediated
by the extent to which the recipient can legitimately claim an affective entitlement to laugh at the target being
construed as a laughable through that humour bid. This (situated) right to laugh is, in turn, grounded in the
interactional management of epistemic access and rights to relevant (background) knowledge, as well as in co-
membership in relevant categories of persons that confer this entitlement to laugh. We conclude that theorising
conversational humour necessarily thus requires attending to both its socio-interactional and socio-cognitive
underpinnings.
References
Attardo, S. (2020). The Linguistics of Humor. Oxford University Press.
Haugh, M. (2012). Conversational interaction. In Keith Allan and Kasia Jaszczolt (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of
Pragmatics (pp.251-274). Cambridge University Press.
Hay, J. (2001). The pragmatics of humor support. Humor 14(1): 55–82.
Norrick, N. R. (1993). Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk. Indiana University Press.
Norrick, N. R. (2003). Issues in conversational joking. Journal of Pragmatics 35(9): 1333-1359.
ViMELF (2018). Corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations. Birkenfeld: Trier University
of Applied Sciences. Available at: http://umwelt-campus.de/case.

239
Communicative practices
in online dating
(organized by Elisabeth
Andersen, Will Gibson,
Riki Thompson)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Formulating location and distance in post-match Tinder chats

Panel contribution

Prof. Will Gibson 1


1. UCL, Institute of Education

Tinder is one of the most widely used dating apps in the world and yet the ways in which people communicate
through it remains an under-researched area (but see Licoppe, 2020; Licoppe, 2021; Carles Roca and Gibson
forthcoming). Drawing on ‘digital’ Conversation Analysis (Giles et al., 2015), this presentation examines how
Tinder users conversationally manage the topic of the ‘distance’ between themselves and ‘matched’ interlocu-
tors. Distance is a key issue for participants, and one that they set as a search variable in the application when
looking for potential dates.
The data for this analysis consists of post-match Tinder chats from 50 users in Spain, The Netherlands, Denmark
and France which were analysed through ‘digital CA’ methods (Giles et al., 2015) with a particular emphasis
on locational formulations (Schegloff, 1972). The analysis found that participants recurrently ask about the
other’s placement (living/working/present location) and/or formulate their own proximity to their interlocutor.
In constructing these formulations users exhibit sensitivity to the activity of ‘getting to know one another’ (Roca
Cuberes and Gibson forthcoming) and to the omnirelevant practice of ‘organising a date’. In this paper I show
the various ways that participants bring up the topic of location and or the ‘distance’ between each other, and
how they use these topics as a means of constructing either an impediment or opportunity for meeting. Par-
ticipants routinely treat location as a sensitive topic, using conversational moves structures that frame it as a
‘delicate matter’ and, occasionally, as a flirtation move (Speer 2017). This analysis contributes to our growing
understanding of how Tinder and other mobile dating applications are impacting on contemporary practices
of dating.
References
Giles, D., Stommel, W., Paulus, T., Lester, J., & Reed, D. (2015). Microanalysis of Online
Data: The methodological development of “digital CA.” Discourse, Context & Media, 7, 45–
51.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2014.12.002
Licoppe, C. (2020). Liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture. A comparative
study of contrasted interactional patterns in the main uses of Grindr and Tinder. Journal of Cultural Economy,
13(1), 73–90.
Licoppe, C. (2021). The spectre of ‘ghosting’ and the sequential organization of post-match
Tinder chat conversations. In J. Meredith, G. David, & W. Stommel (Eds.), Analysing online social interaction
(pp. 155-176). Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology.
Roca Cuberes, C and Gibson, W (forthcoming) Intimate Relationship Formations in Post-Match Tinder Chat Con-
versations. Discourse and Communication
Schegloff, E. A., (1972). Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In D.
Sudnow (Ed.) Studies in Social Interaction. The Free Press.
Speer, S.A., 2017. Flirting : A Designedly Ambiguous Action ? Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50,
2, p.128–150.

241
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Membership categorization analysis of post-match Tinder


chat conversations

Panel contribution

Dr. Carles Roca-Cuberes 1


1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra

From the moment a match occurs on Tinder until the first date (if there is one), users who have decided to
‘like’ each other need to manage a sometimes considerable amount of communication. The main purpose of
such communication for the matches is to get acquainted and decide on the suitability of their counterparts
as potential dates. In this study, we explore post-match Tinder chat conversations to investigate the process
whereby Tinder users get to know each other and (eventually) negotiate a date.
The methodology used in this study is the one developed by the ethnomethodological approach of MCA. MCA
is a kind of formal analysis that investigates the procedures used by members to give meaning to other people
and their activities. In line with ethnomethodology, the practical use of commonsense knowledge by members
when they categorize one another is examined. Categorizing is in itself a form of description that comprises a
mundane methodical practice whereby members render their ordinary activities observable and accountable.
Through the invocation of membership categories, members have at their disposal a mundane apparatus that
enables them to conventionally identify other people. Tinder users obviously also rely on this routine practice to
establish (for practical purposes) the social make-up of their matches. However, the invocation of membership
categories in post-match Tinder chat conversations allows users to accomplish certain tasks: getting acquainted
and, depending on that, determining the suitability of their matches as potential dates. Expected results would
show that the categories that older adults typically invoke in the process of getting to know their matches are
a part of ‘membership categorization devices’ such as ‘occupation’, ‘relationship status’, and ‘hobbies’. Young
adults, on the other hand, tend to employ categories that belong to the membership categorization devices
‘hobbies’ and ‘occupation’.

242
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Online dating, gender, & power: Digital turn-taking and


making the first move on Bumble

Panel contribution

Dr. Riki Thompson 1


1. University of Washington

The digitally mediated search for love and sex has become one of the most common ways for people to find each
other as technologies and social media have become embedded in everyday life. In online dating, Bumble is the
feminist app that promises to change the rules of dating through design features that put women in control of the
message initiation aspect of digital courtship. Despite claims that Bumble’s first move architecture is “levelling
the playing field” through a turn-taking protocol that only allows women to send opening messages to men after
matching, my research suggests otherwise. To provide a comprehensive understanding of digital communica-
tion on Bumble, I used methodological and data triangulation to enrich the analysis. First, I employed digital
ethnographic methods (Varis, 2016) for collecting and analyzing data about people’s experiences of matching
and messaging to focus on situated communicative practices. Interviews with 45 Bumble users demonstrated
that while Bumble’s mission to empower women was often a motivation for downloading the app, users found
that conversing and connecting was complicated by problematic aspects of app design and gendered online dat-
ing practices. Next, I used multimodal discourse analysis (Jewitt et al., 2016) to examine how gender, power, and
online dating communication were constructed on Bumble’s website. Lastly, I applied Microanalysis Of Online
Data (MOOD) (Giles et al., 2015) to Bumble’s “first move” architecture and messaging protocols to map out the
digital conversation floor. While Bumble aims to empower women by giving them control of the floor through
conversation openings and topic initiation, the model is based on an ideal model of cooperative principles of
conversation rather than realistic experiences of everyday users. Interview data suggests that lack of response
to conversation openings—be it through silence, unmatching, or timing out—is a common conversation prob-
lem. This research demonstrates that despite Bumble’s mission to empower women, unreciprocated invitations
to take the floor and time sensitive communication directives inherent in app design negatively reduce women’s
sense of agency and power in online dating interactions. In addition to improving our understanding of lan-
guage, gender, and power in digital dating contexts, this research contributes to the growing body of literature
in digital discourse studies that aims to provide more methodological tools for understanding digital intimacies
and online talk (Licoppe, 2020; Mortensen, 2017).
References
Giles, D., Stommel, W., Paulus, T., Lester, J., & Reed, D. (2015). Microanalysis Of Online Data: The methodological
development of “digital CA.” Discourse, Context & Media, 7, 45–51.
Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J., & O’Halloran, K. (2016). Introducing Multimodality. Routledge.
Licoppe, C. (2020). Liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture. A comparative study of contrasted
interactional patterns in the main uses of Grindr and Tinder. Journal of Cultural Economy, 13(1), 73–90.
Mortensen, K. K. (2017). Flirting in online dating: Giving empirical grounds to flirtatious implicitness. Discourse
Studies, 19(5), 581–597.
Varis, P. (2016). Digital ethnography. In A. Georgakopolou & T. Spilioti (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language
and digital communication (pp. 55–68). Routledge.

243
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“So fast on the keys, when do you have time to meet”: 4 ways
invitations are generated interactionally in Danish Tinder
chats

Panel contribution

Ms. Elisabeth Andersen 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

This paper outlines interactional methods used by Tinder users to generate invitations from the developing
interaction in post-match Tinder chats. In a collection of 194 Tinder chats collected in Denmark in 2020, 19
interactionally generated invitations were identified and analyzed using methodology inspired by Conversation
Analysis, i.e., focusing on the recognizability of social actions constructed through written text and viewing
interaction as an accomplishment between the participants.
The organization of invitations in talk has been described using Conversation Analysis showing that participants
use a range of strategies to avoid a rejection (Drew, 1984; Margutti, Tainio, Drew, & Traverso, 2018; Schegloff,
2007). This presentation builds on these findings and shows the work being done by Tinder users to pursue
setting up a meeting with their ‘match’ in ways that may function to minimize the risk of feeling inadequate
and rejected (Licoppe, 2021, p. 174), or ‘lose face’ in Goffman’s terms (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1955).
This concerns 1) orienting to the response time of the ‘match’ as an indication of (lack of) interest, 2) introducing
aspects of the here-and-now as providing favorable conditions for a meeting, 3) gathering knowledge about the
match’s likings when it comes to leisure activities and dating settings, and 4) inviting an invitation by postponing
a response to a not-yet-agreed-on future meeting. Based on analyses of selected examples, I discuss how these
practices in different ways construct the invitation as a collaborate achievement and how they minimize the
likelihood of rejection and the accountability and potential ‘face loss’ of the inviter in case of a rejection.
References
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4): Cambridge university
press.
Drew, P. (1984). Speakers’ reportings in invitation sequences. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of
social action: Studies in conversation analysis (Vol. 129, pp. 129-151). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry, 18(3), 213-231.
Licoppe, C. (2021). The spectre of ‘ghosting’and the sequential organization of post-match Tinder chat conver-
sations. Analysing Digital Interaction.
Margutti, P., Tainio, L., Drew, P., & Traverso, V. (2018). Invitations and responses across different languages: Ob-
servations on the feasibility and relevance of a cross-linguistic comparative perspective on the study of actions.
In.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis I (Vol. 1): Cam-
bridge university press.

244
Complex syntax for
interaction (organized by
Yael Maschler, Simona
Pekarek Doehler, Jan
Lindström)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Complex Syntactic Patterns with German Verba sentiendi in


Past Tense: Action Formation with Meinen (‘to mean’) and
Finden (‘to find’)

Panel contribution

Ms. Sophia Fiedler 1


1. University of Neuchâtel

The German tense system is one of the most researched topics in German linguistics, especially concerning
the distribution of Präteritum (‘preterit’) and Perfekt (‘present perfect’). A recurring explanation in this respect
is a diatopic distribution with a preference for the usage of present perfect in the oberdeutschen Sprachraum
(=South of Germany), and for the preterite in the niederdeutschen Sprachraum (=Northern regions) (Fischer
2018). Recent research on Alemannic shows, however, that such a distribution may not (anymore) apply without
exception: Analyzing naturally occurring oral data, Leonhard (2022) shows that the preterit is (re)used, at least
in Alemannic. His results illustrate that examining the actual use of past tense in interaction may be fruitful,
especially concerning their grammar-in-use.
This talk discusses a possible relation between the distribution of past tense in everyday talk and action for-
mation (Levinson 2013). Verba sentiendi, which are frequent in present tense and tend to grammaticalize in 1st
person singular (Günthner & Imo 2003) are apt structures for such an investigation of the interface between the
grammar of clause-combining, tense distribution, and action formation: As Deppermann & Reinke (2017) show,
ich dachte (‘I thought’) is, for instance, used in specific clause-combining patterns and for concrete practices that
do not seem to exist in present tense.
The present paper extends this line of research by focusing on the past tenses of meinen (‘to mean’) and finden
(‘to find’) in 1st person singular and their potential distribution according to action formation. I thereby inves-
tigate, following prior research on the grammar-in-use of complex syntactic patterns (Maschler et al. 2020), the
interrelation of grammatical forms and interactional use. With an Interactional Linguistic approach, I analyze
the FOLK-corpus of the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, comprising about 336 hours of everyday talk in
institutional and non-institutional settings.
Initial analyses reveal that both past tense forms of meinen and finden are rare, compared to their present tense
forms, and that the distribution of preterit and present perfect of both verbs does not seem to occur randomly. To
give one example: ich fand (‘I found’) recurrently occurs as epistemic parenthetical, whereas ich habe gefunden
(‘I have found’) does not.
Deppermann, A., & Reineke, S. (2017). Epistemische Praktiken und ihre feinen Unterschiede: Verwendungen
von ich dachte in gesprochener Sprache. In A. Deppermann, N. Proske, & A. Zeschel (Eds.), Verben im inter-
aktiven Kontext. Bewegungsverben und mentale Verben im gesprochenen Deutsch. Tübingen: Narr Franke
Attempo, 337-375.
Fischer, H. (2018). Präteritumsschwund im Deutschen. Dokumentation und Erklärung eines Verdrän-
gungsprozesses. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Günthner, S. & Imo, W. (2003). Die Reanalyse von Matrixsätzen als Diskursmarker: ich mein-Konstruktionen im
gesprochenen Deutsch. InLiSt 37, 1-31.
Leonhard, J. (2022). Die Vergangenheitstempora im Alemannischen Deutschlands. Eine korpusbasierte quanti-
tative und qualitative Untersuchung. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Levinson, S. C. (2013). Action Formation and Ascription. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Con-
versation Analysis. Malden: Blackwell, 103-132.
Maschler, Y., Pekarek Doehler, S., Lindström, J. & Keevallik, L. (Eds.) (2020). Complex Syntax-in-Interaction:
Emergent and Emerging Clause-Combining Patterns for Organizing Social Actions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:

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Benjamins.

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Complex syntax as multiple projections

Panel contribution

Prof. Peter Auer 1


1. University of Freiburg

I argue that from the point of view of online (emergent) syntax, complex syntax should be seen as multiple
projections within one complex project. Project-initial subordinated projects (so-called subordinated clauses)
imply projections simultaneously active with the superordinated project (so-called main clauses), while project-
final subordinated projects occur either as terminating the subordinated project or as expanding it. The online
approach explains the non-symmetry of ‘left’ and ‘right’ positioning of subordinated clauses in conversational
data. I will also show that some of the interactional affordances of pre- and postpositioning of subordinated
clauses can be accounted for in a comprehensive and coherent way if the above-outlined temporal structure of
multiple projections is taken as the starting point of analysis.
The paper grew out of work on large corpora of German conversational data. However, the general point it
wants to make is a theoretical one.

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Complex syntax for assessing situations: ‘Pseudo-cleft’


construction in Mandarin conversation

Panel contribution

Mr. Di Fang 1
1. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

It has been widely acknowledged that many of the syntactic constructions arise from multiple recurrent inter-
actional patterns for accomplishing social actions. Starting from naturally-occurring conversation – the primor-
dial site of social interaction, a considerable body of research provides evidence for the gradual integration of
fragments that results in well-formed complex syntactic constructions, among which is the pseudo-cleft con-
struction (PCC).
Numerous studies have been conducted on PCC in conversational interaction of different languages with regard
to its formulaic nature (Hopper and Thompson 2008; Mori 2014), interactional functions (Kim 1995; Hopper
2001; Maschler and Fishman 2020), and prosodic/multimodal configuration (Tao 2022). This paper will attempt
to discuss the emergence of PCC in Mandarin by focusing on a specific yet pervasive activity – assessing a situ-
ation in the telling.
The investigation is based on 20 hours of naturally-occurring conversation in Mandarin, most of which happen
between 2-3 families, friends or acquaintances. It is found in Mandarin conversation that speakers would firstly
provide the assessing term (whether objective or subjective), and then elaborate the assessable – some kind of
situation of a person/some people. Such an interactional practice gives rise to clause-combination patterns of
different integration levels.

• A. Two separate clauses: Clause 1 [assessing term] + Clause 2 [assessable]

• B. A elaborating clause-combination: Clause 1 [assessing term], jiushi (that is ) Clause 2 [assessable]

• C. Loosely attached PCC: assessing term + de (<NOMINALIZER>) (jiu)shi (<COP>), Clause 2 [assessable]

• D. Canonical PCC: assessing term + de (<NOMINALIZER>) shi (<COP>) + assessable

The interactional contingencies that lead to such patterns are then discussed. It is proposed that use of PCC fea-
tures the pre-positioning of the assessing term, which provide an affordance for speakers to incorporate his/her
assessment into the ongoing telling process, and to express both subjective feeling and objective evaluation over
the extension of situation-presentation.
With the case study of PCC in Mandarin conversation, this paper adds to the understanding of complex syn-
tax for specific social actions, suggesting that complex constructions such as PCC emerge from the recurrent
interactional practices in our daily lives.
Abstract:
Hopper, P., 2001. Grammatical constructions and their discourse origins: Prototype or family resemblance? In:
Piltz, M., Niemeier, S. (Eds.), Applied cognitive linguistics: Theory, acquisition and language pedagogy. Mouton de
Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 109–129.
Hopper, P.J., Thompson, S.A., 2008. Projectability and clause combining in interaction. In: Laury, R. (Ed.),
Crosslinguistic studies of clause combining: The multifunctionality of conjunctions. John Benjamins, Amsterdam,
pp. 99–123.
Maschler, Y., Fishman, S., 2020. From multi-clausality to discourse markerhood: The Hebrew ma she- ‘what
that’ construction in pseudo-cleft-like structures. J. Pragm. 159, 73–97.

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Mori, J., 2014. The re-examination of so-called ‘clefts’: A study of multiunit turns in Japanese talk-in-interaction.
In: Kabata, K., Ono, T. (Eds.), Usage-based approaches to Japanese grammar: Towards the understanding of human
language. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 193–222.
Tao, Hongyin. 2022. Scalar pseudo-cleft constructions in Mandarin conversation: A multimodal approach,
Lingua, Vol. 266, 103-202.

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Discovering pseudo-cleft constructions in Estonian

Panel contribution

Dr. Marri Amon 1 , Prof. Leelo Keevallik 2


1. University of Tartu, 2. Linköping University

Pseudo-clefts are found in a variety of languages. Grammatical, textual and information-structuring functions
of pseudo-clefts have been investigated in languages where they are grammaticalized. Recent accounts based
on examples from talk-in-interaction have furthermore highlighted their specific discourse-structuring and pro-
jecting functions (Pekarek Doehler 2011 for French, Maschler&Fishman 2020 for Hebrew; Lindström, Henric-
son, Huhtamäki 2022 for Swedish).
This paper asks whether pseudo-cleft structures exist at all in Estonian. Grammars do not account for them,
but structurally fitting examples can be found from both spoken and written usage, in particular from public
speeches. Our study is based on 80 examples of pseudo-cleft constructions extracted from a corpus of political
speech, namely verbatim reports of debates of the Estonian Parliament.
Functionally, they are similar to what has been described in other languages: mis/mida ‘what’-initial construc-
tions project longer explanations and launch new topics, thereby highlighting the speaker’s stance and struc-
turing the discourse. While we located a number of what could be considered canonical pseudo-cleft structures
with all elements present like in the excerpt below (with ‘what’ bolded and the copula and the complementizer
are italicized), we also included a range of instances where either the copula or the complementizer did not
occur.
et mida:: (.) ma küll ütlen, (.) ää on et meie eelnõu (.)
that what (.) I PTC say.1SG (.) er is that our draft (.)
’What I am saying, is that our draft
lahendab (.) nii tänaste (0.2) kui: (0.2)
resolve.3SG (.) so today’s.PL.GEN. (0.2) as well (0.2)
will solve the pension problem
tulevaste pensionäride (.) pensioniteema.
future.PL.GEN pensioner.PL.GEN (.) pension.problem.GEN
of today’s and future pensioners.’
Since studies on pseudo-clefts in spoken interaction have revealed a high degree of structural variability even
in languages that make prolific use of them, we suggest that they are also in fact grammaticalized in Estonian.

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Incremental clause-combining at the grammar-body interface

Panel contribution

Prof. Jan Lindström 1 , Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler 2 , Prof. Yael Maschler 3
1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Neuchâtel, 3. University of Haifa

In social interaction, speakers employ various practices for extending syntactic units (and thereby turns at talk)
by making syntactically simpler units structurally more complex in an incremental, step-by-step way. One such
practice consists of adding a coordinated or subordinate clause post hoc to what was first produced as a main
clause ending on a complex transition relevance place (syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic completion; cf. Ford
& Thompson 1996), as in the following:
01 DOR: +men hå:̲re kommer att antagligen att bli bättre.
but the hair will probably become better.
dor +lifts arm to point at hair, holds hands up—>
02 (0.3)
03 DOR: �>°för att de°<� +p- (.) produceras mycke +o
̲ xytoci̲n.+
because (the body) produces much oxytocin.
dor >–hands up— +gaze down +hands down+
04 MIR: �jå, �
yeah
05 (0.6)
06 MIR: å hy̲n ka̲nske (.) eller
and the skin maybe (.) or
Dorotea comments on how her body will respond during her pregnancy, saying that the hair, for example, will
become better. After a slight pause she adds a ‘because’-clause accounting for the increase of oxytocin (l. 3).
During this turn, Dorotea has done pointing gestures around her head. During the addition at line 3 she still
makes gestures, but the loudness is diminished and she begins to gaze down, not looking at the interlocutors.
At the completion of the clause-combination (end of l. 3), she retracts her hands to a rest position. In cases
like this, we see how a clause-combining pattern is patched together on the fly in the course of turn- and action
production. At the same time, the speaker’s embodied conduct seems to be essential for understanding where
the major TRP was located (i.e. at the completion of the clausal complex and hand movements, l. 3).
While research in Interactional Linguistics has extensively studied the incremental design of syntactic trajecto-
ries and turns at talk (Schegloff 1996b; Fox, Ford & Thompson 2002; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), incrementally
composed clause-combing patterns have not been so much in the spotlight (but see Stoenica 2020 and the papers
in Maschler et al. 2020). Also, little is known about speakers’ embodied conduct in such incremental composi-
tion of turns and actions (but see Pekarek Doehler 2021, Stoenica 2020). In this paper, we seek to contribute to
a better understanding of clause-combining practices by attending to speakers’ gaze, posture and gesture at the
juncture of incrementally composed clausal complexes, thus also exploring the import of embodied cues for the
recognition of possible TRPs. Thereby, we hope to contribute to current interests in continua of clausal integra-
tion (Beijering et al. 2019) and in the complexity of how grammar and body interface in social interaction (cf.
papers in Pekarek Doehler et al. 2022). Our analyses are based on excerpts of video-recorded conversations in
three languages, French, Hebrew, and Swedish.

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Syntax and music for interaction: The [CTP + Music]


Construction in Hebrew Musician-to-musician Discourse

Panel contribution

Mr. Yuval Geva 1


1. University of Haifa

Recent studies in interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018) and multimodal conversation analy-
sis (Mondada 2014) explore the phenomenon of “music-in-interaction”. Studies in this emerging field seek to
describe and analyze the situated and embodied nature of music making in a range of social contexts, such as
singing instruction (Szczepek Reed 2021) or orchestra rehearsals (Weeks 1996, Stoeckl & Messner 2021). As mu-
sic does not easily lend itself to being communicated about solely using talk (Feld et al. 2004: 322), a recurring
theme in these studies is examining the practices by which participants integrate depictive embodied-musical
demonstrations into their turns-in-talk (Keevallik 2013, 2014).
This talk focuses on one such practice, as it is found in Hebrew musician-to-musician discourse: the use of a
syntactic construction that may be termed the “[CTP (‘complement-taking predicate’) + Music]” construction.
The construction features two fragments: a formulaic CTP-phrase (of doing, playing, or hearing), accompanied
by projective (Auer 2005) prosody and embodied conduct; followed by a musical demonstration delivered via
the voice or the playing of an instrument. For instance:
1 Doron: nagan ha-rok yaˈase,
player def-rock will.do
{puts hands to guitar}
2 ..(♫ plays de-accented phrase ♫)
3 …ve-ˈata taˈase,
and-you will.do
4 Avi: (♫ plays accented phrase ♫)
“The rock player will do (demo), and you will do (demo)”.
Based on naturalistic data from musician-to-musician interviews and rock band rehearsals, I show that such
constructions, considered elsewhere complex or bi-clausal quotative constructions (Yoeli 1964, Zuckermann
2006), are more adequately described as sedimented sequences of coordinated verbal and musical behavior.
I show that they emerge as formulae for the accomplishment of routine interactional moves crucial to the
process of music making: requesting, making assessments, and sharing musical subjectivities.

References
Auer, Peter. 2005. Projection in interaction and projection in grammar. Text 25: 7-36.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Selting. 2018. Interactional Linguistics: Studying language in social interaction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Feld, Steven, Fox, Aaron A., Porcello, Thomas and Samuels, David. 2004. Vocal anthropology: From the music
of language to the language of song. In: Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology:
321-345. Oxford: Blackwell.
Keevallik, Leelo. 2013. The interdependence of bodily demonstrations and clausal syntax. Research on Lan-
guage and Social Interaction 46 (1): 1–21.
Keevallik, Leelo. 2014. Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations. Journal of Pragmatics 65: 103-120.

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Mondada, Lorenza. 2014. The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. Journal of Prag-
matics 65: 137-156.
Stoeckl, Hartmut and Monika Messner. 2021. Tam pam pam pam and mi - fa - sol: Constituting musical instruc-
tions through multimodal interaction in orchestra rehearsals. Multimodal Communication 10 (3): 193-209
Szczepek Reed, Beatrice. 2021. Singing and the body: Body-focused and concept-focused vocal instruction.
Linguistics Vangaurd 7 (4): paper no. 202000071.
Weeks, Peter. 1996. A rehearsal of a Beethoven passage: An analysis of correction talk”. Research on Language
and Social Interaction 29: 247-290.
Yoeli, Mordechai. 1964. Hebrew Syntax (Taxbir ˈIvri). Tel Aviv: Yesodot.
Zuckermann, Ghilˈad. 2006. Direct and indirect speech in straight-talking Israeli. Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Hungarica 53 (4): 467-481.

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Teasing via the lo, ki ‘no, because’ construction in Hebrew


face-to-face interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna Inbar 1 , Prof. Yael Maschler 1


1. University of Haifa

Teasing in everyday interaction involves mocking jibes or taunts often being framed as playful or humorous
by participants (e.g., Drew, 1987; Haugh, 2014). Teasing underpins numerous interpersonal functions, among
which are indicating moral transgressions (e.g., Drew, 1987; Everts, 2003; Franzén/Aronsson, 2013) and miti-
gating potential offence or embarrassment (e.g., Norrick/Spitz, 2008; Yu, 2013). Employing Interactional Lin-
guistic methodology (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting, 2018), we explore deployment of Hebrew lo ‘no’ followed by a ki
‘because’-prefaced ironic utterance, i.e., one involving an inconsistency between the utterance and the actual
state of affairs referred to. We argue that in Hebrew talk-in-interaction the [lo, ki + ironic utterance] structure
is deployed for teasing.
For example, in the following excerpt, from a conversation between six close friends, Inbal, Omri’s partner, says
that sometimes she cleans the sink and toilet, only to find Omri’s hair all over the place shortly thereafter. In
response, Omri jokingly asks her whether there’s anything else she’d like to tell about his hair, to which Inbal
laughingly responds, while moving over to Omri and kissing him profusely:
1 Inbal: ’ani ’ohevet ’otan,
I love it,
2 me’od.
very much.
3 …me’od me’od me’od me’od me’od me’od me’od.
very very very very very very very much.
4 Omri: lo,
no,
5 ki yesh
because we have
6 …ki yesh ’orxim,
because we have guests,
7 ’at yexola
you can
8 Inbal: me[’od me’od me’od me’od me’od me’od.
very very very very very very much.
9 Omri: ….[yexola lesaper ma she-’at rotsa.
you can tell whatever you want.
Since it is not morally acceptable to embarrass a person in front of guests, Omri’s ‘we have guests, you can- you
can tell whatever you want’ (lines 6–7, 9) is clearly ironic. The implication is that Inbal cannot in fact, according
to Omri, tell whatever she wants in front of the guests. This ironic statement is prefaced by two linguistic
elements: the negator lo (line 4), which often accomplishes disaffiliative moves, such as objection, rejection, or
disagreement, and the causal conjunction ki (lines 5, 6), often used to project an account. Since accounts have
been shown to be regular components of disaffiliative moves (e.g., Pomerantz, 1984; Sacks, 1987; Ford/Mori,
1994; Ford, 2001; Couper-Kuhlen/Selting, 2018; Inbar/Maschler, forthcoming), we suggest that, as a result of
repetitive use, the two moves have crystallized to form the lo, ki fixed chunk, which, followed by an account
provided in an ironic manner, is employed for teasing. This practice may perform a variety of actions. In our

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example, teasing via the [lo, ki + ironic utterance] structure is used to reprimand Inbal for having embarrassed
Omri by revealing an intimate fact concerning his hair.
Based on data from the Haifa Multimodal Corpus of Spoken Hebrew, comprised of video recordings of 18 hours
of naturally-occurring casual conversation, we explore the multimodal realizations of this construction and the
actions it accomplishes in Hebrew face-to-face interaction, showing that the [lo, ki + ironic utterance] structure
constitutes a recurrent and recognizable practice in Hebrew interaction.

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Temporal clauses and insubordination in English: Evidence


from conversation

Panel contribution

Prof. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen 1 , Prof. Sandra A Thompson 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of California Santa Barbara

In this paper we aim to determine whether temporal clauses can be shown to be ‘insubordinate’ in everyday
American English interaction. In order to investigate grammatical insubordination in conversation, we begin
with Evans’ characterization, “the conventionalized main clause use of what appear, on prima facie grounds,
to be subordinate clauses” (Evans 2007: 367). On the basis of our interactional data, we will problematize ‘main
clause use’ in this characterization, showing that to keep the spirit of Evans’ statement, we need to probe further
to determine the ‘insubordinate’ status of English temporal clauses in interaction.
We first analyze an insubordinate if-clause in its sequential environment to determine what characterizes the
insubordinate use of an adverbial clause in conversation (see also Ford 1997, Laury 2012, Lindström et al. 2016,
2019). This allows us to operationalize the notion of ‘insubordination’ as a specific practice for designing a
turn and implementing a social action. Accordingly, we treat as ‘insubordinate’ a clause with a grammatically
subordinate form that (a) is freestanding, that is, builds a turn-constructional unit on its own, (b) serves to
carry out a discrete social action in its sequential context, and (c) has an independent interpretation, that is, is
unproblematically interpreted and acted on by participants in the absence of a main clause. We argue that for
insubordination in interaction, all three criteria must be present at once.
We then examine selected cases of temporal clauses from a collection of more than 200 exemplars, focusing
specifically on those that might be thought to be insubordinate because they embody one or more of the above
criteria. In every case, however, criterion (c) is lacking: that is, the temporal clause turns out to be part of a
larger construction, with another clause or set of clauses nearby which is needed for its interpretation as a time
frame. Even when a clause-to-be-framed is unexpressed, one must be inferred from prior talk in order for the
temporal clause to be actionable; crucially, the temporal clause does not function on its own. We conclude that
temporal clauses are not used insubordinately in English conversation, ending with possible reasons for this
being the case and a call for further cross-linguistic investigation.
Evans, N. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In I. Nikolaeva (ed.), Finiteness, 366-431. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ford, C. E. 1997. Speaking conditionally: some contexts for if -clauses in conversation. In A. Athanasiadou & R.
Dirven (eds.), On conditionals again, 387-413. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Laury, R. 2012. Syntactically non-integrated Finnish jos ‘if’ conditional clauses as directives. Discourse Processes
49: 213-242.
Lindström, J., C. Lindholm, & R. Laury. 2016. The interactional emergence of conditional clauses as directives:
constructions, trajectories and sequences of action. Language Sciences 58: 8-21.
Lindström, J., R. Laury, & C. Lindholm. 2019. Insubordination and the contextually sensitive emergence of
if-requests in Swedish and Finnish institutional talk-in-interaction. In K. Beijering, G. Kaltenböck & M. Sol San-
siñena (eds.), Insubordination, 55-78. Berlin: de Gruyter.

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The complex syntax of the the-N-is structure in spoken


English: When projection meets accommodation

Panel contribution

Dr. Florine Berthe 1


1. University of Pau and the Adour Countries

This paper explores the complex syntax of the the-N-is structure in spoken English. The label “The-N-is” is used
to refer to what looks like a bipartite structure in which the first part contains a head noun, frequently thing,
which can be pre- or post-modified, followed by a form of the copula be (i.e. the idea is, the funny thing is, the
thing about it is…) while the second part consists of one or several clauses.
In the literature, such structures have been analysed in different ways. While some linguists consider them to be
specificational copular clauses (Delahunty, 2011), interactional approaches analyse them as projector phrases
(Auer, 2009; Günthner, 2011). As such, the first part of the structure, the the-N-is pattern, is used by the speaker
as an interactive resource to foreshadow more to come. The aim of this presentation is to show that what is to
come, which will be called the projected segment, varies in terms of syntactic complexity and this complexity
can be accounted for by being looked at through the lens of accommodation.
This study is based on the analysis of a corpus of spoken British English which was created for a larger project
looking at th-clefts and variations around the the-N-is structure (Berthe, 2021). It comprises both monologal and
dialogal genres (Radio podcasts featuring interviews or casual conversations, scientific communications, TED
Talks and one parliamentary debate) and allows us to study around 500 occurrences of the the-N-is structure or
variations around this pattern.
In the corpus, the projected segment can range from one clause to a series of clauses or even a complex stretch of
discourse. Recurrent accommodation strategies, and, in particular, interpersonal adjustments (Gasiorek, 2016;
Pennec, 2018) can be observed within the projected segment. Speakers appeal to their recipient’s knowledge,
sometimes address their recipient directly, digress from their main topic to provide information necessary for
the recipient to understand what is projected organise the projected segment in order to anticipate the recipi-
ent’s reaction, all the while building the projected segment.
References
Auer, Peter. ‘Projection and Minimalistic Syntax in Interaction’. Discourse Processes, vol. 46, n° 2–3, Mar. 2009,
pp. 180–205.
Berthe, Florine. De la clivée en th- à la structure the-N-is en anglais oral : Vers une lecture discursive, prosodique
et dialogique. 2021. University of Lorraine, PhD dissertation.
Delahunty, Gerald. ‘An Analysis of The Thing Is That Sentences’. Pragmatics, vol. 22, n°1, 2012, pp. 41–78.
Gasiorek, Jessica. ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Interpersonal Adjustments in Language and Communication’.
Communication Accommodation Theory: Negotiating Personal Relationships and Social Identities across Con-
texts, edited by Howard Giles, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 13–35. Cambridge University Press.
Pennec, Blandine. Discourse Readjustments in Contemporary English. ISTE Ltd, 2018.

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When e/‘and’ contrasts & ma/‘but’ connects: Additive and


adversative conjunctions in Collaborative turns

Panel contribution

Ms. Virginia Calabria 1


1. KU Leuven

Research on Italian e/‘and’ and ma/‘but’ has been carried out within the domains of traditional grammars,
which describe them as conjunctions (Serianni, 2006), text linguistics, which conceptualizes them as connec-
tives (Ellero, 1986), and pragmatics, which considers them discourse markers (Bazzanella, 2011). How these
resources are deployed in naturally occurring interactions, however, has yet to be documented for Italian.
Starting from a view of grammar as an interactive phenomenon – i.e., both as a resource available to speakers
and as their emergent achievement (Goodwin, 1979) that is situated in the temporality of interactional practices
(Calabria & De Stefani, 2020) –, this paper investigates the additive conjunction e/‘and’ and the adversative
ma/‘but’ in naturally occurring interaction, deployed by next speakers as linking elements relating to a prior
speaker’s turn-at-talk (cf. Laury, Etelämäki & Couper-Kuhlen, 2017).
Specifically, it analyses the use of these resources as introducing candidate continuations, candidate comple-
tions, and other-extensions in Collaborative Turns (cf. Lerner, 1991, 2004; Calabria, forthcoming). In Collabora-
tive Turns, speakers draw on grammar and actions in prior turns to provide a grammatically and/or pragmati-
cally fitted collaborative contribution. When speakers deploy this collaborative practice, contrastive, disaffilia-
tive e/‘and’, and connecting, affiliative ma/‘but’ emerge in two ways: (i) speakers continue the contrastive or the
additive action in the prior turn, e.g., by using a ma-prefaced contribution to carry on a contrast already started
by the prior speaker (cf. interactional projection, Auer, 2005), thereby affiliating; (ii) speakers contribute a turn
directly disaffiliating with the prior turn, e.g., by using an e-prefaced contribution (in fulfillment of a syntactic
projection, cf. Auer, 2005), that targets the prior turn as missing something (cf. Bolden, 2010). Therefore, ma,
which has also been described as a turn-entry-device (Bazzanella, 2011), can be used to display affiliation and
claim understanding, while e can be also used to disaffiliate or subvert the prior speakers’ words.
The actions speakers accomplish with e and ma candidate contributions, in the scrutinized corpus, pertain
broadly to three domains: claiming understanding, agreeing and disagreeing, and building comic scenes (cf.,
among others; Lerner, 1991, Díaz, Antaki & Collins, 1996; Bolden, 2010).
The analysis is based on a corpus of 12 hours of Italian interactions in institutional (two business meetings) and
ordinary (two dinner parties and one aperitif) settings and draws on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff &
Jefferson, 1974), and Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018). A collection of 24 (out of a total
of 184 collaborative turns) occurrences has been examined: 18 e- and 6 ma-prefaced candidate contributions.
This paper explores usages of e and ma that challenge traditional grammatical descriptions, based on the lexical
meaning of these conjunctions in Italian. It is, thus, a contribution to our conceptualization of “contrastive” and
“additive” conjunctions, as well as to our understanding of practical and collaborative grammar. More impor-
tantly, this paper shows an example of “syntax-for-conversation” (Schegloff, 1979), highlighting how grammar
shapes action formation in interaction and how interactional contingencies shape grammatical resources.

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ze ma she-‘ani tsarix ‘that’s what I need’: ‘Reversed


pseudo-clefts’ in Hebrew conversation

Panel contribution

Prof. Yael Maschler 1 , Dr. Hilla Polak-Yitzhaki 1


1. University of Haifa

Employing Interactional Linguistic (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018) methodology, this study investigates Hebrew
[ze ma she- ‘this is what’+ clause] structures, reminiscent of structures termed ‘reversed pseudo-clefts’ in, e.g.,
English (Collins 1991, Oberlander/Delin 1996) and French (Lambrecht 2001). The corpus consists of 9 hours of
video-recorded casual conversation among friends and relatives, manifesting 71 ze ma she- tokens.
Such structures are analyzed according to traditional Hebrew syntax as belonging in the realm of complex syn-
tax, with ze considered subject of a nominal (copular) matrix clause and the [ma she- + clause] – a nominalized
clause embedded as predicate. However, we argue that the ze ma she- construction has become a fixed chunk,
grammaticized from repetitive discourse actions. Information Structure based studies of reversed pseudo-clefts
claim that the demonstrative pronoun denotes Given information, while the clause, which contains the prosodic
nucleus of the tone unit, denotes New information (e.g., Collins 1991), and that the discourse function of reversed
pseudo-clefts is predominantly a summative one. We have found that the Hebrew structure serves mainly other
functions, can even be deployed as a projecting construction (Auer 2005; cf. Küttner 2020), and may manifest
additional prosodic patterns. Despite similarities in lexical and syntactic features with pseudo-clefts (e.g., Hop-
per/Thompson 2008, Maschler/Pekarek Doehler 2022), the functions of the ze ma she- construction are different.
The construction is usually deployed in our corpus at a moment of (slight) dispute, and it implements one of five
actions: ‘claim-backing’ (Antaki/Leudar 1990); getting back to a previous topic; framing prior-talk metalingually;
disclaiming responsibility; seeking clarification. For example, tokens functioning as ‘claim-backing’ present
evidence supporting the soundness of a previous disputable assertion, as in the following suggestion to heat up
water in the microwave:
1 Ya’ir: ….’efshar lexa^mem mayim ba-mikro.
it’s_possible warm.inf water in-the-micro
….it’s possible to heat up water in the micro.
^left hand in PUOH–> l. 5
2 Inbal: …/@/
3 Omri: (0.34)#(0.67)ken?
yes
….really?
#tilts head-> l. 5
4 Ya’ir: ..%m m–%
..m m–
%moves hand in PUOH horizontally to the left while shaking head%
5 ze ma she-hu yode’a la’a#sot.^
this.m.sg what that-he know.prs.m.sg do.inf
that’s what it can do.
…
12 Ya’ir: …hu mexamem ’otam.
he warm.prs.m.sg obj-3m.pl
…it heats them [the water molecules] up.

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Following Ya’ir’s suggestion (line 1), Omri doubts the plausibility of heating up water in the microwave with
ken? ‘really?’ (line 3). In response, Ya’ir produces a [ze ma she- + clause] structure manifesting two primary
stresses – one on the demonstrative pronoun ze, the other on the verb do – supporting the soundness of his
suggestion: ‘that’s what it can do’ (line 5). The construction is accompanied here by a head shake and moving
the hand horizontally away from the body while holding it in the PUOH (Palm Up Open Hand) gesture (Kendon
2004).
We explore the correlation between the functions of the construction and its lexical, syntactic, and prosodic
features, its sequential position, and the speaker’s embodied conduct, thus shedding light on the interlaced
nature of grammar, the body, and interaction.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

« If you have a patrol at hand » – Insubordinate ‘if’-requests in


emergency calls

Panel contribution

Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler 1 , Dr. Anne-Sylvie Horlacher 1


1. University of Neuchâtel

The notion of insubordination has received abundant attention in recent research, since Evans’ (2007) seminal
statement defining insubordination as “the conventionalized main clause use of what, on prima facie grounds,
appear to be formally subordinate clauses”. Typical examples are what some refer to as ‘free-standing’ because-
or if-clauses. Existing research associates insubordination with the management of interpersonal relations and
speaker-hearer intersubjective alignment, relating it to requests, commands, hints, warnings, and the expres-
sion of epistemic, evidential or deontic meanings (papers in Beijering et al. 2019, Evans & Watanabe 2016).
However, work on the issue has typically not been concerned with social-interactional data. Therefore, an in-
teractional perspective can be anticipated to deepen our understanding of the functions of insubordination and
its intersubjective working.
In this paper we investigate insubordinate ‘si’ (‘if’)-clauses in French interactional data within the framework
of Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018). Existing work in this field, focusing on English,
Finnish, Swedish, and German, and has shown that free-standing ‘if’-clauses may function as directives (Ford &
Thompson 1986, Lindström et al. 2019), requests (Laury 2012, Laury et al. 2013, Lindström et al. 2016) or wishes
and threats (Günthner 2020). Turning our attention to French, we investigate speakers’ use of insubordinate
‘si’ (‘if’)-clauses within a strongly asymmetrical situation: emergency calls to the police (Drew & Walker 2010).
We document that, in such calls, citizens recurrently produce ‘si’-requests such as ‘if you have a patrol at hand’
through which they ask for a police patrol dispatch. One of the specificities of these requests is that they do not
identify the requested action (not: ‘if you could send a patrol’), but instead mention the sine qua non condition for
the addressee (the call-operator) to grant the request (having a patrol at hand). In other words, the very format
of these requests provides the call-operator with a possible reason for a non-granting of the request by simply
denying the existence of the sine qua non condition made explicit in the ‘si’-request. We show that through such
‘si’-requests, citizens index their own reduced deontic authority vis-à-vis the call-operator, typically in situa-
tions of low emergency and hence low citizen entitlement to solicit police intervention (Bolaños-Carpio 2019).
We further document the relative lexico-semantic consistency of the format, and argue that this consistency
suggests a certain degree of routinization, and is reflexively related to the mutual roles of the participants and
the set of rights and obligations related to these. Finally, we observe that, recurrently, the ‘si’-requests are pro-
duced not as first but as second requests, after the citizen’s issuing of a first request that was not attended to by
the call-taker; this suggests strong pragmatic dependency of the ‘si’-format on prior talk by the same speaker,
which raises questions of continua of insubordination (e.g., Beijering et al. 2019, Maschler 2020). In sum, the
study demonstrates how an interactional approach can deepen our understanding of insubordination and its
functional motivations.

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Conflict talk in Spanish
digital interactions
(organized by Lucía
Fernández-Amaya, María
de la O Hernández López)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“We are completely stunned”: Corrective facework in hosts’


responses to AirBnB negative reviews

Panel contribution

Ms. Patricia Díaz-Muñoz 1 , Dr. Carmen Maíz-Arévalo 1


1. Complutense University of Madrid

The transaction between hoteliers and their guests has experienced a massive change thanks to travel websites
such as TripAdvisor, Booking or AirBnB. These platforms allow for a more direct relationship between both
parties, i.e. guests and hoteliers, who perform relational work strategies even if the main communicative objec-
tive seems to be purely transactional (Bridges and Vázquez, 2018; Hernández-López, 2019). Even though most
responses to guests’ reviews tend to be positive, verbal aggression and impoliteness are present to some extent
(Hopkinson, 2018).
The present research analyses explicitly and implicitly aggressive responses to reviews with negative valence
written on AirBnB by British and Spanish hosts, with a special attention to the corrective facework strategies
(Guerrero et al., 2014; Maíz-Arévalo, 2019) employed by the hosts. Thus, the aim of this study is twofold: on the
one hand, to examine how hosts repair their face and the reputation of their businesses and, on the other, to
observe the differences and similarities stemming from the use of corrective facework strategies by British and
Spanish hosts.
Hence, 100 responses to reviews with negative valence were gathered from AirBnB, 50 for each nationality,
and analysed qualitatively with the help of the computer software NVivo, considering the strategies deployed
by the hosts in order to repair their face and to revert the situation. Results show that most Spanish hosts’
responses are aimed at repairing their own face rather than their relationship with the guests, while British
hosts acknowledge negative reviews and apologise more often than Spanish hosts, showing more concern with
their guests’ face.
References
Bridges, J., & Vásquez, C. (2018). If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless?.
Current Issues in Tourism, 21(18), 2057-2075.
Guerrero, L. K., Andersen, P. A., & Afifi, W. A. (2014). Close encounters: Communication in relationships. London:
Sage Publications.
Hernández-López, Mª de la O. (2019). Relational work in Airbnb reviews. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 23(4),
1088-1108.
Hopkinson, C. (2018). Oppositional stance and footing shifts in responses to customer complaints on TripAdvi-
sor. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 135, 15-27.
Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2019). Losing Face on Facebook: Linguistic Strategies to Repair Face in a Spanish Common
Interest Group. In Bou-Franch, P. and P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.). Analysing digital discourse. Cham: Pal-
grave, pp. 283-309.

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(Re)Claiming epistemic personhood in Spanish on Twitter: A


corpus-based examination of responses to attacks to
epistemic personhood

Panel contribution

Dr. Manuel Padilla Cruz 1


1. Universidad de Sevilla

Individuals are agents who participate in a variety of epistemic practices which involve, among others, dis-
pensing information. As epistemic agents, one of their quintessential attributes is epistemic personhood. In the
philosophical discipline of social epistemology, this is defined as the ability to author knowledge and involves
being perceived as a knowledgeable and trustworthy informer (Borgwald 2012; Thorson and Baker 2019).
Epistemic personhood may be attacked, questioned and ruined by means of a variety of actions. A recent ex-
ploration reveals that such actions may include insults, exhortations, imprecations or the expression of dis-
agreement (Padilla Cruz, forthcoming), as well as what is known in social epistemology as dismissive incompre-
hension. This amounts to a (feigned) expression of non-understanding of a piece of information owing to its
alleged nonsensicality (Cull 2019). The purported effects of these actions comprise credibility reduction, silenc-
ing, gaslighting and/or pathologisation of the epistemic agent as an irrational individual (Bailey 2020; Cull 2019;
Fricker 2007). Consequently, attacks to an agent’s epistemic personhood may generate or exacerbate interactive
conflict.
Unfortunately, the responses that epistemic agents give to attacks to epistemic personhood have not received
due attention, either in face-to-face or technology-mediated contexts. Reportedly, the attacker’s preferred reac-
tions could be silence or lack of response, even if unlikely. Dispreferred reactions could include disagreement
or counterattacks by the victim in order to reclaim epistemic authority (Padilla Cruz 2019).
This paper will report on a corpus-based examination of such responses by Spanish epistemic agents on the
social network Twitter. Overall, the examination aims to analyse how these agents (re)claim epistemic per-
sonhood through digital discourse. More precisely, it seeks to ascertain (i) whether Spanish epistemic agents
attempt to (re)claim epistemic personhood by alluding to or proving it, (ii) how they do that, (iii) whether they
counterattack or undermine the attacker’s epistemic personhood as a way of (re)claiming theirs, (iv) what strate-
gies they deploy in so doing, (v) whether such actions are organised into specific digital discourse patterns, (vi)
if epistemic agents mitigate or intensify their responses depending on the attacker’s identity, (vii) what tactics
they exploit in order to do so, and (viii) whether failure to respond is motivated by the attacker’s identity or the
nature of their attack.
References
Bailey, Alison. 2020. “On Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice: Editor’s Introduction.” Hypatia 35 (4): 667–673.

Borgwald, Kristin. 2012. “Women’s Anger, Epistemic Personhood, and Self-Respect: An Application of Lehrer’s
Work on Self-Trust.” Philosophical Studies 161: 69–76.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2019. “Reconsidering dismissive incomprehension—Its relation to epistemic injustices,
its damaging nature, and a research agenda: A reply to Cull”. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8
(11): 42-51.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. Forthcoming. Attacking epistemic personhood on Twitter: A Spanish corpus-based
examination. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict.

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Thorson, Juli, and Christine Baker. 2019. “Venting as Epistemic Work.” Social Epistemology. A Journal of Knowl-
edge, Culture and Policy 33 (2): 101–110.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Are all negative reviews alike? A contrastive study of


conflictual language in product and experience-based reviews

Panel contribution

Dr. María de la O Hernández López 1


1. Pablo de Olavide University

In the age of digital communication, reviewing and rating products or experiences have become part of most
users’ lifestyle (Barton and Lee, 2013). Therefore, most digital companies have enabled this feature to their
platforms, with a twofold function: 1) obtain information regarding the users’ tastes and preferences, and 2)
use reviews as an advertising campaign that is more efficient than traditional publicity.
Reviews have also become a complaint channel in which users vent their negative feelings after a negative
purchase or booking experience (Henning-Thurau et al., 2004). In addition, the contents, as well as the way
users express their opinions in reviews, may vary depending on the type of review (product or experience-
based), the type of platform (business-to-peer or peer-to-peer, for instance), and where the review is posted (on
the business page or outsourced in other pages). Little research has been done with regards to externalized
reviews and contrasting both product and experience-based websites.
This study aims to bridge this gap by examining 600 negative reviews, written in Spanish, about Airbnb, Zara
and Travelgenio posted in the external website TrustPilot. The aim of this study is to examine and compare:
1) the themes that users raise as the source of complaint or conflict; and 2) the conflict arising from the im-
politeness triggers (Culpeper„ 2016) found in each of the three data sets. By considering both a thematic and
structural analysis, I aim to providing an in-depth examination of negative reviews in outsourced reviews, and
their connection conflict and language aggression in contrast to previous literature, which focuses on in-site
reviews.
The results show that users’ conflictual language in externalized sites like TrustPilot is intensified, with esca-
lated aggressiveness that may even include insults, as well as affiliation and empathy with other users in the
same situation. Also, users complain about different issues in Airbnb, Zara and Travelgenio. While Airbnb users
are mostly dissatisfied with the platform that does not mediate properly, Zara users focus on the interpersonal
side of the experience, mainly with shop-assistants or online purchases. With regards to Travelgenio, dissatis-
fied users are much more aggressive, with direct accusations related to the company management and unmet
expectations. These findings not only show that the online review genre is not homogeneous across platforms,
but also that the the type of review, the nature of each platform and the source of dissatifaction will determine
whether negative reviews escalate into conflict, and to what extent verbal aggression is present.
REFERENCES:
Barton, D. and Lee, C. (2013) Language online: investigating Digital Texts and Practices. London: Routledge.
Culpeper, J. (2016). Impoliteness Strategies. In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, ed.
By Alessandro Capone and Jacob L. Mey, 421-445. Springer.
Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten, Kevin P. Gwinner, Gianfranco Walsh, and Dwayne D. Gremler (2004) “Electronic
Word-of-Mouth via Consumer Opinion Platforms: What Motivates Consumers to Articulate Themselves on the
Internet?” Journal of Interactive Marketing 18: 38–52. https://doi.org/10.1002/dir.10073.

267
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Colorism attributions and (non) verifications

Panel contribution

Prof. Patricia Bou-Franch 1 , Prof. Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich 2


1. Universitat de València, 2. University of North Carolina, Charlotte

This presentation examines the role of colorism vis-à-vis online processes of Latino identity attribution, (non)
verification and challenge (Burke & Stets, 2009; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2022). The Hispanic/Latino identity is
a top-down census category imposed by the Nixon administration on those who can trace their roots to Latin
America and Spain. For its part, colorism refers to prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark
skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group. Although Latino is properly an ethnic-
not racial - label, it has undergone – along with Spanish -a process of racialization in the context of the U.S.,
whereby Latinos have become de facto the third main racial group, alongside whites and blacks, and speaking
Spanish positions native speakers as non-white. This includes Spaniards who, as Europeans, have traditionally
been categorized as Caucasians. This racialization process has been extensively researched (Cobas et al., 2015;
Negrón, 2014; Flores & Rosa, 2015,). However, to our knowledge, scant scholarship has addressed how the
attributed Latino intragroup addresses colorism issues (but see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2018). Importantly, we
would like to explore reactions to how the US position Spaniards regarding colorism and Latinidad.
Our study is guided by the following research question: how are whiteness and de color constructed within the
Latino group, both from a U.S. and a European perspective? To answer this question, we compiled a corpus of
user-generated comments (n = cc 2,500 comments/ +63,000 words) posted in response to a newspaper article
published in the Spanish broadsheet El País. The article reported that some U.S. media had referred to Spanish
actor Antonio Banderas as the only Oscar-nominated actor of color following the Academy being criticized for
lack of diversity. Since Spaniards are considered Caucasian, the news triggered a strong reaction.
We adopted a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS, Partington 2004; Partington et al. 2013) approach, which
included analysis of keywords and concordances (Baker 2010) of the data and a qualitative, thematic analysis
(Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006) of a keyword-based, topical sub-corpus of comments. The analysis of online
processes of Latino / de color identity negotiation draws from various identity as constructed in interaction
frameworks (Burke & Stets, 2009; Jones, 2016; Gee, 2011, Bucholtz & Hall, 2005).
Preliminary results showed that online users engaged in non-verification processes of the ‘attributed’ Latino,
de color identity. They mostly alluded to the globalization of imposed US racial and ethnic categories and to
discussions of race alongside genetics and ethnic heritage, among others, thereby trying to objectivize their
arguments.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversational Human Voice in answers to complaints in the


telecommunications sector: a contrastive genre analysis of
English and Spanish emails

Panel contribution

Dr. Rebecca Van Herck 1 , Dr. Lieve Vangehuchten 2


1. Radboud University Nijmegen, 2. University of Antwerp

Recent research (Van Herck et al., 2021) shows that, despite the rise of new media in a business-to-consumer
context, companies still prefer to handle complaints privately. As such, many complaints are addressed via
email resulting in a professional communication genre on its own. We performed a cross-cultural genre anal-
ysis to understand (1) the discourse structure of the moves within response mails to complaints and (2) the
importance of the communicative function of Conversational Human Voice (personalization, e.g., sign with the
employee’s name; informality, e.g., colloquial expressions; inviting rhetoric, e.g., call to action). With this aim,
we collected authentic organizational email replies to complaints from telecommunications companies active
in England and Spain (47 and 44 emails respectively). The results indicate that the English and Spanish data sets
show a similar discourse structure in terms of move frequency. The submoves that are prototypical for all data
sets are Greeting, Explanation, Conclusion, and the closing submoves Sign-off and Signature. The data sets differ
slightly in their frequency for the interpersonal submoves Gratitude, Apology, Future contact, and Concluding
sentence. This suggests that organizational email replies to complaints have become a rather conventionalized
genre in the two studied linguacultures. However, regarding the cross-cultural analysis of Conversational Hu-
man Voice and despite its importance in webcare (van Hooijdonk & Liebrecht, 2018), it seems that the role of
Conversational Human Voice is underestimated in this genre. Indeed, the writers of both data sets seem to be
guided mainly by their own linguacultural background. The Spanish corpus shows a sometimes overly informal
and direct style that could benefit from more deference. In the English corpus, on the contrary, the recurrently
detached and formal style should be enhanced with a more person-oriented approach.
Decock, S., & Spiessens, A. (2017). Customer complaints and disagreements in a multilingual business environ-
ment. A discursive-pragmatic analysis. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2017-0004
Einwiller, S. A., & Steilen, S. (2015). Handling complaints on social network sites – An analy-
sis of complaints and complaint responses on Facebook and Twitter pages of large US companies.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.11.012
Fernández-Amaya, L. (2022). Politeness in hotel service encounter interactions in Spain. The receptionist’s point
of view. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ps.19010.fer
Hernández-López, M. & Fernández-Amaya, L. (2019). What makes (im)politeness for travellers? Spanish
tourists’ perceptions at national and international hotels. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2016-0060
Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P. (2013). A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular
Spanish and British English: The role of (in)formality and (in)directness. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ps.4.1.01lor
Packard, G., Moore, S., & McFerran, B. (2018). (I’m) Happy to help (you): The impact of personal pronoun use in
customer–firm interactions. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.16.0118
Van Herck, R. E., Dobbenie, B. & Decock, S. (2021). Person- versus content-oriented approaches in English and
German email responses to customer complaints: a cross-cultural analysis of moves and first-person pronouns.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ip-2021-2003
van Hooijdonk, C., & Liebrecht, C. (2018). “Wat vervelend dat de fiets niet is opgeruimd! Heb je
een zaaknummer voor mij? ^EK”: Conversational human voice in webcare van Nederlandse gemeenten.
https://doi.org/10.5117/TVT2018.1.HOOI

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Disagreement and reliability in comments for and against


COVID vaccination on Facebook. Scientific vs personal
evidence

Panel contribution

Dr. Marta Albelda Marco 1 , Dr. Dorota Kotwica 1


1. University of Valencia

Part of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign of the Spanish Ministry of Health has taken place on Facebook
(FB) social network. From the beginning of the campaign, this topic has provoked heated debate and conflict
between two strongly polarized groups: pro and anti-vaccine advocates. In this paper, we study the nature
of the evidence that social network users deploy to support their standpoint in comments published on the
Spanish Ministry of Health FB page.

Our goal is twofold: (i) to learn which types of knowledge and sources of information (scientific, experiential,
reported, inferred) pro- and anti-vaccine users exploit to boost their assertions and/or to discredit their op-
ponents; and (ii) to explore if there exists a hierarchy of evidence that the public opinion considers the most
reliable and valid (Mancera & Pano 2020, Fox 2001, Faller 2002).
For that purpose, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 100 comments published in response to a 2022 Spanish
Ministry of Health’s post promoting the vaccines. All analysed comments express disagreement and they con-
tain evidential elements used as support for the speaker’s own claims or as mechanisms for disregarding the
opinions of the opponents.
The study is based on the notions of evidentiality and epistemicity (Chafe 1986, Bermúdez 2005) understood in
a broad sense of sources of knowledge and information, and their reliability. Furthermore, the analysis of the
data considers the previous accounts on disagreement (Bach & Harnish 1979; Locher 2004; Brenes 2009, 2015),
and the literature on conflict, impoliteness and negative evaluation in social media (Graham & Hardaker 2017;
Bou-Franch, P. & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2018; Sanmartín Sáez 2019).
The first findings of the analysis suggest that, in the COVID-19 vaccination debate, FB users choose different
evidential elements to present their own opinions as righteous and unbeatable. In both groups (pro and anti-
vaccine), there exists a generalized tendency to rely on sources that are more accessible to users, rather than
more scientific or authoritative ones. Although the results show that there are no major differences between
anti- and pro-vaccine FB users’, pro-vaccine users tend to use more subjective sources.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘No es mi presidente, es un delincuente’. Aggressive digital


interactions on Pedro Sánchez tweets

Panel contribution

Prof. María Luisa Carrió-Pastor 1


1. Universitat Politècnica de València

Discourse analysis on Twitter reflects the way human beings communicate and interact in a digital environ-
ment. Depending on the topic and the account on Twitter, some digital interactions may suggest conflict, even
aggression. In this proposal, the focus is on actual, naturally occurring conflict talk on Twitter. Then, digital
interactions were studied considering the classification of the Appraisal theory proposed by Martin & White
(2005), adapted to Spanish, a multimodal interpretation of language (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001), and conflict
talk studies (Grimshaw, 1990). The objectives of this analysis were, first to categorise the aggressive language
used in the replies to tweets, second to classify the visual elements used to show conflict talk on Twitter and,
finally to identify some of the mechanisms by which conflict talk can be initiated, maintained or escalated,
and terminated in Spanish on Twitter. For this, a corpus of fifteen tweets sent to Pedro Sanchez’s account and
their replies and nested comments, almost 3,000 in total, was downloaded with the tool Export Comments and
analysed. The corpus was chosen considering the number of replies received. It was observed in the analysis
that the topic was not relevant to the replies; Pedro Sanchez’s tweets received hundreds of replies immediately,
boosting conflict talk. After the analysis, the examples and occurrences found were discussed.
References
Martin, J. R. & White, P. R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Continuum.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse. Bloomsbury Academic.
Grimshaw, A. D. (1990). Conflict Talk. Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations. Cambridge
University Press.

271
Convergent and
divergent information in
multimodal and
multisensorial
communication
(organized by Paul
Bouissac, Ellen Fricke)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Divergence and incongruence increase coordination in


interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Gregory Mills 1 , Dr. Christine Howes 2 , Prof. Eleni Gregoromichelaki 2 , Prof. Patrick Healey 3
1. Kingston University London, 2. University of Gothenburg, 3. Queen Mary University of London

A commonly held view in theories of communication is that convergence and congruence, both within- and
between- interlocutors underpin and is the aim of “successful” communication. Dialogue models also typically
assume that, as conversation unfolds, interlocutors become “more similar” across various dimensions. How-
ever, this view is too simplistic, not least because it goes against mathematical notions of information, recently
also adopted in complex systems research in physics, biology, AI, neuroscience, and philosophy, where surprisal
is the measure of the gain that can be achieved through the exchange of signals. Where constant learning, plas-
ticity, and adaptation are the requisite factors for persistence under continual environmental change, dynamic
processes of self-organisation under constraints from multiple sources are more significant than code-matching
and message replication (Kauffman, 2019; Bickhard 2017).
Accordingly, recent models of grammar and interaction argue that, instead of convergence and congruence, it
is divergence and incongruity that drive coordination in joint action (Healey et al., 2018a,b; Mills, 2014) through
the realisation of novel affordances achieved via the juxtaposition of constraints originating from mismatched
individuals (Gregoromichelaki et al, 2022). In everyday interactions, our predictions are constantly shaped
on the basis of how our own and others’ behaviour reciprocally affect each other and the world, opening up
new possible courses of action (affordances) unavailable to single agents due to lack of sufficient constraint.
In dialogue, these predictions are about communicative actions, e.g. sounds, words, gestures, posture, facial
expressions and eye gaze (Mills & Boschker, 2022). Individual expectations, which we argue can never fully be
met, provide a background onto which the figure of incongruent feedback is integrated, ensuing in a surprising
but rewarding outcome (more prominently in cases of humour, irony, etc. but, in reality, in every single
instance of perception/action).

Such incongruities and their effects on interaction have been addressed in recent experimental work on mis-
communication. Standard approaches to dialogue assume that signals produced by participants are congruent
with the level of (mis)understanding: when communication difficulty occurs, there is the assumption that inter-
locutors will produce signals of miscommunication that are congruent with the nature of the problem. If there
is a hearing problem, the interlocutor should signal “huh?” or “sorry what?”. Similarly, if a person misunder-
stands a direction instruction, e.g., “all the way at the end of the long path”, they might ask “all the what at the
end of the where?”.
However, we have shown instead, that targeted incongruence, both within and across turns and participants,
often increases coordination: If participants’ signals of miscommunication are detected and artificially trans-
formed to make them less congruent with the nature of the communication problem, by making the (apparent)
nature of the problem more severe, improved coordination is achieved in task-oriented dialogue (Healey, Mills
et al., 2021; Howes and Healey, 2015; Mills and Redeker, 2022). We argue that this is due to the formation of a
novel complex system emerging from the participants’ efforts and the affordances of the mediating technology.
This system develops its own emergent organisation that is irreducible to its participating components.

273
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Divergent senses and sensors in multimodal recipient design:


Avoiding gestural mismatches in human-robot interaction
scenarios

Panel contribution

Prof. Ellen Fricke 1 , Dr. Jana Bressem 1


1. Chemnitz University of Technology

What is the potential of the concept of recipient design (Sacks 1992) derived from linguistic Conversation Anal-
ysis (CA) applied to multimodal and multisensorial human-robot interaction in future hybrid societies? In par-
ticular, how can hybrid group settings consisting of participants with different senses and sensors be commu-
nicatively designed? What kind of mismatches occur and how can these be resolved – technically as well as
semiotically?
This paper is relying on a concrete empirical scenario of human-robot interaction as a starting point (Gäbert et
al. 2022). It aims at initial steps of an extended concept of recipient design that considers future hybrid settings
of humans and machines on different levels of complexity.
Basically, the concept of recipient design is broad enough to cover the most diverse aspects of complex human
as well as robot behavior (Avgustis et al. 2021; Pitsch 2020; Winner et al. 2019): (1) attributions of goals, inten-
tions, abilities, knowledge, etc. to addressees, followed by a corresponding adaptation of one’s own behavior; (2)
attribution of sensory capabilities: e.g., with regard to a blind person or a robot that does not have optical sen-
sors, one will have to use other types of signs as, for example, visible pointing gestures to localize an object; (3)
assignment of particular context conditions; (4) attributions of linguistic ability or other semiotic competences;
(5) establishing joint attention; (6) adaptation to inter-cultural differences and further aspects.
The scenario used in this paper is based on joint research (Gäbert et al. 2022; Hellara et al. 2022) in the Col-
laborative Research Center “Hybrid Societies” (www.hybrid-societies.org). It comprises an artificial gesture set
for two human co-workers (visual mode) and a robot arm (non-optical sensor-based tracking only) and thus
provides the interesting case of combining two types of addressees with (1) different sensory capabilities and
(2) different semiotic competence whose contrasting recipient design may easily lead to mismatches in interac-
tional adaptation.
For example, a pointing gesture towards an object is intuitive to the respective human (worker) performing it
and to another human bystander (co-worker) as it directs the attention to the selected object and, thus, enables
its identification. However, if the robotic arm does not have any optical sensors, such visual guidance of atten-
tion is not possible (Gäbert et al. 2022). The human interacting with the robotic arm must, therefore, take into
account the different sensory capabilities of the potential addressees in the signs he or she uses. This particular
dimension of recipient design has to be considered when constructing an artificial gesture set for humans and
machines in hybrid group interaction.
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 416228727 –
SFB 1410.

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Faith in Deepfakes: Plausibility and veracity in digital face


manipulation

Panel contribution

Dr. Remo Gramigna 1


1. University of Turin

Just as there is fake news there is also fake digital content. In the era of disinformation, discerning facts from
fiction, seeing and believing, real and fake, has become a real challenge. Whilst image manipulation has always
been a technique commonly used for doctoring face images, today image manipulation has come to a new stage
of development reaching its pinnacle with ‘deepfakes’. “Deepfake” is a fairly new technique that has revolution-
ized the way in which face images and representations are altered and manipulated in the digital era. Indeed,
using a blend of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, deepfakes create fake videos
and audio content that are very realistic, so much so that it can be hardly distinguished from authentic and gen-
uine sources. Deepfakes are videos (or audios) of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered
so that they appear to be someone else. These videos purport people saying or doing things they never said or
did. Indeed, the result is a digital mimesis of the original content which is close enough to its original source as
to pass off as authentic and real. Today, such matters are at the forefront of discussion as the invention of deep-
fakes has created heated debates dividing the public opinion into two opposite fronts: the techno-enthusiasts,
who anticipate and speculate on the great potential as aids to bolster education, the arts, and the film industry,
and the techno-phobic, who raise concerns about the possible threats that may derive from a weaponization
of deepfakes. The implications of this emerging phenomenon are plenty. By drawing on semiotic theory, this
presentation takes a deep into the phenomenon of deepfakes, taking into account the uses and misuses as well
as the peculiarity of this new synthetic media.
Bibliography
Filimowicz, Michael, ed. (2022) Deep Fakes. Algorithms and Society, Routledge.
Gaur, Loveleen, ed. (2022) DeepFakes. Creation, Detection, and Impact, Routledge.
Poulsen, Søren Vigild 2021. Face off – a semiotic technology study of software for making deepfakes. Sign
Systems Studies 49 (3-4): 489-508

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Group differences in crossmodal correspondences and


multisensory perception involving music

Panel contribution

Dr. Bruno Mesz 1


1. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero

In research on cross-modal correspondences and multisensory perception, differences between groups of in-
dividuals usually emerge. For instance, in a recent experiment on music-odor correspondences, we observed
that high-pitch music was evoked by strong smells for some participants, but other group associated high pitch
to odorants with a fresh/light smell character (e.g., sour, mint, citrus, green, and fruity). In another study on
the impact of music on the experience of coffee tasting, both the taste of the coffee and the emotionality of
the experience were modulated differently, for different subgroups of participants, by the presence of musical
soundscapes.
Different kinds of crossmodal relation that have been proposed in the literature to date may imply the exis-
tence of potential divergences between groups with respect to the congruence of multisensory communication
involving music. Congruence given by semantic correspondences, based on common linguistic terms used to
differentiate aspects of sensory experience, will likely be influenced by the great variability across languages
in representing auditory, visual, and olfactory dimensions. Emotional congruence of multisensory stimuli or
messages will possibly be affected by cultural or gender differences that have been reported in terms of people’s
affective responses to music and other unisensory stimuli.
In view of these group differences I will propose ways to personalize multimodal interactions. As an alternative
to this approach, I will comment on a case showing the theoretical possibility of designing emotionally congru-
ent multimodal objects or messages for a general user or recipient, in spite of the interindividual diversity of
“translations” across the senses.

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Olfactory interferences in multimodal communication: from


seduction to aversion

Panel contribution

Prof. Paul Bouissac 1


1. University of Toronto

Paul Bouissac (University of Toronto)


The research on multimodality bears almost exclusively on visual and acoustic modes of communication. The
purpose of this paper is to call attention on the role of other sensorial components in both face-to-face and me-
diated semiotic interactions. Although the haptic dimension is not negligible, olfaction seems to have a more
determining impact on the effective reception of multimodal messages. To approach this dimension of multi-
modality both intuitively and empirically, it is necessary to distinguish the olfactive baseline that defines the
apparent “absence of smell” in the usual environment of the interactants – olfaction is a definite determinant
of “familiar space” – from the salient olfactive information that may become a part of the interaction. Such
molecular modifications of the atmosphere within which the interactions take place can be either accidental or
artifactual. The multimodal marketing of various products makes use of this “stealth input” that plays on the
association of certain smells with social status or other distinctive cultural categories. However, the power of
olfaction cannot be entirely controlled and can undermine the intents of the interactant. Molecules generated
by the ink of printed material or by various technological devices may play a part in the reception of multimodal
messages. Body generated pheromones is also credited to impact subtly human interactions. The hypothesis of
this paper is that a felicitous multimodal communication act depends in a significant manner on its olfactive
dimension all the more so as the selective detection of molecular environment is the most ancient adaptation
of the earliest organisms. Evolution is conservative and the more recent – on the evolutionary scale – adaptive
processing of acoustic and optic information did not cancel the vital detection of olfactory information signal-
ing danger or nutrient. Recent research on the pervasive role of olfaction shows that decisions can vary with
the olfactory context, a phenomenon that is grounded on more fundamental empirical evidence showing, for
instance, that “the valence and salience of individual odorants are modulated by an animal’s innate prefer-
ences, learned associations, and internal states, as well as by the context of odorant presentation” (e.g., Khan et
al. 2022). In general, the question of whether olfaction is a determining factor in multimodal communication
among humans is amenable to empirical investigation as it is a falsifiable hypothesis in the context of current
research on cross-modal convergence and interferences (e.g., Galmarini et al 2021).
.

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When divergence opens to the exploration of Alterity.


Experiences of Infopoetry as abductive design

Panel contribution

Prof. Salvatore Zingale 1 , Ms. Arianna Bellantuono 1


1. Politecnico di Milano

This contribution will focus on divergence and convergence as semiotic processes within design activity.
Convergence occurs when, starting from different positions, there is a tendency towards a single goal or purpose.
We, therefore, interpret convergence as moving towards an intended goal or effect.
Divergence is the opposite movement: moving away from a common point. Or, according to our interpretation,
the detachment from established visions and beliefs that are obvious and unchangeable.
Design shifts from these two directions, which can be seen as the paths through which the sense of design is
sought. Suppose convergence incorporates everything experimented with a method, procedure, respect for
parameters, and, therefore, that which follows the path of deduction and induction. In that case, divergence
suggests abduction: acting in unusual ways by associating ideas and exploring possibilities. At the same time,
if convergence leads to the identification of an identity (values, objectives, and brand characteristics), conver-
gence also brings about an encounter with alterity: that which appears alien, that which is culturally problem-
atic, that which is still unknown, and which the project may unearth. Abduction is divergent thinking, driven
by the need to find alternative solutions to the possibilities already explored and traditionally pursued. With
abduction, the design aims at the valorisation of differences while simultaneously reflecting on the role that
design can play as an inventive act, non-identitarian but projected towards alterity.
This theoretical premise will be supported by the presentation of a design practice that we have been experi-
menting with for years in the Data Visualization laboratory at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano
and that we have called Infopoetry. It is a neologism that combines ‘information’ and ‘poetry’ on the lines of the
better-known infographics. Infopoetry has a twofold purpose: (i) to show data and (ii) to make them feel, seeking
the emotional involvement of the user. Compared to infographics, the designer is here called upon to expose
himself as subjectivity and intentionality. Moreover, using metaphor as an element of mediation between the
object to be visualised and its artefactual expression, the practice of Infopetry is necessarily implemented by
urging design thinking to find unusual ways of representation. The designer explains his or her point of view
on the chosen phenomenon via discourse that aims to make tangible the aspects of the content plane considered
most pertinent through an aesthetically appropriate level of expression.
The starting dataset is first interpreted according to the specific relevance chosen by the designer, then trans-
lated into a communicative image, resorting to various forms of expression, exploiting the tools of multimodal-
ity, multimedia and multisensoriality.
Eco, U., & Sebeok, T. A. (eds.). (1988). The sign of three. Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Lightning Source.
Zingale, S. (2020). Infopoetry: the poetic enunciation of data. E|C, (30), 366-373. Retrieved from
https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/ec/article/view/777
Zingale, S. (2022). Design e alterità: Comprendere l’Altro, pensare il possibile. Milano, FrancoAngeli. Retrieved
from https://series.francoangeli.it/index.php/oa/catalog/book/825

278
Corpus linguistic
approaches to epistemic
and evidential marking in
talk-in-interaction
(organized by Johanna
Miecznikowski, Jérôme
Jacquin)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“J’imagine” as deverbal discourse marker in spoken French.


Position in turns and interactions

Panel contribution

Mr. Stefan Schneider 1


1. Universität Graz

The presentation reports on a study concerning j’imagine, a deverbal discourse marker in the first person
present indicative singular with medium frequency in spoken French (Schneider 2007). The verb imaginer
is a medieval borrowing from Latin imaginari and/or imaginare. In the 13th century, its prevailing meaning is
‘form a mental picture’. Later, the verb adds cognitive meanings that background the picture aspect, among
them ‘suppose’. In the 17th and 18th century, the diffusion of ‘suppose’ favors the emergence of the deverbal
discourse marker expressing reduced speaker commitment.
The evolution leading to the deverbal discourse marker j’imagine has been studied by Schneider (2020a, 2020b).
Except for remarks in Schneider (2007) and Gosselin (2014), detailed analyses of its use in contemporary
spoken French are lacking. The present study seeks to fill this gap. The data stem from the CFPP2000 corpus of
spoken French, a collection of verbal interactions recorded in Paris in 2005-2012.

The CFPP2000 contains 146 occurrences of imaginer, of which 67,1 % (n = 98) are in the first person present
indicative singular and 32,8 % (n = 48) are deverbal discourse markers. In a first step, the distribution of the
deverbal discourse markers was analyzed. Three basic positions were found: (1) preclausal after extraposed
elements, (2) intermediate postverbal and (3) postclausal:

(1) (Spk3) et pour votre fille j’imagine ça n’se pose même plus ? (Yvette Audin, 1504.200-1507.110)
(2) (Spk1) ça dépend j’imagine des quartiers hein (Pauline de Bordes, 4619.294-4623.205)
(3) (Spk1) non mais bon vous connaissez quand même tout Paris j’imagine (Julie Teixeira, Katia Teixeira,
327.013-329.864)

In a subsequent step, these positions are now being examined, specifically in the light of the hypothesis that the
left periphery concerns the management of turns and text coherence, whereas the right periphery concerns the
speaker’s viewpoints and the modification of illocutionary force (Beeching & Detges 2014; Haselow 2015).
References:

Beeching, Kate, Ulrich Detges 2014. Introduction. In Kate Beeching, Ulrich Detges (eds.). Discourse functions at
the left and right periphery. Crosslinguistic investigations of language use and language change. Leiden: Brill,
1-23.
CFPP2000 = Sonia Branca-Rosoff et al. (eds.) 2009. Discours sur la ville. Corpus de français parlé parisien des
années 2000 (CFPP2000). http://cfpp2000.univ-paris3.fr.
Gosselin, Laurent 2014. Sémantique des jugements épistémiques : degré de croyance et prise en charge. Lan-
gages 193, 63-81.
Haselow, Alexander 2015. Left vs. right periphery in grammaticalization. In Richard Waltereit, Graeme Trous-
dale, Andrew D. M. Smith (eds.). New directions in grammaticalization research. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 157-
186.
Schneider, Stefan 2007. Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators. A corpus study of spoken French, Italian
and Spanish. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Schneider, Stefan 2020a. L’évolution des marqueurs déverbaux cognitifs de l’ancien français au français clas-

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sique. In Marta Saiz-Sánchez, Amalia Rodríguez Somolinos, Sonia Gómez-Jordana Ferary (eds.). Marques
d’oralité et représentation de l’oral en français. Chambéry: Presses universitaires Savoie Mont Blanc, 335-355.
Schneider, Stefan 2020b. J’imagine comme verbe et marqueur pragmatique : une analyse diachronique. In
Franck Neveu et al. (eds.). 7e Congrès mondial de linguistique française, Université de Montpellier 3, France, 6-10
juillet 2020. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20207803001.

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An utterance-centered corpus-pragmatic approach to the


categorization of information source in spoken Italian

Panel contribution

Prof. Johanna Miecznikowski 1 , Ms. Elena Battaglia 1 , Mr. Christian Geddo 1


1. Università della Svizzera italiana

Languages use diverse grammatical/lexical means to encode information source (Aikhenvald 2004, Squar-
tini 2007) within the larger conceptual domain of epistemicity (Boye 2012), which is related to the assertive-
interrogative functional space (Levinson 2012) and provides speakers with verbal means to claim/attribute
epistemic access/primacy/responsibility in interaction (Stivers/Mondada/Steensig 2011).
In languages that do not impose evidential distinctions by grammar, to which extent is information about in-
formation source (made) available in interaction?
“InfinIta” (USI 2020-2024, SNSF grant no. 192771) looks for answers by focusing on spoken Italian, based on
a corpus of 24 hours of video-recorded talk-in-interaction (“TIGR”). We view information source as a con-
ceptual/pragmatic category and consider both linguistic evidential marking and less-researched evidential re-
sources such as multimodal conduct (Mondada 2016), elements of the environment, implicatures based on the
propositional content p/related to text/sequence structure, and argumentation. We hope to thereby obtain a
realistic picture of how information sources are categorized within an interactional ecology.
Besides the sequential analysis of cases/collections, we adopt a corpus-pragmatic approach. Existing corpus-
based investigations retrieve and annotate explicit evidential markers/constructions (e.g. Cornillie/Gras 2015,
Pietrandrea 2018, Jacquin et al. 2022). Our annotation procedure, in contrast, is utterance-centered:
(i) Identify all utterances in a corpus sample that are compatible with an evidential specification, i.e. asser-
tions/conjectures/assessments with an epistemic commitment of at least K+/-;
(ii) Per utterance, retrieve all resources that narrow down the set of source types for p;
(iii) Per resource, describe (a) type of resource (marking, implicature etc.), (b) position with respect to p and (c)
source type.
The annotation is performed on Jefferson-style transcripts in INCEpTION (Klie et al. 2018) using one layer of
features+tagsets and viewing video-data through ELAN in parallel. Subsequent quantitative analysis will allow
to describe the degree of specificity, redundancy and earliness (with respect to p) of source categorization. We
present the annotation schema, report on its testing and address theoretical and methodological challenges.

• AIKHENVALD, A.Y., 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford:OUP. BOYE, K., 2012. Epistemic meaning: a cross-linguistic
and functional study. Berlin:De Gruyter Mouton.
• CORNILLIE, B./GRAS, P., 2015. On the interactional dimension of evidentials: The case of the Spanish
evidential discourse markers. Discourse Studies, 17(2), 141-161.
• JACQUIN, J./KECK/A. C./ROBIN, C./ROH, S. (2022). Guide d’annotation du projet POSEPI (1.0). Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7266737
• KLIE, J. et al., 2018. The INCEpTION Platform: Machine-Assisted and Knowledge-Oriented Interactive
Annotation. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System
Demonstrations, Association for Computational Linguistics, 5-9.
• LEVINSON, S.C., 2012. Interrogative intimations: On a possible social economics of interrogatives. J.P.D.
RUITER, ed, Questions: Formal, functional and interactional perspectives. New York:CUP, 11-32.
• MONDADA, L., 2016. Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal
of sociolinguistics, 20(3), 336-366.
• PIETRANDREA, P., 2018. Epistemic constructions at work. A corpus study on spoken Italian dialogues.
Journal of Pragmatics, 128, 171-191.

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• SQUARTINI, M., ed, 2007. Evidentiality between lexicon and grammar. SI of Italian Journal of Linguistics.
• STIVERS, T./ MONDADA, L./STEENSIG, J., 2011. Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction.
T. STIVERS/ L. MONDADA/J. STEENSIG, eds, The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge:CUP,
3-24.

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Discourse functions of look and see as evidential and


epistemic markers in Italian political discourse: a corpus
based study

Panel contribution

Ms. Tanja Trebucchi 1 , Ms. Serena Coschignano 2


1. University of Bergamo, 2. University of Pavia

Political discourse is a persuasive genre: one of its main goals is to build a common ground with addressees
and persuade them of the validity of some (ideological) content. This is often done through implicit linguistic
means, harder for listeners to consciously detect and reject (Lombardi Vallauri 2019). Functional markers –
external to the propositional content and with discourse-procedural or expressive purposes (Molinelli 2014) –
can be used to convey epistemic modality and information source: see, for instance, the parenthetical use of
perception verbs as “look”, “see”, “listen” and “hear” (Ghezzi/Molinelli 2015; Lo Baido 2018).
We focus on the second person singular/plural forms guardi/guardate (“look”) and vede/vedete (“see”) in a cor-
pus of Italian political speeches from 2020 to 2022. The corpus, 7 hours of transcribed speech, is balanced for
sub-genres: dialogues (interviews) and monologues (parliamentary speeches). The transcription was carried
out with ELAN, also used to annotate functional markers according to their prototypical features (Heine et al.
2021). The corpus was tokenized and lemmatized on SketchEngine, whose KWIC visualization was exploited
for comparing inflected forms across different texts.
We analyze what follows: the discourse functions of guardi/guardate and vede/vedete in Italian political dis-
course and the meaning they convey; their tendency, if any, to co-occur with specific speech acts, also comparing
monological and dialogical settings.
Despite having the same semantic source, guardare and vedere seem to be used in different contexts for differ-
ent purposes. Our data show a well-defined trend: the agentive guardare is more frequent in interviews, at the
beginning of the turn, with an allocutive value inviting one to turn one’s mind to what is about to be asserted;
the non-agentive vedere is more frequent in monologues, with an epistemic value, often introducing an implicit
Face Threatening Act towards political opponents. This contrast can be explained through their different de-
grees of agentivity: guardare takes the imperative mood and implies a conscious effort by the addressee, who
is metaphorically asked to take action to update their knowledge; vedere, in the indicative mood, invites the
addressee to “experience” information persuasively presented as part of the common ground, even when it is
not the case (Aikhenvald/Storch 2013).
References:
Aikhenvald, A., Storch, A. (2013): “Linguistic expression of perception and cognition: a typological glimpse”, in
A. Aikhenvald/A. Storch (eds.), Perception and Cognition in Language and Culture. Brill, 1-46.
Ghezzi, C., Molinelli, P. (2015): “Segnali allocutivi di richiamo: percorsi pragmatici e sviluppi diacronici tra latino
e italiano”, Cuadernos de Filología Italiana 22, 24-47.
Heine, B., Kaltenböck, G., Kuteva, T., Long, H. (2021): The rise of Discourse Markers. OUP.
Lo Baido, C. (2018): “Grammaticalizzazione, costruzioni e frasi commento in italiano parlato: uno studio em-
pirico”, in B. Moretti et al. (eds.), Le tendenze dell’italiano contemporaneo rivisitate. Proceedings of 52nd SLI
International Conference. Officinaventuno, 139-154.
Lombardi Vallauri, E. (2019): La lingua disonesta: contenuti impliciti e strategie di persuasione. Il Mulino.
Molinelli, P. (2014): “Orientarsi nel discorso: segnali discorsivi e segnali pragmatici in italiano”, in E. Pîrvu (ed.),
Discorso e cultura nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana. Cesati, 195-208.

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Distribution and function(s) of parenthetical mi sembra/mi


pare in spoken Italian

Panel contribution

Mr. Flavio Pisciotta 1


1. Department of Humanities (DipSUm), University of Salerno

In the literature, parenthetical mi sembra and mi pare ‘it seems to me’ have been classified as hedges, i.e., miti-
gators that take scope over the whole host clause (Caffi, 2007; Schneider, 2007), and are considered to only mark
the speaker’s uncertainty, without referencing any specific information source.
Given the lack of dedicated studies on these two parentheticals, we want to provide a more in-depth description
of the distribution and the functions of parenthetical mi sembra and mi pare. In particular, we hypothesize
that these parenthetical verbs can also take scope over a phrasal constituent, as suggested by Kaltenböck (2010)
for I think. Moreover, following some observations made on the construction with mi sembra as main-verb
(Miecznikowski & Musi, 2015), we hypothesize that these parentheticals can also have an evidential, memory-
related meaning.
We extract 139 total occurrences of the two constructions from the spoken Italian corpora KIParla (Mauri et al.,
2019) and LIP (De Mauro et al., 1993). The occurrences are coded for four variables: the type of interaction they
appear in, their position within the host clause, their scope (clausal/phrasal), and their epistemic or evidential
function. We perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the occurrences.
Our preliminary results show that mi sembra and mi pare are more frequent in unplanned and less constrained
interactions. Furthermore, we find occurrences in which the parenthetical takes scope on phrasal constituents:
(1) c’è un pezzo che lui registra nel cinquantotto mi pare in un disco […]
‘there’s a piece that he recorded in nineteen-fifty-eight it seems to me in a record […]’
However, we expect these cases to be less frequent than the ones having a clausal scope. Instead, we expect
many occurrences to show an evidential function. For instance, in cases like (1), the uncertainty marked by mi
pare is due to the speaker’s difficulty in retrieving the correct information from their memory. We hypothesize
this function will be present mainly in less planned interactions (e.g., free dialogical interactions), where the
speaker has fewer available sources to justify their claims.
References
Caffi, C. (2007). Mitigation. Amsterdam/London: Elsevier.
De Mauro, T., Mancini, F., Vedovelli, M., & Voghera, M. (1993). Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato. Milano:
Etaslibri. Available at: http://badip.uni-graz.at/it
Kaltenböck, G. (2010). Pragmatic functions of parenthetical I think. In: G. Kaltenböck, W. Mihatsch & S. Schnei-
der (Eds.), New approaches to hedging, (pp. 243-272). Bingley: Emerald.
Mauri, C., Ballarè, S., Goria, E., Cerruti, M., & Suriano, F. (2019). KIParla corpus: a new resource for spoken
Italian. In: R. Bernardi, R. Navigli, & G. Semeraro (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Italian Conference on Com-
putational Linguistics CLiC-it, November 13-15, 2019, Bari, Italy. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Available at:
https://kiparla.it/search/
Miecznikowski, J. & Musi, E. (2015). Verbs of appearance and argument schemes: Italian sembrare as an argu-
mentative indicator. In: F. van Eemeren & B. Garssen (Eds.), Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation
Theory, (pp. 259-278). Amsterdam: Springer.
Schneider, S. 2007. Reduced Parenthetical Clauses as Mitigators. A corpus study of spoken French, Italian and
Spanish. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Evidential last I checked expressions

Panel contribution

Mr. Ozan Mustafa 1 , Prof. Gunther Kaltenböck 1


1. University of Graz

Recent decades have seen the rise of evidential extra-clausal fragments which so far have escaped attention
in the literature. These typically take the form ‘(the) last I/we + [VERB-ed]’ and involve a verb of cognition or
perception, as illustrated in (1)–(3).
(1) The last I looked, I think it went up about 4 points in the latest poll (COCA)
(2) But really, this country, last I checked was a free country (COCA)
(3) Now the 16-year-old, Jason Gelroth, remains in critical condition last – last we heard. (COCA)
Drawing on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American
English (revealing 1,396 and 427 instances respectively), this paper investigates their typical forms and discourse
functions, particularly in spoken interaction. It also considers their recent development and grammatical status.
It will be shown that their overall epistemic/evidential function, reducing the speaker’s commitment to the truth
of the host clause based on limited available evidence, is further shaped by a number of parameters, viz. their
position with regard to the host clause (initial 82.2%, medial 8.9%, final 8.9% in the spoken section of COCA),
the specific verb used, and the semantic nature of the host clause. Thus, ironic use may arise, for instance, in
connection with host clauses expressing unchangeable states-of-affairs or ‘facts’, as in (2).
In initial and final position, last I checked expressions also have important discourse-organisational and turn-
taking/yielding function, with initial position being consistent with subjective use and final with intersubjective
(e.g. Beeching & Detges 2014). Medial position, on the other hand, has information structuring function, while
stand-alone uses represent speaker responses, as in (4).
(4) A: Sure she’s alive?
B: Last I saw. (COCA)
As regards their grammatical status, it is argued that they are best analysed as constructions in their own right
(e.g. Goldberg 2006) rather than cases of ellipsis. This is on the grounds that they do not allow for unambiguous
reconstruction of a ‘complete’, non-elliptical form (allowing instead for multiple parent constructions, e.g. The
last time that I heard, When last I heard, The last thing I heard is) and may exhibit their own formal and functional
idiosyncrasies. It is these parent constructions that can also be identified as the historical source constructions
out of which the expression has developed. The development itself is essentially one from core to periphery,
and may involve a number of different parameters, such as loss of an NP head noun (e.g. time, thing), loss of
the determiner, loss of a complement (last I read [it]) and increase in positional mobility.
References
Beeching, Kate & Ulrich Detges (eds.). 2014. Discourse functions at the left and right periphery: Crosslinguistic
investigations of language use and language change. Leiden: Brill.
Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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Expressing a low degree of certainty in interaction: the


French epistemic adverb peut-être ‘perhaps’ in a corpus of
political debates and work meetings

Panel contribution

Mrs. Ana Keck 1 , Dr. Jérôme Jacquin 1


1. Université de Lausanne

The frequent French adverb peut-être ‘perhaps’ is generally considered as an epistemic modal that applies a
low degree of certainty to a propositional scope (Gosselin, 2010). The present paper focuses on the values and
functions of peut-être as documented by a random sample of 150 tokens annotated in a 28h corpus of natu-
rally occurring interactional data. This case study is part of an ongoing research project about epistemic and
evidential markers in French-in-interaction, examined at the enunciative, interactional and multimodal levels.
The goals of the paper are (1) to present our methodological approach for the systematic analysis of epistemic
markers in interaction, and to provide (2) a quantitative overview of peut-être in contrast with other epistemics
markers present in our corpus, as well as (3) a qualitative, sequential analysis that examines and illustrates the
different aspects of peut-être found in our sample.
Existing studies of epistemic adverbs by Rossari et al. (2016) and Rossari (2018) highlight that peut-être and
other adverbs such as sans doute and certes can have non-epistemic meanings, often with a rhetorical use.
In English, Suzuki’s (2018) identifies different interpersonal functions of perhaps (e.g., hedging in questions,
requests, and suggestions), while Rozumko (2019; 2022) shows that even though perhaps is mainly employed
with a purely epistemic meaning, it can also be used as a discourse marker (for discourse-organizing functions)
or as a downtuner (for interactional functions). Our goal is then to assess the extent to which these observations
are also applicable to the adverb peut-être in spoken French.
In our corpus of spoken French interactions, 576 tokens of peut-être can be found, 156 of which being in the 9h
sub-corpus of public debates, 68 in the 5h sub-corpus of TV debates, and 352 in the 14h sub-corpus of work meet-
ings. Peut-être is by far the most frequent epistemic adverb in the corpus. To study the functions of peut-être,
we look at three layers of contextual information: (i) the syntactic position of the adverb, (ii) the interactional
context in which it appears and (iii) the type of informative content that is present in its scope. Regarding the
syntactic context, peut-être frequently appears in cleft-sentences, in correlative constructions, and in conces-
sive structures. Regarding the interactional context, peut-être can be employed in initiative positions, e.g., to
mitigate a request, in reactive positions, e.g., to evaluate a previous informative content, and in undetermined
sequential positions, to organize the discourse. Finally, our preliminary observations suggest that the nature
of the informative content also plays a role in the interpretation of peut-être, e.g., whether the scope includes a
personal deictic or a modal verb.
Based on the existing literature and our preliminary observations, our working hypothesis is that two main
uses of peut-être could be distinguished: a “subjective” peut-être1 , which is used by the speaker to express only
a downtuned degree of certainty about their own informative content or the content provided by another par-
ticipant, and an “intersubjective” peut-être2 , which is used as an interactional resource, notably to soften face-
threatening acts.

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French markers of evidentiality in interaction

Panel contribution

Mrs. Gerda Hassler 1


1. University of Potsdam

In this paper, lexical markers of visual evidentiality (visiblement, apparemment), quotative evidentiality (il/elle
dit) and hearsay (on dit) will be examined for their use in spoken French. In particular, we will investigate
the question of to what extent the interaction between interlocutors influences the meaning and function of
evidentiality markers. The following results will be demonstrated with corpus examples.

1. First, an extension of meaning to areas of evidentiality not originally covered can be noted. For exam-
ple, visiblement is hardly ever used as an indication of the origin of the communicated content from
the speaker’s visual perception. Often the use of such markers is coupled with attention-demanding dis-
course markers: ben une passe en profondeur aérienne écoute hein/visiblement ça marche/ (n5/fc4 ‘Well,
an overhead pass listen, doesn’t it/it seems to work’).
2. Another result of the study is the finding that syntactically complex markers that formally consist of a
subject and a predicate are given a simple meaning that does not always follow from the meaning of
the constituents (on dit mais: pourquoi: pourquoi faut qu’on parle anglaise si vous venez de Lyon, 15j/946,
‘they say but: why: why do we have to speak English if you come from Lyon’).
3. It is also noticeable, for example, that the evidentiality marker apparemment is increasingly used in
conversations to reinforce an affirmation or negation (pas pour l’moment mais apparemment j’vais faire
quelque chose. 1b8/j0 ‘not at the moment but apparently I have to do something’).
4. Evidentiality markers referring to the speaker’s own cognitive activities often enter into relationships
with discourse markers (ben, hein) which underline the willingness to cooperate (Ben moi aussi ben dis
lui si elle en a [besoin] j‘la dépanne 15j/ffj ‘Well, I also tell her if she needs it, I’ll help her out.’).

The study was conducted on the corpus Clapi (Corpus de LAngue Parlée en Interaction), a multimedia database of
corpora recorded in real-life situations, in various contexts: professional, institutional or private, commercial,
didactic, medical interactions, etc. and a set of query tools. It consists of 67 hours of searchable data that
are transcribed and are also available for download. The results also include quantitative statements on the
frequency of the individual evidential markers in the corpus, but the study is predominantly qualitative in
nature and based on the methods of functional corpus-based pragmatics.
Some references
Boye, K., 2012. Epistemic meaning: a cross-linguistic and functional study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Cornillie, B. / Gras, P., 2015. “On the interactional dimension of evidentials: The case of the Spanish evidential
discourse markers”. Discourse Studies, 17(2), pp. 141-161.
Haßler, G. (ed.), 2022. Manuel des modes et modalités. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Haßler, G., 1921. “Evidentiality in Romance languages. Explanatory potential of a concept and its applications
in pragmatics”. Cadernos de Linguística v. 2, n. 1, e337. DOI 10.25189/2675-4916.2021.V2.N1.ID337
Pietrandrea, P., 2018. “Epistemic constructions at work. A corpus study on spoken Italian dialogues”. Journal of
Pragmatics 128, pp. 171-191.

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Interactional uses of evidential markers in Galician

Panel contribution

Dr. Mercedes González Vázquez 1


1. Universidade de Vigo

This presentation contributes to the analysis of the role of evidential markers in interaction through a case
study of Galician, a Romance language spoken in northwestern Spain. The discussion focuses on the qualitative
analysis of three evidential markers disque (‘it is said’), seica (‘it seems’, ‘it is said’) and polo visto ‘(it seems’, ‘it
is said’) retrieved from a corpus of the current Galician language. We will try to answer the question of what
interactional meanings related to intersubjectivity, negative politeness and lack of epistemic authority these
markers convey.

Evidentiality has been treated as one of the ways of expressing epistemic stance towards the content of what is
said and towards the hearer (Du Bois 2007). The stance-taking is detected in the degree of epistemic authority
that the speaker ascribes to him/herself. This epistemic authority is based on the speaker’s perception of the
boundaries of his/her information territory (Kamio 1997; Clift 2006; Heritage 2012; Grzech et al. 2020).

In the corpus we collect cases of evidential markers that do not show a lack of certainty but lack of epistemic
authority. According to our analysis, the interactional purpose of speakers who are certain of the propositional
content can be threefold: to create common ground and intersubjectivity, to express negative politeness and
to emphasise that the information, although certain, is outside the speaker’s territory. As for intersubjectivity
(Nuyts 2001), since the speaker assumes that he/she shares knowledge with the hearer, evidential units aim to
establish common ground or mutual knowledge (Hintz & Hintz 2017). Regarding negative politeness (Brown
& Levinson 1987), attention to the addressee’s self-image leads to the levelling of epistemic authority between
interlocutors and the avoidance of intruding on the hearer’s territory. Finally, evidential markers are also
used to manifest the lack of epistemic authority as a result of the information being outside the speaker’s
information territory.

REFERENCES
Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson (1987): Politeness: Some universals in language usage. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Corga: Corpus de Referencia do Galego Actual. Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a investigación en humanidades. [4.0]
< http://corpus.cirp.gal/corga/>
Clift, Rebecca (2006): “Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential”. Journal of Sociolinguis-
tics 10/5, 569–595.
Du Bois, John (2007): “The Stance Triangle“. In: Englebretson, R. (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity,
Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 139-182.
Grzech Karolina, Schultze-Berndt, Eva & Bergqvist Henrik (2020): “Knowing in interaction: An introduction”.
Folia Linguistica 54(2): 281–315.
Heritage, John (2012): “Epistemics in action: action formation and territories of knowledge“. Research on Lan-
guage & Social Interaction 45 (1), 1–29.
Hintz, Daniel & Diane Hintz (2017): “The evidential category of mutual knowledge in Quechua”. Lingua 186,
209- 228.

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Kamio, Akio (1997): Territory of Information. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.


Nuyts, J. (2001): Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Ams-
terdam: Benjamins.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Managing knowledge in financial dialogues: corpus


annotation of epistemic modality and evidentiality in
earnings conference calls

Panel contribution

Mrs. Costanza Lucchini 1 , Prof. Andrea Rocci 1


1. Università della Svizzera italiana

Earnings conference calls (ECCs) are a key oral genre in financial communication (Crawford Camiciottoli 2013),
involving a presentation by managers followed by a Q&A session with analysts. In finance, access to infor-
mation is a crucial asset both for companies and for the investing community. Notwithstanding the regular
disclosure of information from companies, a clear informative asymmetry between managers and analysts per-
sists, affecting the management of knowledge claims in the interaction, compounded with the constitutive un-
certainty of forward looking statements about investments (Mc Laren-Hankin 2008). Rocci et al. (2020) show
that evidentials in ECCs exhibit a strikingly different distribution between managers’ and analysts’ turns and
strongly correlate with controversiality indicators. Their quantitative exploration of a large corpus of ECCs,
however, skips manual annotation, relying instead on a list of presumed evidential expressions derived from
the literature. To test and refine these findings, we conduct here a manual annotation of epistemic frames (cf. ev-
idential frames, Miecznikowski 2020) in ECCs, including both source categorization (evidentiality) and degree
of certainty (epistemic modality) examined from a communitarian (Stalnaker 1978), interactional viewpoint
(Pietrandrea 2018) in a corpus of Q&A sessions of 10 ECCs. We observe the distribution of epistemic frames in
question-answer pairs with respect to genre-specific sets of discourse moves and question designs (Palmieri et al.
2015). In particular, we seek to identify recurrent patterns of epistemicity marking that correlate with institu-
tional roles (manager, analyst) as well as with discourse strategies as captured by moves and question designs.
The paper reports the first results of an ongoing annotation effort, as well as the challenges of this process.
Pietrandrea, P. (2018). Epistemic constructions at work. A corpus study on spoken Italian dialogues. Journal of
Pragmatics, 128, 171–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.10.006

Stalnaker, R. (1978). Assertion. Syntax and Semantics, 9, 78-95.


Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2013). Rhetoric in financial discourse. A linguistic analysis of ICT-mediated disclosure
genres. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi.
Miecznikowski, J. (2020). At the juncture between evidentiality and argumentation. Journal of Argumentation
in Context, 9(1), 42–68.
Palmieri, R., Rocci, A., & Kudrautsava, N. (2015). Argumentation in earnings conference calls. Corporate stand-
points and analysts’ challenges. Studies in Communication Sciences, 15, 2015(1), 120–132.
Rocci, A., Raimondo, C., & Puccinelli, D. (2020). A Quantitative Corpus-Based Study of Evidentiality and Disagree-
ment in Earnings Conference Calls. In C. Dutilh Novaes, H. Jansen, J. A. Van Laar, & B. Verheij (Eds.), Reason to
Dissent. Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation, 2019, Groningen, The Netherlands, Vol-
ume 1 (pp. 637–652).
Rocci, A. & Raimondo, C. (2017). Dialogical Argumentation in Financial Conference Calls: the Request of Confir-
mation of Inference (ROCOI). In Argumentation and Inference: Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on
Argumentation (Oswald and Maillat editors), vol. 2: 699-715
McLaren-Hankin, Y. (2008). ‘We expect to report on significant progress in our product pipeline in the com-
ing year’: Hedging forward-looking statements in corporate press releases. Discourse Studies, 10(5), 635–654.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445608094216

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Qu’est-ce que (je vois que) tu fais ? De quoi (j’entends que) tu


parles ? On the interaction of wh-placement and situational
verbs in French partial interrogatives

Panel contribution

Mr. Jan Fliessbach 1 , Mx. Johanna Rockstroh 2


1. University of Potsdam, 2. University of Bremen

French partial interrogative markers (Q-phrases) can occur preverbally (QV) and postverbally (VQ). This
variability has been studied from various sociolinguistic perspectives (Adli 2013; Coveney 2011; Elsig 2009;
Thiberge 2020). Yet the designs of these studies did not allow for a detailed investigation of the pragmatic effects
resulting from combinations of specific verbs and wh-placement, which could be expected from remarks in the
literature on situational (Ehmer & Rosemeyer 2018: 80) and incorporating verbs (Mathieu 2004: 1108–1125).
Using a workflow based on OpusTools (Aulamo et al. 2020), we extracted approx. 150.000 partial interrogatives
from a large parallel corpus of French-Spanish film subtitles (Lison & Tiedemann 2016) which represents a
close approximation of informal conversations (Levshina 2017). We selected 20 verbs for investigation and
found that most of the verbs show a tendency for either QV or VQ. Particularly in some verbs of speech and
occurrence (Levin 1993), QV and VQ interrogatives correlate with differences in the corresponding Spanish
sentences, with QV translated with constructions and Pottsian expressives (Potts 2007) that indicate a negative
evaluation. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that particular combinations of QV syntax and verbs
of speech and occurrence are conventionalized for uses in which speakers inquire about a situationally
accessible (visible, audible, etc.) entity, activity, or speech act. The mismatch between this accessibility and
the assumption of “speaker ignorance” (Farkas 2022: 297) underlying questions can then in turn lead to an
implicature of negative evaluation.

References
Adli, Aria. 2013. Syntactic variation in French Wh-questions: A quantitative study from the angle of Bourdieu’s
sociocultural theory. Linguistics 51(3). 473–515.
Aulamo, Mikko, Umut Sulubacak, Sami Virpioja & Jörg Tiedemann. 2020. OpusTools and Parallel Corpus Diag-
nostics. 3782–3789.
Coveney, Aidan. 2011. L’interrogation directe. Travaux de linguistique 63(2). 112–145.
Ehmer, Oliver & Malte Rosemeyer. 2018. When “Questions“ are not Questions. Inferences and Conventional-
ization in Spanish But-Prefaced Partial Interrogatives. Open Linguistics 4(1). 70–100.
Elsig, Martin. 2009. Grammatical variation across space and time: The French interrogative system (Studies in
language variation 3). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Farkas, Donka F. 2022. Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions. Journal of Se-
mantics 39(2). 295–337.
Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago, London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Levshina, Natalia. 2017. Online film subtitles as a corpus: an n-gram approach. Corpora 12(3). 311–338.
Lison, Pierre & Jörg Tiedemann. 2016. OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and
TV Subtitles. 923–929.
Mathieu, Eric. 2004. The mapping of form and interpretation: the case of optional wh-movement in French.
Lingua 114(9-10). 1090–1132.
Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2). 165–198.

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Thiberge, Gabriel. 2020. Acquisition et maîtrise des interrogatives partielles en français: La variation sociolin-
guistique comme outil interactionnel. Paris: Université de Paris Doctoral Thesis.

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Reportive evidentiality in French-in-interaction: distribution


and pragmatic functions of reportive evidentials

Panel contribution

Ms. Clotilde Robin 1 , Dr. Jérôme Jacquin 1


1. Université de Lausanne

The present paper focuses on the forms, functions, and distributions of French reportive evidentials as they
emerge in a 28h video-recorded corpus of Swiss-French natural data, documenting two different “institutional”
settings (Drew & Heritage, 1992): (i) public and TV debates (14h;2007-2013) addressing various political topics;
and (ii) work meetings (14h;2017-2018).
Reportive evidential markers signal that the information transmitted has been acquired indirectly through an-
other entity, whether defined or not (Willett, 1988). In French linguistics, studies have focused extensively on
the (non-)evidential nature of reported speech (Guentchéva, 1994; Kronning, 2002; Dendale, 2022); and specific
markers, e.g., conditional mood (i.a. Kronning, 2002; Guentchéva, 2014; Dendale, 2014); “prétendre” [pretend]
(i.a. Dendale, 1991, Anscombre, 2014); “selon” [according to] (i.a. Coltier & Dendale, 2004); “il paraît que” [it
appears/allegedly] (i.a. Nølke, 1994; Rossari, 2012; Dendale, 2022); markers derived from SAY-verb, as “on dit”
[it is said] (Anscombre, 2016), “les gens disent que” [people say that] (Marque-Pucheu, 2014) or “au(x) dire(s) de”
[according to] (Dendale, 2019), are largely studied from a semantic and/or syntactic perspective and by using
either invented or decontextualized examples. Notable exceptions are the studies by AUTHOR(S) (2022) on the
evidential marker “tu dis/vous dites” [you say] in naturally collected data, and by Caillat (2012) and Doury (2004)
on reported speech in French-in-interaction.
Expanding on this work, we propose a quantitative and qualitative study of these expressions in context. In
total, 1249 tokens of reportive evidentials (corresponding to 76 lemmas) have been identified and annotated
(morphosyntactic and enunciative realization, interactional/sequential and discursive environment, and mul-
timodality). Preliminary quantitative observations show that these tokens are more frequent in TV debates (85
tokens/hour) than in public debates (37,7 tokens/hour) and work meetings (34,6 tokens/hour). In all three gen-
res, the most used lemma is, by far, the verb “dire” [say] (n =820/1249). In public debates and work meetings,
the second most used lemma is “demander” [ask], followed by “parler” [talk]. In TV debates, the second most
used lemma is “parler” [talk], followed by “pour (X)” [according to (X)]. It is interesting to note that the use of
evidential reportive markers differs from one genre to another depending on “who” is the original speaker of
the reported information. In work meetings and public debates, speakers mostly report information acquired
from someone who is not present, whereas in TV debates, speakers most often report information acquired
from an interlocutor who participates in the debate (e.g., “you say/you said”).
On a more qualitative level, we will consider how these reportive evidentials contribute to the interactional
construction of “epistemic stance” (K+/K- rights, Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Heritage, 2012). Indeed, more than
just indicating the source of information, evidential markers are also resources for expressing and negotiating
epistemic positions (González et al., 2017). Thus, through a sequential analysis of some relevant collections
identified in the corpus, we will assess the role of these reportive evidentials in the organization of knowledge-
in-interaction.

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Uncertainty vs. dispreference of German “ich weiß nicht”: A


mixed-methods workflow of a corpus-based interactional
linguistic study

Panel contribution

Dr. Henrike Helmer 1 , Dr. Silke Reineke 1


1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

In our primarily methodological contribution, we aim at illustrating a typical workflow of a corpus-based (multi-
modal) interactional linguistic study on epistemic constructions that combines both qualitative as well as quan-
titative analysis.
We present a study on the German negative epistemic construction (ich) weiß (das/es) nicht (‘(I) don’t
know (that/it)’), based on previous studies on its grammatical features and sequential pre- and post-context
(Helmer/Reineke/Deppermann 2016; Helmer/Deppermann/Reineke 2017). Following new findings on the role
of multimodal resources for different practices of equivalent epistemic constructions in other languages (e.g.,
French je ne sais pas, see Pekarek Doehler 2019, in press), we investigate the relevance of gaze, facial expres-
sion and body posture for three different functions of (ich) weiß (das/es) nicht: produced as 1. an assertion and
emphasis of not knowing, 2. an epistemic hedge or pragmatic marker downgrading the certainty or relevance
of propositions in the context, and 3. a marker of dispreference, displaying disalignment or doubt or projecting
an objection. The video data stem from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (Forschungs- und
Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK), Reineke/Schmidt 2022).
This study lends itself as a showcase example for illustrating a typical workflow and typical tools used in our
corpus-based (multimodal) interactional linguistic approach. In recent years, increasingly bigger corpora of
spoken language are built and made available and searchable through digital resources like corpus research
platforms tailored to the specific properties of spoken language data (e.g., CLAPI for French, Spoken BNC for
English, TalkBankDB for several languages, the Database for Spoken German (DGD) for German). Thanks to
these developments, researchers today can use a relatively big amount of spoken data for their projects and
queries of specific forms or constructions. These bigger amounts of data that are accessible on the other hand
lead to new challenges in their further processing and qualitative analysis. This calls for elaborate workflows
and the use of digital tools.
Our contribution addresses these issues and shows how qualitative researchers faced with rather big amounts
of data can deploy corpus-technological possibilities and with their help adopt mixed methods approaches. We
present our workflows as well as digital resources that we typically use while working on studies like the one
mentioned above, e.g.:

• the Database for Spoken German (DGD, Schmidt 2017) as a corpus research platform that allows struc-
tured token queries and various filters that help to delimit a potentially big amount of data and results
• editors like EXMARaLDA and FOLKER to adapt transcriptions following the GAT2 transcription conven-
tions (Selting et al. 2009)
• ELAN and EXMARaLDA for annotation of multimodal resources
• spreadsheets (Excel) for systematizing our collection as well as for qualitative coding
• RStudio for statistical analysis

Together with examples from our study on “(ich) weiß (das/es) nicht” we want to illustrate the potential of com-
bining corpus-based and qualitative analysis.

295
Digital play as
socio-pragmatic practice
(organized by Hiloko
Kato)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Co-constructing sociability in online gaming communities

Panel contribution

Dr. Carolin Debray 1


1. University of Basel

Gaming is an increasingly mainstream pastime and gaming communities are becoming bigger and more diverse
in regards to the social identities (age, gender, educational background, nationality, ethnicity, profession, etc.)
and the linguistic backgrounds of their members. While interactions between gamers are often restricted by the
technological affordances of different sites, the time pressures in-game and during game spectatorship, and the
arguably limited common ground that exists between them, community is nonetheless constructed within this
diversity through a variety of practices. Both linguistic innovation and ritualization constitute important pro-
cesses that help to construct a linguistically distinct community (Ensslin, 2012) and with that help to construct
community identities.
One instance in which large groups of gamers come together and interact is during game spectatorship: Here,
gamers broadcast themselves playing a game via a stream, with sometimes tens of thousands of others watching.
During the stream, the audience can interact with each other and the streamer through text-based chat, while
the streamer usually speaks directly to the audience. Unlike in analogue television, sociability - the pleasure of
being associated with others (Simmel & Highes, 1949), is a crucial component of the viewing experience. In this
talk I examine the different linguistic resources gamers and spectators alike mobilise in order to construct a
sense of sociability and strengthen community identity through a small corpus of transcribed spectator-gamer
interactions.
Taking a socio-pragmatic approach, and drawing on the notions of joint attention and relational work (Locher,
2008), I examine the ways in which linguistic practices such as creative word formations, interjections and rep-
etition are used to construct sociability in these interactions. I illustrate how streamers and spectators jointly
co-construct a “play-frame” (Bateson, 1985) that further enhances sociability. At the same time, by using linguis-
tic resources invoking a play-frame, participants remind each other that “this is (only) play”. This is important
as it helps to mitigate the threat posed by frequent anti-social interactional behaviours and allows participants
to guard against and to reconstruct sociability in the face of these threats.
References
Bateson, G. (1985). A theory of play and fantasy. In: R.E: Innis (Ed.), Semiotics: An introductory anthology, (pp.
131-144), Indiana University Press.
Ensslin, A. (2012). The language of gaming. Palgrave Macmillan.
Locher, M. (2008). Relational work, politeness, and identity construction. In G. Antos, E. Ventola, in cooperation
with T. Weber (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 509-540). De Gruyter Mouton.
Simmel, G., & Highes, E. (1949). The sociology of sociability. American Journal of Sociology, 55(3), 254–261.

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Digital play for life-saving knowledge? The multimodal


arrangement in VR applications for first-aid procedures

Panel contribution

Prof. Dusan Stamenkovic 1 , Prof. Janina Wildfeuer 2


1. Södertörn University, 2. University of Groningen

VR applications for medical simulations such as emergency situations offer new ways of distributing knowledge
and providing practical skills for saving a life. Compared to the genre of serious games in which players are
trained as exports or layperson first-aiders within an interactive gameplay, VR applications potentially repre-
sent an even more complex communicative environment. Additional semiotic resources such as touch, body
movements and proprioception (cf. Martin et al. 2022) are used to construct the virtual world and instruct
players to perform certain procedures. From a multimodal perspective (cf. Bateman et al. 2017), the commu-
nicative situations constructed by the virtual environment bring with them an increasing level of interactivity
and ergodicity and it is particularly challenging to address these analytically. Especially the cyberphysical in-
frastructure provided in these applications add to the complexity by embedding holograms, 360-degree videos,
etc. which need to be taken into consideration in the analysis of the instructional techniques.
While there is now research on e-learning strategies such as serious games (e.g. Boada et al. 2020) and mobile
apps (e.g. Metelmann et al. 2018), not much work has been done with regard to the (multimodal) design of
VR applications and how these can be used to teach resuscitation and other procedures. It will therefore be
interesting to address this question from a qualitative perspective with future potential for empirical research
on the effectiveness of these applications.
In this talk, we will address the analytical challenges by looking at two different examples of VR applications
for first aid (Lifesaver VR, Resuscitation Council UK; Basic Life Support, Dual Good Health) and providing a
foundational framework for the multimodal analysis of the communicative situations created in these two ap-
plications based on our previous work on video games (Wildfeuer & Stamenković 2022). The data to work with
are recordings of the initial usage of the applications as provided by the production companies. We aim to not
only show how recent developments in multimodality research are well-equipped for the effective analysis of
these artifacts, but also how the analytical results can be practically implemented in the further development
of these applications.
Bateman, J., Wildfeuer, J., Hiippala, T. (2017). Multimodality. Foundations, Research, Analysis. A Problem-
Oriented Introduction. Mouton de Gruyter.
Boada, I., Rodriguez Benitez, A., Thió-Henestrosa, S., & Soler, J. (2020). A Serious Game on the First-Aid Proce-
dure in Choking Scenarios: Design and Evaluation Study. JMIR Serious Games, 8(3), e16655. DOI: 10.2196/16655.
Martin, D., Malpica, S., Gutierrez, D., Masia, B., & Serrano, A. (2022). Multimodality in VR: A Survey. ACM Com-
put. Surv., 54(10s), Article 10s. DOI: 10.1145/3508361.
Metelmann, B., Metelmann, C., Schuffert, L., Hahnenkamp, K., & Brinkrolf, P. (2018). Medical correctness and
user friendliness of available apps for cardiopulmonary resuscitation: Systematic search combined with guide-
line adherence and usability evaluation. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth, 6(11), e190. DOI: 10.2196/mhealth.9651.
Wildfeuer, J., Stamenković, D. (2022): The discourse structure of video games: A multimodal discourse seman-
tics approach to game tutorials. Language & Communication 82, 28-51. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2021.11.005.

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Expression of embodiment in a virtual environment: players


projecting themselves into the digital world

Panel contribution

Dr. Julie Bardet 1 , Ms. Lydia Heiden 2


1. ENS/ICAR, 2. ICAR Lab

Video games typically offer to their players new, unknown places to explore. Some famous online games allow
the players to discover and interact in and with whole worlds (e.g. League of Legends) or even (partially) create
them (e.g. Minecraft). Players therefore have spatial positions in the virtual environment of the game that
they can refer to, depending on the perspective they take: for example from inside the game world or from an
observer’s perspective. The term embodiment notably describes the player’s experience of ‘living’ the virtual
world and displaying a feeling of presence in it. Gee puts it as follows “players inhabit the goals of a virtual
character in a virtual world” (Gee, 2008: 259). Online games offer not only a world where avatars and other
characters can move in, but also different spaces and channels of interaction between the players.
Our corpus consists of triadic interactions in an online collaborative game which has been designed for the
purpose of research. Players are part of a submarine’s crew and have to repair some damages, while preventing
the submarine from sinking since water flows into the different rooms at the end of each player’s turn. Before
starting the game, we gave the players the opportunity to explore the game interface via a tutorial. During the
game, they either see the plan of the submarine from a bird’s eye perspective (when it is not their turn) or they
see the room they are currently in, from an immersive point of view (when it is their turn). In the first, the
three players are represented by coloured circles allowing to locate them in the submarine and they can see
the water level in the different rooms. The players can communicate with each other via their webcam image
representation in the ‘talking head’ format (e.g. Morel & Licoppe, 2008).
Drawing on a qualitative, interactional analysis of screen recordings of players from several groups, we will
show four different dimensions of embodiment in the context of this game: (i) verbal display of the players’
projection of themselves and each other in the first person immersive view, for example by referring to their
feet being under water, (ii) multimodal display of the players orientation in the game on the two dimensional
submarine plan, for example by using directions and positions (left, right, up, down) linked to the flat screen
image (iii) in case of involuntary deconnexion players making their reappearance explicitly relevant for the
other players and ensuring mutual perceptibility and (iv) clear gaze orientation towards the webcam image
of one of the two co-players as a display of address (in case of the speaking person) and attention (in case
of the listening person). We explore how these types of embodiment can contribute to group cohesion and
collaboration.

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Identity Work by Australian Fortnite Content Creators:


Commercial, Public and Private Identities

Panel contribution

Dr. Jonathan White 1


1. Högskolan Dalarna

This presentation deals with the identity work by Australian content creators playing the multi-player online
game, Fortnite. There are many different levels of identity that are indexed in the videos.
One level relates to the game itself, and specifically the player’s skill level and playing style. In the game, players
choose an avatar (skin) where the species, gender and clothing are preset. Many content creators have become
associated with a particular skin, and so any player using this skin may be referred to by the streamer’s name
(that’s a Lachlan). Some have been given a special personalised Icon Series skin which indexes them as a player
(Lachlan, Loserfruit and Lazarbeam), and skins associated with early seasons index more skilled players.
The streamers analysed are very well known to each other, and in fact used to live in a house together in Sydney,
Australia, and so mix private and public identities by addressing one another by their real names and usernames
(Lannan/Lazarbeam, Elliott/Muselk). The use of terms specific to the game (the ludolect, cf. Ennslin, 2012) is
another way of showing an identity as an experienced player.
An additional important finding is the commercial identity of the streamers. Many streams and videos begin
with a call for viewers to subscribe, the number of subscriptions, and information about commercial products.
Some videos are sponsored by companies, and other products can be mentioned (for example, Muselk advertises
Bang energy drink), and streamers have their own merchandise.
Thus, we see streamers indexing their shifting identities as public, private and commercial individuals.
Reference
Ennslin, A. (2012). The language of gaming. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Locating enemies in cooperative online games: on markers


and professional vision

Panel contribution

Mr. Federico Corradini 1


1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Online multiplayer games usually involve distant players who do not share the same domain of scrutiny through
the same screen, but may have asymmetries in visual access, depending on their position in the game space
and the orientation of their camera. Visual asymmetry thus becomes a relevant practical problem in online
gameplay, especially in non-linear games with complex three-dimensional maps like battle royales, where ex-
ploration and location of enemies and items are one of the key features of gameplay. In online cooperative
videogames, collaborative practices are consequently used to enact and negotiate professional vision (Goodwin
1994).
In this study I provide an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic account of how gamers cooperatively
collaborate in the moment-by-moment achievement of shared vision, to monitor and identify threats and ene-
mies in the surrounding space, and consequently organize strategic action. While previous EMCA research on
gaming has started to shed light on the relevance of and orientation to professional vision in the local organi-
zation of recognizable gaming actions (e.g. Reeves et al. 2009; Bennerstedt & Ivarsson 2010; Reeves & Laurier
2014; Brincher & Moutinho 2021), the focus has often remained either on a single player, or on the interaction
with a spectator/physical co-player.
This proposal instead deals with interactions between three distant gamers who play as a trio in the popular
battle royale game Fortnite, while also communicating via the vocal chat system of the game. The data, three
hours of interactions in English and Italian, include the recordings of the vocal chat and the three players’
screen, which have been synchronized so as to have access to each player’s in-game (re)actions.
My analysis focuses on two aspects. One, the combination of multiple resources employed to make relevant
aspects of the game world visible and accountable. Such “visual sharing” is achieved by combining talk with
the use of “makers”, i.e. user-manipulated audio-visual cues that appear on each player’s interface to highlight
a point in space and alerting teammates. Two, the subsequent collaboration and confirmation, not only of
what is noticeable, but also of who is “notice-able”, in the negotiation of visual competence, with consequent
implications for the arrangement of the team’s course of action. My results point to show an interactional
orientation to gamers situated visual skill as a collaborative accomplishment.
References
Bennerstedt U., Ivarsson J. (2010). Knowing the way. Managing epistemic topologies in virtual game worlds.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 19 (2): 201-230.
Brincher S., Moutinho R. (2021). The intricacies and overlaps of Lebenswelt and Spielwelt during an instructed
match of Counter Strike: GO. Ethnographic Studies, 18: 238-262.
Goodwin C. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606-633.
Laurier E., Reeves S. (2014). “Cameras in video games: Comparing play in Counter-Strike and the Doctor Who
Adventures” in Broth M., Laurier E., Mondada L. (eds.) Studies of video practices: Video at work. New York:
Routledge, pp. 181-207.
Reeves S., Brown B., Laurier E. (2009). Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise. Games and Culture 4
(3): 205-227.

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Multimodal Practices in MOBA Games on the Example of


League of Legend‘s Player Communication

Panel contribution

Mr. Luca Ferrari 1 , Dr. Hiloko Kato 2


1. UZH University of Zürich, 2. Department of German Studies University of Zurich / Game Design Zurich University of the Arts

MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas) are one of the most popular, if not the most popular, game genre in the
online gaming industry. Especially in terms of linguistics, online games offer an interesting field of research that
is in constant flux. Recently, we took a closer look at the world’s most played online game (League of Legends)
by analyzing 70 games with regard to the specifics of player communication. The game offers its players a
variety of multimodal communication options that have a (seemingly) intended function but are often used
very differently by the players. In conclusion, player communication in League of Legends heavily relies on
multimodality, as players need to pay attention to multiple modes of communication simultaneously throughout
the entire game.
Our contribution expands this existing analysis (Ferrari/Kato in preparation) by
a) taking the recently launched new additions to League of Legends communication system into account (patch
12.22 in November 2022). These changes already established new patterns and conventions of communication
in terms of intended function and player usage. In this context, we also added material of streamers, online
coaching sites and the discourse taking place on player community sites to our data collection. Our analysis
shows how the players’ gaming community are co-constructed especially while changes in and establishments
of massively relevant communication happen.
b) integrating an additional fine-grained analysis of the data with an (ethnomethodological and conversation
analytical) informed approach (EMCA), where we try to show that the players’ communication is, in fact, a
multimodal interaction, challenging the traditional distinction between face-to-face interaction in presence and
textual communication in absence (Hausendorf et al. 2017). By considering the already existing analysis on
players’ representation (cf. Keating/Sunakawa 2010; Baldauf-Quilliattre/Colón de Carvaja 2015) the status of
the players’ agency as part of the cybernetic system of the game shall be examined as well.
Baldauf-Quilliatre, Heike/Colón de Carvaja, Isabel (2015): Is the avatar considered as a participant by the play-
ers? A conversational analysis of multi-player videogames interactions. PsychNology Journal, 13/2-3, 127–147.
Hausendorf, Heiko/Kesselheim, Wolfgang/Kato, Hiloko/Breitholz, Martina (2017): Textkommunikation Ein
textlinguistischer Neuansatz zur Theorie und Empirie der Kommunikation mit und durch Schrift. Berlin: De
Gruyter.
Keating, Elizabeth/Sunakawa, Chiho (2010). Participation cues: Coordinating activity and collaboration n com-
plex online gaming worlds. In: Language in Society 39, 331–356.

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Non-task-related joint activities in massively multiplayer


online games

Panel contribution

Dr. Yan Zhou 1


1. Northwestern University

Human interaction is fundamentally cooperative and is based on joint attention (Tomasello 2008). Despite that
some studies found anti-social effects of some video games (Greitemeyer 2018), collaborative massively mul-
tiplayer online (MMO) games have been shown to facilitate pro-social behaviors as they enable players from
diverse backgrounds to accomplish collaborative goals in the virtual environment (Voida & Greenberg 2009).
Scholars in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) recently reported that interaction on MMO
game is socially organized (Reeves, Greiffenhagen & Laurier 2017).
However, social interaction in MMO video games is more challenging than in the real world as MMO games
are mostly designed with a first-person perspective, which provides limited visual access to the space and other
players’ activities (Manninen & Kujanpää 2005). How do players achieve various types of collaboration with
the “constrained set of possibilities afforded by the game” (Bennerstedt & Ivarsson 2010)? This study aims to
answer this question by conducting empirical analyses using EMCA methods.
Unlike Bennerstedt and Ivarsson (2010) who analyzes shared core game missions, this study focuses on collab-
orative social activities that are performed “just for fun” (from a participant), such as taking selfie in Ex.1. Data
include five one-hour-long play sessions of Sea of Thieves, a MMO game where a team of players explore an
open world via a pirate ship from a first-person perspective. Data is in American English.
Three important observations were made in the initial analysis. First, players seem to recreate real-world joint
activities in the virtual world with the available resources. Second, players in this study complete joint activities
by controlling their avatars in a sequentially organized manner. Third, players may coordinate interactional
channels separately to complete multiple actions simultaneously. Third, despite the multitasking feature, In
Ex.1, the three players have lost to another team. Bob initiates the joint activity of selfie by requesting Lucas sit
down here so we can take a screenshot, which is equivalent to a group selfie after a social gathering in real life.
Following a sequential order, Lucas responds verbally, alright, then makes his avatar runs towards the other
two players’ avatars. Prior to Ex.1, Lucas manages to multitask through different channels: his avatar has been
shoveling dirt while Bob is telling a bear story, then he makes a verbal comment when the story ends while his
avatar is still shoveling dirt on the screen.
Ex.1 Selfie.
08 Bob: Lucas, sit down here so we can take a screenshot.
09 Lucas: alright.
10 Lucas: ((Lucas runs towards the other two avatars who are sitting around a fire pit))
11 Bob: sit- sit on the other side.
12 Lucas: ((Lucas’s avatar examines the seat and site down as Bob is producing line 11))
By studying non-task-related joint activities in MMO games, this study expands the scope of EMCA studies on
social interaction and contributes to the understanding of how players complete pro-social joint activities in the
virtual world. Empirical findings in this study also have direct implications for video game design.

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Videogame system messages as turns: a new participant

Panel contribution

Ms. Sara Badia Climent 1


1. University of Valencia

The discourse generated during a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) videogame match differs in many re-
spects from natural conversations. One of the most remarkable features is the set of oral- and written game system
messages, showing real-time relevant information about the match. These messages influence the dialogue system
and the structure of interaction during the match. This contribution is aimed at establishing the conversational
role assigned to the game system and the shape of the interactional schemas where the system is involved.
This study is based on three strands of research: on the one hand, multimodality approaches (i.e., Depperman,
2013; Djonov y Leuween, 2017) take into account the confluence of multiple communication channels (oral, written
and action) in digital genres (Herring, 2017). On the other hand, videogames are a kind of computer-mediated
discourse (Yus, 2010; Herring and Androtsopoulos 2015, Herring, 2007; Jovanovic & Leuween, 2018), hence some
of their features must be analyzed in tandem with the ones found in digital communication. Finally, given that
this contribution aims at studying the role of the game system during a match, the communication processes in
human-robot interaction Fischer (2010 & 2011) are also considered.
This contribution analyzes twelve League of Legend MOBA matches with different team compositions: full premade
and teams with some randomly selected members. For every match, human-to-human and game system-to-human
messages are compared, in order to determine if game system interventions (linguistic emissions) could be also
considered turns (socially accepted linguistic emissions) (Val.Es.Co. Research Group 2014, Pons Bordería 2022).
In order to do this analysis, both the linguistic interventions (oral and written) and the actions of the participants
have been taken into account.
Also, special attention will be paid on the different dialogue schemas visual depictions of the kinds of interaction
in conversations (Briz 2006; Espinosa-Guerri 2016) performed by the game system and by the speakers.
Finally, some conclusions will be drawn about the future of the interactional behavior of game system in MOBA
games.

References:

Depperman A. (2013):“Multimodal interaction from a conversation analytic perspective”, Journal of Pragmat-


ics,nº 46, pp.1-7.
Djonov, E., & Van-Leeuwen, T. (2017):“The power of semiotic software: A critical multimodal perspective”, The
Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies, pp.566-581. Routledge.
Fischer, Kerstin (2010):“Why it is interesting to investigate how people talk to computers and robots: Introduc-
tion to the special issue”. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, pp.2349-2354.

• (2011):“How People Talk with Robots: Designing Dialog to Reduce User Uncertainty”. AI Magazine, 32(4),
pp.31-38.

Herring, S. C. (2007):“A Faceted Classification Scheme for Computer-Mediated Discourse”, Language@Internet,


v. 4,(1) [online] [12/10/2021]

• (2013):“Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent” en Discourse 2.0.: Language and
New Media. Washington: Georgetown University Press
• & Androutsopulos J. (2015):“Computer-Mediated Discourse 2.0”, Deborah Tannen, Heiddi E. Hamilton y
Deborah Schiffrin(eds.) the HandBook of Discourse Analysis, p.127-151

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• (2017):“Emergent forms of Computer-Mediated Communication and their global implications”, en


Fuentes-Calle, Alicia(ed.) World Language Diversity: Old and New Frontiers, Emerging Scenarios, pp.90-
130, Lingupax: Barcelona.

Jovanovic y Leuween (2018):“Multimodal dialogue in social media”, Social Semiotics, v.28, pp.683-699.
Yus, F. (2010):Ciberpragmática 2.0. Barcelona: Ariel.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“right - left - yes”: the interactional and collaborative


achievement of synchronization with the avatar in a Kinect
dance game

Panel contribution

Ms. Isabel Colon de Carvajal 1 , Dr. Heike Baldauf-quilliatre 1


1. ICAR Lab

Our contribution investigates players’ practices during Kinect video game sessions where players have to syn-
chronize their own body movements with those of an avatar who represents the player in the game. Performing
entirely synchronized movements allows the player to earn points.
From a conversation analytic point of view, interaction is considered as an achievement that is co-constructed
by all participants. Within the last decade, different studies have detailed particular practices of co-construction
in digital interaction, especially concerning the use of different kings of technological devices such as mobile
phones, tablets or voice interfaces as well as video-mediated interactions in different situations (medical inter-
action, business meetings, or videogames). EMCA research on videogames has almost focused on the players’
activities in digital games. It has been investigated how physically co-present players collaborate in the co-
construction of digital play (Mondada 2012; Reeves et al. 2017; Baldauf-Quilliatre & Colon de Carvajal 2019).
During the last years, researchers have highlighted the importance of non-playing participants who are phys-
ically present and who participate in different ways in the interaction and in the gaming (e.g. Tekin & Reeves
2017; Baldauf-Quilliatre & Colon de Carvajal 2021; Olbertz-Siitonen, Piirainen-Marsh & Siitonen 2021).
In our paper we will investigate how all participants collaborate in the ongoing activity. Our analysis is based
on a local video game session with Kinect. The participants are playing at Dance Central, a dance videogame.
The aim of the game is to swing on the choreography represented on the screen as in the reflection of a mirror.
The four participants take turns in dancing, the three non-players are sitting on the sofa, watching the player
dancing. In our presentation we present two extracts: one extract in which the player Dominique is totally
synchronized with his avatar’s mouvements and a second one showing the player Lucas who struggles to syn-
chronize. We therefore draw on previous work of playing sessions with Kinect by Tekin & Reeves (2017) and
Tekin (2021).
Concerning our data, the comparison of the two situations (good vs. bad synchronization) allows to establish
an interesting link between digital play as social practice and game design. Indeed, the interactional practices
of the three non-players are different depending on whether or not the player manages to synchronize with the
avatar’s movements. We focus on the resources mobilized by the participants to consider the (non) synchronic-
ity of the player through the features available at the screen and the “seeing” posture of the four participants.

306
Discourse and
disfluencies in cognitive
and speech disorders
(organized by Ludivine
Crible, Christelle Dodane)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Coherence markers, word-finding difficulties, and their


relationships: what can we learn from Alzheimer’s disease?

Panel contribution

Dr. Aurélie Pistono 1


1. Ghent University

Language production difficulties occur early in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In particular, word-finding difficulties
are one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Most authors analyzing connected-speech production in AD
interpret the high proportion of disfluencies in this group as a proof of word-finding difficulties (e.g., Kavé
and Goral, 2018). In the current study, we focused on other phenomena, namely coherence markers. We also
investigated the relationship between coherence markers and cognitive functions (linguistic and non-linguistic).
We predicted that discourse variables would be correlated with several linguistic and non-linguistic processes,
meaning that discourse-level assessment is a useful tool for revealing impaired communication and cognition.
17 early AD participants and 17 matched healthy controls were recruited. They underwent a language assess-
ment (Bézy et al., 2016) -which included a picture-based narrative- and a neuropsychological assessment. We
compared the number of mandatory elements, the proportion of misinterpretations, modalizing discourse, con-
nectors, ambiguous references, and topic shifts produced during the picture-based narrative. We then per-
formed correlations between these variables and lexical performance, memory performance, as well as execu-
tive functioning.
Results indicate that AD participants were less informative (i.e., fewer mandatory elements) and produced more
modalizing discourse than healthy controls. These variables were correlated with memory and executive func-
tion abilities. Additionally, AD participants with lower lexical performance also produced ambiguous refer-
ences and misinterpretations during their narrative.
Altogether, the current study shows that, in a population characterized by lexical and memory impairment,
discourse coherence is also reduced. Nonetheless, the fact that AD participants produced modalizing discourse
means that their pragmatic abilities are preserved and used to communicate about their difficulties (Duong
et al., 2003). Lastly, lexical impairment probably contributes to patients’ coherence failure (i.e., in particular
by increasing ambiguous references), which is calling for further research on the links between word-finding
difficulties, disfluencies, and coherence markers.
References
Bézy, C., Renard, A., and Pariente, J. (2016). GREMOTS Batterie d’évaluation des troubles du langage dans les
maladies neurodégénératives. De Boeck supérieur.
Duong, A., Tardif, A., and Ska, B. (2003). Discourse about discourse: What is it and how does it progress in
Alzheimer’s disease? Brain Cogn. 53, 177–180. doi: 10.1016/S0278-2626(03)00104-0.
Kavé, G., and Goral, M. (2018). Word retrieval in connected speech in Alzheimer’s disease: a review with meta-
analyses. Aphasiology 32, 4–26. doi: 10.1080/02687038.2017.1338663.

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Conversational and intonational characteristics of dialogue


between autistic adults

Panel contribution

Dr. Simon Wehrle 1 , Prof. Kai Vogeley 2 , Prof. Martine Grice 1


1. IfL-Phonetik, University of Cologne, 2. Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Cologne

Most research on conversational speech in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is based on data from structured
interactions between autistic children and non-autistic adults. We cannot expect to reliably extrapolate findings
a) from structured to more naturalistic settings [1], nor b) from the behaviour of children to that of adults,
particularly in neurodiverse populations [2].
Perhaps even more importantly, the vast majority of previous research in the field only reveals what happens
when we observe interactions in heterogeneous, disposition-mixed dyads, consisting of one autistic and one
non-autistic participant, that is, between interlocutors with different cognitive styles [3]. This does not allow
any direct insights into what characterises conversations between autistic interlocutors.
In an effort to close this gap in the literature, we recorded 28 German-speaking adults, half of which had been
diagnosed with ASD, engaged in semi-spontaneous dialogue in homogeneous, disposition-matched dyads. We
recorded 5 hours of speech, for an average of 20 minutes per dyad. Our analysis focusses on five different
aspects of conversation: intonation style, turn-taking, backchannels, filled pauses and silent pauses.
Overall, we found robust tendencies in the ASD as compared to the control group for 1) a more melodic intona-
tion style, 2) very similar turn-taking behaviour, 3) a lower rate and diversity of backchannel productions and 4)
a lower rate of filled and silent pauses as well as differences in the former’s prosodic realisation (all confirmed
using Bayesian modelling).
One overarching conclusion we can draw from this multi-dimensional analysis is that each ASD dyad behaved
differently, represented as a unique pattern for each speaker (pair). It is also important to note that patterns
were different for each aspect of conversation analysed, and that at least one ASD dyad differed from behaviour
typical for the control group, in all dimensions.
Ultimately, the analysis at the dyad-level allows us to arrive at some generalisations at the group level with
more confidence. For instance, the clearest between-group difference was found for backchannelling, which
has an important function in structuring discourse and might be conceived of as a prototype of other-oriented
communicative behaviour. The greatest similarity between groups, on the other hand, was found for turn-
timing, which is a more fundamental and domain-general skill.
With these findings, we contribute to the area of research on neurodiverse behaviour in discourse by a) using
data from semi-spontaneous conversational interactions between dyads of autistic adults and b) analysing
these data using a multi-dimensional analysis focussing on speaker and dyad-specific patterns.

—
[1] Dideriksen, C., Fusaroli, R., Tylén, K., Dingemanse, M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Contextualizing
conversational strategies: Backchannel, repair and linguistic alignment in spontaneous and task-oriented
conversations. In CogSci’19 (pp. 261–267).

[2] Wozniak, R. H., Leezenbaum, N. B., Northrup, J. B., West, K. L., & Iverson, J. M. (2017). The development of
autism spectrum disorders: Variability and causal complexity. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Cognitive Science, 8(1-2),
e1426.
[3] Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disabil Soc, 27(6),
883–887.

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Disfluencies and interruptions in everyday conversations


with autistic children

Panel contribution

Mrs. Lisa Vössing 1


1. Bielefeld University

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is associated with pragmatic language impairments, but the impairments may
vary considerably between individuals with ASD (Volden, 2017). Among others, problems in the conversational
management e.g. turn-taking, topic management or repairing a conversational breakdown are reported (Paul,
Landa, & Simmons, 2014; Volden, 2017). Difficulties in those areas may lead to disfluencies and interruptions in
the interactional flow of conversations. Since these phenomena are difficult to assess in structured tests settings,
because they most likely occur spontaneously in everyday interactions, a qualitative methodical approach, e.g.
ethnomethodological conversation analysis, seems to be appropriate to reconstruct and analyse the interaction
in detail. There are already some CA-informed contributions focussing on the autistic children’s conversational
management skills, focussing on performance in responding to questions and turn-taking in general (Kremer-
Sadlik, 2004; Ochs, Kremer-Sadlik, Sirota, & Solomon, 2004; Rendle-Short, 2014).
Subsequently to those contributions, this paper aims to investigate in detail the appearing disfluencies and inter-
ruptions and their causes that occur in the interaction with autistic children. The analysis is based on authentic
conversational interactions of three autistic children in different settings at home and in therapeutic settings,
using a CA-informed approach. Taking into account that autism is a spectrum with various competences con-
cerning the conversational management, the examined autistic children show a heterogeneous profile of com-
petencies and difficulties in the interactions. The similarities and differences are presented and discussed. The
goal of the case study is twofold: (1) to learn more about the various causes of disfluencies and interruptions in
authentic interactions with autistic children and (2) to investigate whether or in which way these phenomena
affect the interaction. The second investigation is especially interesting to the decision of declaring a disfluency
and interruption as atypical (autism specific) or normal.
References:
Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2004). How Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome Respond to Questions: A ‘Natural-
istic’ Theory of Mind Task. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 185–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445604041767
Ochs, E., Kremer-Sadlik, T., Sirota, K. G., & Solomon, O. (2004). Autism and the Social World: An Anthropological
Perspective. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 147–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445604041766
Paul, R., Landa, R., & Simmons, E. (2014). Communication in Asperger Syndrome. In J. C. McPartland, A. Klin, &
F. R. Volkmar (eds.), Asperger Syndrome (Second edition, p. 103–142). New York: The Guilford Press.
Rendle-Short, J. (2014). Using conversational structure as an interactional resource: Children with Asperger’s
syndrome and theire conversational partners. In J. Arciuli, & J. P. Brock (eds.), Communication in Autism (p.
217-244). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.11.10ren
Volden, J. (2017). Autism Spectrum Disorder. In L. Cummings (ed.), Research in Clinical Pragmatics (p. 59–83).
Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_3

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In-the-moment episodes as structuring devices in the


conversation of people with dementia

Panel contribution

Dr. Simon Williams 1


1. University of Sussex

The Carolinas Conversations Collection is one of the few corpora of informal talk featuring people living with
dementia. A manual survey of the collection suggested that participants with the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)
form of the disorder seldom took the first turn in an exchange outside occasional episodes of in-the-moment
talk, which can be defined as talk about the participants’ immediate environment. Examples include an object,
event, or state, or some aspect of the participants themselves. The episodes showed a more equal length of turn
between speakers that enabled topic drift to take place, taking the discourse closer to conversation. To examine
more closely the contribution of in-the-moment talk to the structuring of conversation in a similar population
required a larger collection of examples, and original data was collected in the South of England in July 2022.
Twenty-two participants, 11 people diagnosed with dementia and 11 healthy controls, agreed to take part in
three 15-20-minute conversation meetings with a researcher, usually in their own home, and the conversa-
tions were audio- and video-recorded. An oral survey in the first meeting established possible triggers that
the researcher might use to elicit episodes of in-the-moment talk in the following meetings. Examples were a
favourite possession such as a book or photograph, or a gadget, device, or piece of equipment. It was found that
people with dementia took part in more in-the-moment episodes than did healthy controls and produced more
linguistically assertive talk than elsewhere, evidenced by the inclusion of imperatives, first-person pronouns,
declarative statements, and meta-comments. Their talk was often accompanied by deictic gestures, e.g. while
referring to paintings, ‘It’s all hand-written and that’s from Crawley’; or to a pigeon in the garden, ‘It didn’t want
to go. What’s the matter with it?’. By reducing cognitive load, declarative statements accompanied by gesture in
these exchanges appeared to offer speakers with dementia a means of structuring the interaction by sustaining
more equal pair parts.

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Linguistic correlates of cognitive impairment: findings from a


corpus of pathological speech produced by elderly Italian
subjects with dementia

Panel contribution

Ms. Elena Martinelli 1 , Ms. Vita Garrammone 2 , Ms. Francesca Mori 2 , Ms. Incoronata Nolè 2 , Ms.
Franca Cameriero 2 , Dr. Matilde Martino 2 , Dr. Gaetano Di Bello 2 , Prof. Gloria Gagliardi 1
1. University of Bologna, 2. Universo Salute – Opera Don Uva

The presentation will illustrate the preliminary results of a quantitative/qualitative linguistic comparison be-
tween the speech of Italian speakers affected by dementia and neurotypical peers. The study aims at profiling
the linguistic-communicative features of cognitive impairment in the Italian language.
We enrolled 40 Italian-speaking individuals living in Basilicata (an administrative region in Southern Italy),
forming two groups balanced by sex (24 females, 16 males) and age (Pathological Group age = 81 ± 6.9, range:
63-91; Control Group = 81 ± 6.3, range: 63-92): 20 healthy subjects and 20 subjects affected by different types of
dementia.
We obtained written informed consent for all of them. The research project was approved by the Bioethics
Committee of the University of Bologna (n. 0072032/2022).
After the neuropsychological evaluation, we collected a sample of semi-spontaneous speech by administering
three elicitation tasks. The resulting corpus was manually transcribed at the orthographic level, segmented
into utterances [1], and annotated at the level of the prosodic structure (theoretical framework: L-AcT [2]).
Then, we automatically performed tokenization, lemmatization, post-tagging, and syntactic parsing. Finally, we
extracted the Digital Linguistic Biomarkers (DLBs) – i.e., a rich set (151) of phonetic-acoustic, rhythmic, lexical,
syntactic, and readability indices [3] – and we investigated possible differences within the cohort by applying
parametric/non-parametric inferential statistics in R [4].
The main findings affecting the pragmatics of pathological speech are:

• Fluency: the patients usually produce significantly shorter utterances, consisting of fewer words and
full of empty pauses, phonetic fragments, paraphasias, and false starts. Sudden interruptions of the
speech flow are also more frequent. In particular, the subjects with vascular dementia produced a higher
percentage of disfluencies than individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
• Discourse construction: although pronouns and conjunctions percentages in the cohorts are not signifi-
cantly different, the qualitative analysis of their occurrences enables us to point out pragmatic-discursive
deficits. As a matter of fact, the pronominalization strategies and the coordination/subordination be-
tween sentences reflect typical errors of referential cohesion (e.g., the patients use pronouns without
introducing an antecedent in the text or pointing to a referent in the extra-linguistic context) and lo-
cal/global coherence (e.g., patients often produce coordinated/subordinated sentences formally correct
but tangential to the main topic).

This study supports the trustworthiness of a corpus-based mixed analysis for the identification of atypical
speech peculiarities. The quantitative data (i.e., 84/151 DLBs reaching the statistical significance, p-value <0.05)
mainly reflect degradation at the micro-linguistic level. Moreover, the integration of qualitative observations
helps to understand the mechanisms of interaction management and speech structuring of people suffering
from cognitive decline, highlighting the impairments of macro-linguistic skills (e.g., tangentiality, ideational
derailment, lack of referential cohesion, repetition/argumentative iteration).

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[1] Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do things with words.


[2] Cresti, E. & Moneglia, M. (2018). Chapter 13. The illocutionary basis of Information Structure: The Language
into Act Theory (L-AcT).
[3] Gagliardi, G. & Tamburini, F. (2022), The Automatic Extraction of Linguistic Biomarkers as a Viable Solution
for the Early Diagnosis of Mental Disorders.
[4] R Core Team (2014). R: A language and environment for statistical computing.

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Non-autistic versus autistic children: Why should I say “um” if


I’m not talking to anybody?

Panel contribution

Ms. Cynthia Boo 1 , Dr. Aaron Shield 2 , Dr. Nancy McIntyre 3 , Dr. Ruth Grossman 4 , Dr. Peter Mundy 5 ,
Dr. Letitia Naigles 1 , Dr. Emily Zane 6
1. University of Connecticut, 2. Miami University, 3. University of Central Florida, 4. Emerson College, 5. University of
California - Davis, 6. James Madison University

When speakers use “um,” they may be conveying that they are pausing to plan an utterance (Clark & Fox Tree,
2002), and/or intending to take a turn in the exchange (Fischer, 2000). Research finds autistic individuals use
“um” less often than non-autistic (NonAu) individuals when they answer questions during diagnostic testing
(Gorman et al., 2016), describe how to play a sport (McGregor & Hadden, 2020), and describe pictures (Irvine et
al., 2016). These authors argue that differences in “um” frequency are due to autistic individuals’ general prag-
matic challenges. However, a recent study reported no difference in “um” usage between NonAu and autistic
children during dyadic conversation (Boo et al., 2022). This suggests that differences in “um” use may not occur
in all contexts. The current investigation compares “um” use by NonAu and autistic speakers across datasets
that utilize different discourse elicitation tasks.
Data came from two sites (A and B): At Site A, 15 NonAu (Mage = 13.4, SD = 2.1) and 18 Autistic (Mage = 13.5,
SD = 2.3) children participated in two tasks – first, they completed the Trier Social Stress Test (Kirschbaum et
al., 1993), where they had three-uninterrupted minutes to Narrate a story in front of a panel of judges. Then,
they Conversed with an adult researcher, where they answered questions about their family and hobbies. At
Site B, 22 NonAu children (Mage = 12.5, SD = 2.3) and 21 Autistic children (Mage = 11.6, SD = 2.2) also engaged
in Conversation, but they interacted with virtual avatars that mimicked peers instead of an adult. In all three
language samples, “um” tokens were tallied.
“Um” tokens did not differ between NonAu and Autistic children in Conversational tasks from Sites A or B, ps
> 0.05. At Site A, NonAu children produced more “um” tokens than Autistic children during the Narrative task,
t(38) = -2.097, p = 0.043. Significant cross-task differences also emerged (F(5, 110) = 3.886, p = 0.003, ηp2 = 0.150):
both groups from Site A produced fewer “um” tokens in the Narrative task than children from both sites who
engaged in conversation, ps < 0.05 (Figure 1). No significant differences between the conversational tasks from
Sites A and B emerged.
Findings suggest that “um” use differs depending on the nature of the discourse context (i.e., monologic vs. con-
versational). Interestingly, “um” use was statistically equivalent regardless of whom participants were speaking
to, suggesting that discourse type (dyadic conversation vs. monologic storytelling), and not discourse partner,
most affects “um” usage for both Autistic and NonAu speakers. Further, the fact that Autistic participants use
“um” significantly more often during conversation suggests that they recognize its usefulness as a turn-taking
device. This function of “um” is unnecessary in a context like storytelling, where speakers are asked to talk
for a specified amount of time without interruption. Overall, findings reveal pragmatic strengths for autistic
speakers, including not only their use of “um” in the first place, but also their ability to vary their frequency of
“um” use across contexts.

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On the representation of the other discourse in the


autobiographical narrative of the speaker suffering from
aphasia: atypical characteristics

Panel contribution

Dr. Aleksandra Nowakowska 1


1. Université Montpellier 3, UMR 5267 Praxiling

This research, which is part of discourse analysis, proposes to explore some aspects of represented discourse
(Authier-Revuz 2020), in the autobiographical narrative of the aphasic speaker. The research is based on a
corpus composed of audio-visual recordings of 37 speakers suffering from fluent or non-fluent aphasia at the
chronic stage. The data collection was carried out via the zoom platform, within the framework of the Aphasia
and Analysis of Interaction Discourse project, in order to constitute a database in French. These recordings
are made according to a collection protocol (Sharaoui, Martinez, Nowakowska 2021) involving several tasks
(question-guided interview, image description, reading aloud, storytelling and conversational dyad). Our main
interest in this paper will be the study of the semi-directive interview in which the aphasic speaker tells, among
other things, the story of the occurrence of the aphasia, its recovery and a significant event in his life. These
autobiographical narratives are characterised in particular by a significant presence of represented discourse,
the forms and functioning of which present atypical characteristics, for example:
(1) The aphasic speaker (global non-fluent aphasia) tells the story of the stroke. The speech represented in the
direct style is used when he reports the moment he is in the hospital after leaving intensive care:
alors je me suis dit hof@i ça va prendre un mois puis je pourrai Rate [: retourner] travailler [=! rire] !
so I thought hof@i it’s going to take a month and then I can Rate [: go back] to work [=! laugh]!
The speech represented in direct style can be identified by its formal characteristics: the presence of the intro-
ductory verb followed by the fragment which keeps its own deictic and modal system, which corresponds to
typical DD marks. On the other hand, what poses a question for the analysis is, on the one hand, the presence
in DD of elements related to the expression of emotional attitudes, which constitute the interjection and the
laughter, and, on the other hand, the production of the error Rate [go back] non corrected by the speaker. How
to deal with these elements from the enunciative point of view? Are they elements of represented discourse or
of representing discourse? Is the laughter part of the represented discourse? Indeed, sometimes the speaker
express, mimes or gestures several times the non-verbal attitudes that accompanied the production of the RD at
the moment t0 of its production, especially when it is his own speech, and sometimes he evaluates it in this way
a posteriori, at the moment t1 when he reports the event during which the represented statement was produced.
In the same way, how can we deal with the error from the enunciative point of view in this case?
We will first look at the identification and classification of different forms of represented discourse, and then
at their dialogical functioning (Bakhtin 1978 and 1984, Goodwin 2007, Du Bois 2014, Bres 2021). This study will
finally lead us to address the expression of emotional attitudes accompanying the represented discourse.

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Prosody, gesture and disfluency in teenagers with Autism


Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Panel contribution

Ms. Cwiosna Roques 1 , Prof. Christelle Dodane 1 , Dr. Ludivine Crible 2


1. Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3, 2. Ghent University

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by a range of impairments in


communication and social interaction. The present paper focuses on three dimensions of possible atypical lan-
guage use in autism: prosody, gesture and disfluencies. Taken separately, prosody, gesture and disfluency have
received some attention in the literature on ASD. With regard to prosody, researchers have noted abnormali-
ties in rhythm, accentuation, pitch, intensity and rate of speech. Turning to gesture, ASD can be accompanied
by deficits in non-verbal communication behaviors, such as eye contact and body language deficits or deficits
in the understanding and use of gestures. Lastly, the production of disfluencies seems to differ in typical and
atypical speech.
Against this background, the present study integrates annotations of disfluencies, prosody and gestures in order
to identify potential specificities of pragmatic language use in ASD. In particular, individuals with ASD (Silver-
man et al., 2017) produce the same co-gesture’s types than their neurotypical peers, but in a lesser extent and
these gestures are more difficult to understand, which has significant implications for their communicative abil-
ities. While prosody, co-speech gesture and disfluencies typically perform pragmatic functions related to speech
planning and expressivity, their use, mapping and features remain largely unknown in the study of autism. Ad-
dressing this gap is essential since these devices have a significant impact on the linguistic and discursive levels,
but also on the transmission of attitudes and affects.
To do so, we annotated prosody, gestures and disfluencies in 5 French-speaking children aged 12-17yo video-
recorded during the autism diagnostic observation program (Baghdadli et al., 2020) and 5 peers with typical
development, using PRAAT and ELAN. Our sample includes data from a narrative and a conversational task, in
order to investigate the range of discourse functions that are expressed by disfluencies. Prosody was annotated
for a number of parameters to observe whether deviations frequently reported in ASD do occur in our data.
Lastly, manual gestures were classified as representational or non-representational (Kita & Özyürek, 2003), to
test whether co-speech gestures differ across speaker groups. Disfluencies were identified using the ANODIS
procedure developed for typical and atypical speech (Crible et al. 2022). We will present our main findings and
emphasize some examples of ASD compared to neuro-typical peers.
References
Baghdadli A., Julie Loubersac, Cécile Michelon, Cécile Rattaz, Eric Pernon, Sabine Traver, Marion Mortamais,
Stéphanie Miot, Marie-Christine Picot, et le consortium Elena (2020) Cohorte Elena : étude transdisciplinaire
des déterminants des troubles du spectre de l’autisme.
Crible, L., Didirkova, I., Dodane, C. & Kosmala, L. (2022). Towards an inclusive system for the annotation of
(dis)fluency in typical and atypical speech. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 1-18.
Kita, S. & Özyürek, A. (2003). What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and ges-
ture reveal? Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal Memory and
Language, 48(1), 16-32.
Silverman, L.B.n Eigsti, I.-M. & Bennetto, L. (2017). I tawt i taw a puddy tat: Gestures in canary row narrations
by high-functioning youth with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 10, 1353-1363.

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Relationships between speech and gesture in the production


of disfluencies in stuttering and non-stuttering adult French
speakers

Panel contribution

Prof. Christelle Dodane 1 , Dr. Loulou Kosmala 2 , Dr. Ivana Didirková 3


1. Laboratoire CLESTHIA (EA 7345) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2. Laboratoire PRISMES EA 4398 / EA 370 GReMLIN,
Université Paris Nanterre, 3. Laboratoire TransCrit UR 1569, Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis

Stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) differ from other disfluencies (OD) in the way articulatory gestures are pro-
duced (Didirková et al., 2020). Such motor disturbances are not limited to speech, stuttering can also be accom-
panied by involuntary and abnormal hand gestures (Riva-Pose et al., 2008). This is not surprising, given that
speech and gestures are closely related and form an integrated communication system in language production.
Previous research has shown that people who stutter (PWS) are unable to initiate a representational gesture
simultaneously with a SLD, resulting in a breaking off, suspension, or a complete interruption of their ongoing
manual gestures (Mayberry & Jaques, 2000). From different sensors, the speed of the different gestures was also
calculated in cm/sec.
In order to study the relationships between gesture and disfluency, we recorded two speakers, a fluent speaker
and a PWS during a cartoon narration task with a platform developed in the previous project. Movements of
both hands, face, and tongue were recorded with an electromagnetic articulograph. The SLDs and ODs were
then annotated (Crible et al. 2022) and the manual gestures, segmented according to their different phases
and classified as representational (deictics, iconics or metaphorics) or non-representational, illustrating the
structuring of the discourse (Kita & Özyürek, 2003).
Our preliminary results show that the fluent speaker produced 48 OD disfluencies, while the stuttering speaker
produced 77 TSDs and 12 ODs. During the ODs, both speakers produced exclusively representational gestures,
whereas during the TSDs, the stuttering speaker produced more atypical, non-representational gestures (>
40%). This could be explained in part by the presence of initiating and releasing movements (Riva-Pose et al.,
2008). Quantitative analyses show, for both speakers, that manual gestures are faster during fluent speech, but
slower during disfluencies, although this deceleration is not as marked for TSDs than for ODs. This difference
could be explained by a qualitative difference in gestures observed during ODs and TSDs: the stuttering
speaker produces mainly releasing movements, which could possibly make her hand move faster. Our goal is
now to extend this procedure to a larger number of speakers , in order to better investigate how articulatory
and manual gestures are integrated and coordinated with speech production.

References
Crible, L., Didirkova, I., Dodane, C., Kosmala, L. (2022). Towards an inclusive system for the annotation of
(dis)fluency in typical and atypical speech. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 1-18.

Didirkova, I., Le Maguer, S., Hirsch, F., An articulatory study of differences and similarities between stuttered
disfluencies and non-pathological disfluencies. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2020.

Kita, S. & Özyürek, A. (2003). What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and
gesture reveal?: Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal Memory
and Language, 48(1), 16-32.

Mayberry, R., Jacques, J., Gesture production during stuttered speech: Insights into the nature of gesture-speech

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

integration. In D. McNeill, Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 199-214.
Riva-Pose, P., Busto-Marolt, L., Schteinschnaider, A., Martinez-Echenique, L., Cammarota, A., Merello, M., Phe-
nomenology of abnormal movements in stuttering. Parkinsonien and Related Disorders, 2008, 14, 415-419.

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The role of discourse markers, backchannels and pauses on


discourse structure in Augmentative and Alternative
Communication (AAC)

Panel contribution

Dr. Iris Hübscher 1 , Prof. Christiane Hohenstein 1 , Dr. Martina Spiess 1 , Prof. Brigitte Gantschnig 1
1. Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Discourse markers and backchannels play an important role in connecting parts of as well as contributing to
fluency in discourses (e.g. Fraser, 1996). While research on discourse markers on the verbal level in “typical”
language use is abundant (e.g. Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen, 2006; Fischer, 2006), little is still known about
the manifestation of discourse markers and backchannels in Augmentative and Alternative Communication
(AAC) (see Friginal et al., 2013 for an exception). AAC discourses are “atypical” in that they are characterised
by AAC users’ pauses for utterance production and overlaps with interlocutors’ turns using spoken language.
To our knowledge, no multimodal approach has been taken so far to analyse the discourse of persons who
communicate using AAC. To fill this gap, we address the question of how discourse markers, backchannels and
pauses are employed multimodally in AAC.
The data stem from six interviews with persons belonging to AAC groups 3 and 4 (cf. Weid-Goldschmidt, 2013)
who communicate through speech-generating devices. Despite representing a close range in terms of AAC users,
their communication shows a wide range of diversity and complexity. The interviews were carried out as part of
an interdisciplinary project investigating the challenges experienced by AAC users during the transitions after
compulsory school, entering higher education, a workplace, or an adult institution (Kollmar et al., 2018). Each
interview lasted approximately two hours and was transcribed orthographically first. In each interview, key
passages were selected where pragmatic stance-taking or discourse interventions on the part of the AAC users
took place. These then underwent a detailed multimodal transcription in EXMARaLDA.
Preliminary analyses of the data show that a wide variety of multimodal features characterize AAC discourse
such as body movements, hand and head gestures, facial expressions, gaze, PORTA signs and conventional-
ized signs, vocalization and speech-generating devices being used alternately and sometimes simultaneously
by AAC users to structure their discourse. Taking a close look at the structure of the discourse from a “typical”
speaker’s normalized perspective on discourse, lengthened pauses can be perceived as atypical or fragment-
ing the discourse in AAC communication. For AAC users, characteristic features like pauses are essential for
structuring their AAC discourse. Furthermore, with regard to the occurrence of discourse markers and par-
ticularly backchannels, it can be noted that there are several commonly used forms displayed to participate
in the discourse, such as offering a turn to another person, the use of affirmation and negation signals and
connectors which, depending on the circumstances, will be expressed through one or a combination of the
above-mentioned multimodal features.
References:
Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A. M. (2006). Pragmatic Markers in Contrast. Elsevier.
Fischer, K. (2006). Approaches to Discourse Particles. Elsevier.
Fraser, B. (1996). Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Associ-
ation (IPrA), 167–190. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.6.2.03fra
Friginal, E., Pearson, P., Di Ferrante, L., Pickering, L., & Bruce, C. (2013). Linguistic characteristics of AAC dis-
course in the workplace. Discourse Studies, 15(3), 279–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445613480586
Weid-Goldschmidt, B. (2013). Zielgruppen Unterstützer Kommunikation. Looeper Verlag.

319
Discourse-pragmatic
markers of Chinese origin
in East Asian languages
(organized by Seongha
Rhee, Reijirou Shibasaki,
Wenjiang Yang)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Change of the world: With respect to seysang in Korean

Panel contribution

Prof. Hyun Sook Lee 1


1. Jangan University

The Korean lexeme seysang (世上) ‘the world’ is of Chinese origin. A historical survey shows that the first appear-
ance of seysang is attested in the 15th century, meaning ‘the world people live in.’ The meaning of the lexeme
has gone through a chain of semantic changes involving subjectification. In spite of the intriguing nature of the
changes, the lexeme has not drawn much attention to date, and this study intends to fill this gap, on the basis of
the data taken from historical and contemporary corpora.
When seysang appeared in Korean in the 15th century, it occurred in an argument position as a full-fledged noun,
marked with the possessive and locative cases as well as topic markers, and later with the accusative cases in
the 16th century. Its semantic function was predominantly to denote ‘the world people live in’, as shown in (1):
(1) 世上앳 길히 비록 해 어즈러우나

seysang-ays kil-hi pilok hay eculewu-na


the world-GEN path-NOM nevertheless very chaotic-CONN
내의 사롬도 �� �� 잇 니라
nay-uy salom-to stohan kAzi isnAnila
I-Gen living-also also end-NOM exit-DEC
‘Although the way of the world is very chaotic, my life also has an end.’
(1481 Twusienhay 10:3)
In the example (1), the word seysang as a noun is employed with a genitive marker and modifies the noun kil
‘way.’ It denotes ‘the world we live in,’ which is the primary meaning of seysang.
The meaning of seysang is extended to the following senses: the period of the time from birth to death; the time
or the place individuals or groups can be active; the outside society seen out of closed communities such as
temples, monasteries, or prisons; the hearts of people (in the world); and the earth contrasted to heaven. The
lexeme seysang is also used adverbially to mean ‘beyond compare’ as well as to emphatically denote a negative
meaning ‘not in the least’. When the Sino Korean seysang ‘the world’ is used with the locative particle -ey, the
literal meaning of the combination denotes ‘in the world.’ In Modern Korean, the combination seysangey has
developed into a discourse marker (DM).
(2) A: (in a calm voice) … I was fired!
B: what?!
A: I said I got fired. The manager said to me that I’d better work as a sale
representative or canvasser than an office worker. The ones that are needed to run
around outside a lot…
B: seysangey…
DM
‘Oh my gosh…’
(2000 A Higher Animal)
In the example (2), seysangey signals the speaker’s stance, mostly carrying a feeling of unexpectedness. As a
DM, seysangey is independent of the sentence where it occurs. The noticeable characteristic of DMs is freedom
of position, among others. The development of the functions of seysang and its relative seysangey is an instance
of subjectification and intersubjectification. In addition, a distributional analysis of seysangey does not support
the hypothesis that LP and RP usage is related to subjective and intersubjective, respectively.

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Development of the Vietnamese discourse marker ‘thật’/’thật


là’ from the 17th century to the present

Panel contribution

Dr. Mayumi Adachi 1


1. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

This study explores the diachronic development of the Vietnamese discourse marker thật or thật là, which is
mainly based on the documents written in the 17th century. Compared with its contemporary usages, thật origi-
nated from a Sino-Vietnamese lexeme meaning ‘fruit.’ It obtained equivalents in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
as well as a meaning modification to ‘truth, reality, and fact’ (Rhee et al. 2021). Currently, thật has various us-
ages as different parts of speech in both spoken and written contexts: (1) an adjective (noun+thật) ‘real’ (e.g., tên
thật, meaning ‘real name’), (2) an adverb (thật+adjective) ‘really’ (e.g., thật ngon, meaning ‘really tasty’), (3) an
utterance-final particle ‘indeed’ (e.g., nên làm thế thật, meaning ‘should do so indeed’), and (4) a discourse marker
in the utterance-initial position. In usage (4), which is often followed by copula là, thật expresses the speaker’s
attitude toward the situation described in the preceding or following contexts (e.g., thật là không may, meaning
‘unfortunately’) rather than objective facts. However, in Cathechismvs in octo dies diuisus (Catechisms in eight
days), the first romanized Vietnamese prose written by Alexandre de Rhodes, a French missionary in 1651, thật
was used in most parts of the prose as (1) an adjective (e.g., Chùa thật meaning ‘the true load’) and (4) a discourse
marker (e.g., thật là…, meaning ‘the truth is…/without a doubt (the demon is in hell)’) to preach “religious truth”
to Vietnamese at that time. These findings propose that a discourse marker thật or thật là experienced (in-
ter)subjectification from obvious facts to the speaker’s affective or evaluative stance in the grammaticalization
process thereafter.

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From a unit of time on a temporal axis to a discourse marker


on a contextual–spatial axis: The case of shunkan ‘(at the)
moment’

Panel contribution

Prof. Reijirou Shibasaki 1 , Ms. Keiko Takahashi 2


1. Meiji University/University of British Columbia, 2. Toyo University

This study investigates the historical development of the Sino-Japanese (SJ, hereafter) lexeme shunkan 瞬間 from
a clause-internal adverbial to a clause-external discourse marker (DM, hereafter) in Japanese, from the perspec-
tive of grammaticalization. SJ lexemes have usually been used in formal registers such as Buddhism, Confucian
notions, politics, legislation and administration, not constituting everyday spoken language. Given that studies
on DMs have been based on spoken-oriented discourse materials, typically in conversation and historically in
drama scripts (e.g., Hansen 1998; Waltereit 2011), we can propose that the written-oriented grammaticalization
seen in East Asian languages is different in essence from any spoken-contact-based grammaticalization reported
in many preceding studies. The data used for this survey are retrieved from a variety of corpora.
The temporal noun shunkan, which was first witnessed in the first half of the nineteenth century, appears to
have been adverbial-oriented from the very beginning, accompanied by the adverbializer -ni of Japanese origin,
i.e., shunkan-ni 瞬間に ‘at the moment.’ In the early twentieth century, the demonstrative-prefaced example of
sono shunkan(-ni) ‘(at) that moment’ was found, presumably to clarify both anaphoric and cataphoric relations
in a stretch of discourse. Finally, such morphosyntactic clues became eroded, creating a stand-alone DM, as in
(1).
(1) Kare-wa… hito-no-kage-o mitome-ta.
he-TOP people-GEN-shade-ACC admit-PST
Shunkan, inu-no-youni sono-sugata-no-hou-e hasshit-ta.
moment dog-GEN-like that-figure-GEN-direction-to run-PST
‘He saw a human figure. Instantly, (he) ran up to that figure like a dog.’
(1925 Hechima no Tsukemono: Taiyo)
The reason why shunkan was adverbial-oriented from the start can be explained as follows. Shunkan can be
considered to have developed through the influence of the pre-existing setsuna 刹那, a Buddhist term that has a
strong association with the Sanskrit lexeme kṣaṇa, the smallest unit of time in Buddhism, i.e., 10-18 . The use of set-
suna, albeit nominal-oriented, could form part of an adverbial phrase such as setsuna-no-uchi-ni-oite [moment-
GEN-inside-in-put] ‘in a flash’ (lit. ‘in the smallest amount of time’). Further, due to the emergence of another
adverbial expression of nominal origin, totan(-ni) 途端に ‘(at the) moment’ in the late nineteenth century, we
may be able to hypothesize that these three lexemes could form a word group that enabled such written-oriented
lexemes to move in step with each other to become DMs over the twentieth century.
Abbreviations
acc=accusative; gen=genitive; pst=past tense; top=topic
References
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. (1998) The Function of Discourse Particles: A Study with Special Reference to Spo-
ken Standard French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Waltereit, Richard. (2011) Grammaticalization and discourse. In: Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (eds.), The
Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 413–423. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Corpus mentioned
Taiyo=Taiyō Corpus (CD-ROM) 1901. 2005. Tokyo: Hakubunkan Shinsha.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

From objective to subjective and to intersubjective functions:


The case of the Thai jing

Panel contribution

Ms. Kultida Khammee 1


1. University of Phayao

Thai and Chinese belong to different language families, i.e., Sino-Tibetan and Kra-Dai (Tai-Kadai), respectively.
Despite the fact that the two languages are not genealogically connected, they share a number of typological
features as a result of geographic propinquity and the Chinese cultural-intellectual leadership in the area in
historical times. Thai still retains many words borrowed from Middle Chinese (Haarmann 2012[1986]: 165,
Suthiwan and Tadmor 2009: 601, Rhee 2021: 435-436, among others). Thai ching ‘true/real’ is a borrowing from
Middle Chinese cin ‘true, real, sincere; (Suthiwan and Tadmor 2009: 613), and a few words and expressions
derived from it developed into discourse markers (DMs).
The Thai ching as a lexical word denotes ‘true, real, genuine’ (objective meaning), but it also has the adverbial
function marking ‘surely, certainly, definitely’, i.e., an intensifier (subjective meaning), a natural development
considering its lexical meaning. In the discourse domain the lexeme acquired a number of interactional func-
tions (intersubjective meaning). The ‘truth’-related DMs in Thai include ching itself and a number of the DMs
derived from ching through various morphosyntactic operation, e.g., tai ching (< lit. ‘real death’), ching pa (< lit.
‘real-Q’), ching ching (lit. ‘real-real’), mai ching (< ‘not real’). Due to the lack of historical data, the chronology of
the development of ‘truth’-DMs cannot be established, but the interaction between the lexical source meaning
and the pragmatic inferences from the context is evident. The DMs ching ‘really’ and its negative counterpart
mai ching ‘not really’ are among the common response tokens for agreement (‘yes’) and disagreement (‘no’). The
DM tai ching (from ‘real death’) carries the function of marking surprise (“Oh dear!”) or sudden remembrance
(“Oh, I almost forgot”), which often prefaces an action disrupting the interaction or turns the discourse to a
different direction. The DM ching pa, which involves a phonologically eroded question marker (thus ‘Really?’),
marks disbelief, typically with negative connotation but occasionally positively as well. The reduplicative DM
ching ching carries the function of prefacing disalignment, thus often challenging the veracity of the previous
speaker’s claim or statement. Another notable function of the same DM ching ching is to reinstate the crux of the
state of affairs, disregarding all peripheral issues, either presented or imagined, thus paraphrasable as “putting
aside all other issues.”
A comparative analysis of the DMs in other Asian languages such as Korean and Chinese involving the same
etymon reveals many similarities, supposedly due to the lexical source semantics and common cognitive oper-
ations, and subtle differences, supposedly due to the minor variation of such cognitive operations.
References
Haarmann, Harald. 2012[1986]. Language in Ethnicity: A View of Basic Ecological Relations. Berlin: Mouton.
Rhee, Seongha. 2021. Linguistic Forms at the Border of Lexis and Grammar: Grammaticalization of Adpositions
across Languages. Seoul: Global Contents.
Suthiwan, Titima and Uri Tadmor. 2009. Loanwords in Thai. In: Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmore (eds.),
Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, 599-616. Berlin: Mouton.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

From temporal adverbials to discourse structuring markers:


The development of Chinese yuanlai and its Japanese cognate
ganrai

Panel contribution

Prof. Wenjiang Yang 1


1. University of Macau

This presentation demonstrates how Chinese yuanlai and Japanese ganrai evolved from temporal adverbials to
discourse structuring markers (DSM) through investigations of historical corpora in both languages. Japanese
ganrai is a loanword originating in Chinese yuanlai. Both yuanlai and ganrai consist of a morpheme meaning
‘origin’ (Chinese yuan and Japanese gan) and a morpheme meaning ‘since’ (Chinese lai and Japanese rai), and
thus literally mean ‘since the beginning’. From their first occurrences in historical documents till today, yuanlai
and ganrai have retained the nominal meaning of ‘beginning’ or ‘previous situation’, but more often than not,
they are used as adverbials with the meaning of ‘previously’.
As temporal adverbials, Chinese yuanlai and Japanese ganrai are often used in contrastive contexts where a
situation in the past signaled by yuanlai or ganrai is compared with the present one. This use paves the way
for yuanlai and ganrai to evolve into DSMs, whose major functions are to guide listeners’ or readers’ attention
towards the background or explanatory information for the preceding discourse, and consequently to highlight
discourse coherence. Together with the rise of the new functions, their syntactic positions shift from typically
occurring clause-medially to predominantly occurring clause-initially.
Notwithstanding the commonalities in their developmental paths, they apparently differ in the following ways.
First, Chinese yuanlai is frequently used in colloquial style, whereas Japanese ganrai bears the sense of formal-
ity and is mainly found in written texts. Second, their textual functions have subtle differences. Chinese yuan-
lai exhibits a strong causal relationship between yuanlai-prefaced clause and the preceding clause(s), roughly
translatable as ‘this is because’ or ‘it turns out that’. Japanese ganrai tends to merely provide supplementary
information as to the preceding discourse, synonymous with English ‘in fact’ or ‘actually’. Third, relevant with
the above properties of colloquiality and causality, Chinese yuanlai has acquired an attitudinal function (“mi-
rative” in Tsai and Yang 2022; “counter-expectation trigger” in Zhao and Bai 2022). It is used to indicate that the
speaker has just found out the true status of the situation s/he has been curious about, usually with overtones
of unexpectedness.
References
Tsai, Wei-Tien Dylan, and Ching-Yu Helen Yang. 2022. On the syntax of mirativity: Evidence from Mandarin
Chinese. In Andrew Simpson (ed.), New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in Honor of Yen-Hui
Audrey Li, 431-44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zhao, Yu, and Xuefei Bai. 2022. Yuanlai de fanyuqi xingshi jiqi xiangguan wenti [The counter-expectation nature
of yuanlai and related issues]. Yuyan Yanjiu Jikan [Bulletin of Linguistic Studies] (1): 53-67.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

From truth to truly: the case of shin-ni ‘truly’ in Japanese

Panel contribution

Dr. Yuko Higashiizumi 1 , Prof. Reijirou Shibasaki 2


1. Toyo University, 2. Meiji University/University of British Columbia

This study traces the development of the adverb shin-ni ‘truly’, the hybrid form consisting of the Sino-Japanese
noun shin 真 ‘truth’ and the adverbializer -ni of Japanese origin, in the history of Japanese, drawing on various
historical and contemporary corpora. It has previously been observed that some words with the meaning “true
(‘true’, ‘real’)” have developed into “intensive” in Chinese, English, French, Hungarian, etc. (Kuteva et al. 2019:
443). This paper presents a case study of the word with the Chinese etymon 真/眞 in Japanese to contribute to
a discussion of whether or not words that share the same Chinese etymon are grammaticalized into discourse-
pragmatic markers similarly across some Asian languages.
The lexeme shin-ni is listed as an adverb or a phrasal adverb in contemporary Japanese dictionaries. The word
shin was found in Buddhist-related documents from the seventh century in Japan, denoting ‘truth, sincerity, non-
falsehood’ in the Buddhist sense. It began to be attested as a noun marked by the genitive -no or the accusative
-o in non-Buddhist documents from the thirteenth century onwards. Its adverbial form shin-ni began to be used
as an evaluative intensive adverb ‘truly’, modifying an adjective or a predicate (e.g., ‘truly sorrowful’, ‘be truly
in love’), in colloquial written Japanese from the late eighteenth century. However, the use of shin-ni is more
or less limited to formal registers in contemporary Japanese. Although infrequent, we can find an example of
shin-ni that serves to intensify the illocutionary force of the utterance. In other words, it expresses the speaker’s
subjective attitude or evaluation toward the speech act being conducted. For example, shin-ni in (1) can be seen
as intensifying the speech act of apologizing.
(1) anata-no-o.kokoro-o kujiku-yoo-de shin-ni mooshiwakenai-no-desu-ga,
you-GEN-RES.heart-ACC discourage-way-COP truly sorry-NML-COP.POL-but

… go.rooshi-no-kanbyoo-o onegai-deki-nai-deshoo-ka?
RES.old.master-GEN-care-ACC ask-can-not-COP.CONJ-QP
‘I am truly sorry to discourage you, but…could you please take care of your old master?’ (BCCWJ: PB29_00269,
23790, 2002)
The extension from the noun shin ‘truth’ to the intensive adverb shin-ni ‘truly’ in Japanese is in line with the
development from “true” to “intensive”. On the other hand, while it is reported that ‘truth’-related words with
the same etymon 真/眞 in Chinese, Korean, and Thai have extended from ‘truth’ to ‘truly’ and have further
developed a number of interactional functions as discourse-pragmatic markers, shin-ni does not carry a clear
discourse-pragmatic function. Thus, it appears that the extension of the etymon 真/眞 from ‘truth’ to ‘truly’ is one
of the commonalities among these four Asian languages, whereas the interactional functions of each discourse-
pragmatic marker may exhibit differences.
Abbreviations
ACC=accusative; CONJ=conjectural; COP=copula; GEN=genitive; NML=nominalizer; POL=polite; QP=question
particle; RES=respective
Reference
Kuteva, Tania, et al. (2019) World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Corpus mentioned
The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ)

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

327
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Textual-to-epistemicity or else? The case of Chinese shenzhi


(yu)and Korean sim-ci-e

Panel contribution

Prof. Haiping Long 1


1. Sun Yat-sen University

Chinese shenzhi (yu) ‘so much as to, even’ and Korean sim-ci-e ‘so much as to, even’ may be used between two
correlative clauses or in the medial position (i.e., the position between the subject and the predicate) of the
second clause.
(1) Tā pàng duō le, shènzhì yǒude rén/ yǒude rén shènzhì dōu shuō tā biàn yàng le.
‘He has become much bigger. Even some people/Some people even say that his appearance has changed because
of that.’
(2) Ku-nun ton-to ilh-ko cikep-to ilh-ess-e. Simcie ayin-to/Ayin-to simcie ttena-ss-e.
he-topic money-also lose-and job-also lose-past-end even girlfriend-also/girlfriend-also even leave-past-end
He lost money and a job. Even his girlfriend/ His girlfriend even also left him.’
Liu (2012) sees a shenzhi (yu) that appears between two correlative clauses as a discourse structuring marker
(shortened as a DSM), and a clause-medial shenzhi (yu) as an epistemic adverbial (shortened as an EA). The
author argues that the former appeared earlier than the latter in historical Chinese. Similarly, Traugott (2022)
also argues that a DSM after all that is used between two clauses appeared earlier than an EA after all that is
used in a clause-medial position in historical English. Diachronic changes of Chinese shenzhi (yu) and English
after all seem to hint a hypothetical pathway leading from a DSM to an EA.
We don’t support this hypothetical pathway because our diachronic investigations of Chinese shenzhi (yu), Ko-
rean sim-ci-e, and English after all reveal that these constructions had epistemic meanings when they appeared
between two correlative clauses, and retained discourse structuring functions when they appeared in the me-
dial position of a clause. In other words, diachronic changes of these constructions don’t support a hypothetical
pathway leading either from a DSM to an EA, or from an EA to a DSM.
From the perspective of discourse grammar, we argue that there is a group of constructions (e.g., manner adver-
bials, prepositional phrases, clauses) that indicate epistemicity, and at the same time serve to link clauses. These
constructions may exhibit features of both a DSM and an EA. They may follow the hypothetical initial-to-medial
pathway argued by Long et al. (2022), and move to the medial position of one of the clauses that it links.
References:
Liu, Hongni. 2012. Shènzhì de cíhuìhuà yǔ duōzhǒng gōngnéng de xíngchéng [Lexicalization and formation of
multiple functions of shenzhi]. Dāngdài Yǔyánxué [Contemporary Linguistics] 14(3): 246–259.
Long, Haiping, Francesco Ursini, Bernd Heine, and Yaohua Luo. 2022. Grammatical changes of Modern Chinese
sentence adverbial guoran ‘it really happens’: A hypothesized external-to-medial pathway. Australian Journal
of Linguistics 42(3): 1–25.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2022. Discourse Structuring Markers in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

328
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The way of truth: The case of the Korean DM cincca in


comparison with Chinese DMs zhenshi and zhende

Panel contribution

Prof. Seongha Rhee 1 , Ms. Lin Zhang 2


1. Mahidol University & HUFS, 2. Seoul National University

Despite its recency in development, the Korean discourse marker (DM) cincca presents an interesting grammati-
calization scenario. It is a hybrid form consisting of the Sino-Korean morpheme cin ‘truth’ and the native Korean
nominalizer cca ‘thing, person’, thus denoting ‘a true thing’. It is a noun phrase in form but from the early days
of its appearance, it carried an adjectival function of adding genuineness or excellence in quality to a modified
noun (e.g., ‘a true story’, ‘a genuine treasure’) or an adverbial function of adding emphasis to an adjective or
a predicate (e.g., ‘truly fortunate’, ‘truly painful’). From the emphatic adverbial function there arose diverse
DM functions through the interaction of the source meaning of truthfulness and diverse inferences from the
discourse contexts.
Among the primary, and presumably first, function is the emphatic function, paraphrasable as “I am serious,”
modifying a proposition. The DM further acquired the emotive function of marking frustration or annoyance
(“I am annoyed/frustrated”), often occurring stand-alone often accompanying ellipsis before or after it. Closely
related to the function is that of marking challenge (“I am challenging you”), also often occurring in elliptical
contexts. Unlike these negative functions, the DM also acquired a neutral or positive function as an interjection
marking surprise (“I am surprised”), i.e., the surprise involved may be of negative, neutral, or positive nature.
The DM carrying the interjective function also tends to occur in elliptical structures, often involving elongated
trailing of the last syllable. The ellipsis strongly suggests that the speaker is emotionally overwhelmed and is
unable to complete the utterance. When the ‘truth’ meaning became significantly bleached, the DM acquired
the filler function, not with any notable semantic content, only paraphrasable as “I am speechless” or “What can
I say?”. Still another function is to mark sudden remembrance (“Oh, I almost forgot” “Oh, that reminds me”),
often serving the function of prefacing a statement that was nearly forgotten. All these functions are observable
in present-day Korean.
When it is compared with the Chinese DMs involving the same etymon zhen, i.e., zhenshi and zhende, some in-
teresting aspects emerge. The Chinese zhenshi ‘really’ denotes truthfulness of a descriptor, either a choice of
expression or the content of a statement. As a DM, zhenshi or its reinforced form zhenshide signals the speaker’s
disgust or discontent (“I am unhappy/frustrated”). Similarly, the Chinese zhende ‘truth, fact, really’ also func-
tions as a DM, signaling diverse speaker’s attitudes or assessments toward the statement being presented, e.g.,
surprise, emphasis, preface to disalignment, etc. Unlike the negatively-biased zhenshi, zhende is used in various
value-neutral contexts.
Drawing upon historical and contemporary corpus data, this presentation describes the functions of the Korean
and Chinese DMs originating from an identical etymon from a comparative perspective. Their developments
and current usages exhibit much commonalities and subtle differences at the same time.

329
Discourses of identity:
Placing self in the public
sphere (organized by
Elena Raymond, Jenny
Cook-Gumperz)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Registers of gender conscious person references in German

Panel contribution

Prof. Helga Kotthoff 1


1. University of Freiburg

For more than 40 years, a debate on gender-related person references has been taking place in the German-
speaking world. I am going to discuss four styles of gender conscious person reference as “registers” in the
sense of anthropological linguistics (Agha 2003). This concept of registers implies that the producers are lo-
cated in a socio-symbolic cosmos and can be perceived with cultural evaluations (in production and reception,
for example, as conservative, progressive, feminist, queer, Kotthoff 2020). In my paper I shall explore their
(socio)linguistic underpinnings within conceptions of language ideology (Woolard 1998) in order to grasp the
communication-reflexive charges of this discourse.
The traditional writing practice with a generically intended masculine (type 1), as favoured, for example, by
Eisenberg (2017), argues within structural linguistics for a general capacity of the basic masculine gender to
refer to all persons. Psycholinguistic and cognitive-psychological experiments repeatedly show with very short
texts that women are more likely to be mentally included if the syntactic-semantic structure contains an explicit
reference to women in addition to men or using internal majuscules within a morphologically feminine form to
refer to both sexes (“FahrerInnen”) (Rothmund/Scheele 2004). Neutral forms are also proposed here which use
a participle (“Fahrende“) (type 2). In partial contrast to type 1 and also to some strategies of feminist-inspired
language reform (type 2), representatives of a queer view (type 3) argue that reference to men and women
(i.g. „Fahrer und Fahrerin“) or using internal majuscules (”FahrerInnen“) strengthen the dichotomy of gender
classification instead of creating gender diversity. New signs are integrated at morpheme boundaries, especially
the underscore and the asterisk (also called ”gender star“) (e.g. „Lehrer_innen, Verkäufer*innen“, recently also
a colon at the morpheme boundary „Fahrer:innen”)
According to Hornscheidt (2012) and many guide lines, which are constantly published by universities or cities
or firms these graphemes are mainly intended to invite cognitive representations of persons with non-binary
gender identities (but there are also many vague justifications in the direction of sexual identity). In addition, in
some media (e.g. radio stations, magazines and some daily newspapers) and also in the social sciences, styles of
“flexible gendering” (type 4) have emerged, which often work with neutral forms and only selective mentioning
of all genders. In my paper I try to discuss the linguistic ideologies which underpin these registers.
Agha, Asif (2003): The social life of a cultural value. Language and communication, 23, 231-73.
Eisenberg, Peter (2017): Das missbrauchte Geschlecht. Süddeutsche Zeitung 2.3. 2017.
Hornscheidt, Lann (2012): Feministische w_orte. Frankfurt: Brandes&Apsel.
Kotthoff, Helga (2020): Gender-Sternchen, Binnen-I oder generisches Maskulinum, … (Akademische) Textstile
der Personenreferenz als Registrierungen? Linguistik Online, 103(3), 105–127.
Rothmund, Jutta und Brigitte Scheele (2004): Personenbezeichnungsmodelle auf dem Prüfstand. Lö-
sungsmöglichkeiten für das Genus-Sexus-Problem auf Textebene. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 212(1):40-54
Woolard, Kathryn A. (1998): Introduction. Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry. In: Bambi B. Schieffelin et
al. (eds.): Language Ideologies. Practice and Theory. Oxford University Press, 3-47.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sequential stand-offs in police encounters with the public

Panel contribution

Prof. Geoffrey Raymond 1


1. University of California Santa Barbara

Schegloff’s (2007) account of sequence organization includes a description of a practice that introduces an unex-
amined source of potential complexity for the organization of action: In describing sequence initiating actions
and the responses they make relevant, Schegloff (2017:16-19) notes that recipients of a first action can pro-
duce a “counter” in place of doing an appropriate responding action – that is, they can produce an alternative
sequence initiating action that reverses “the direction of the sequence and its flow.” While the sequences ini-
tiated by such “counters” can be resolved in short order, if both parties persist in pursuing a response to their
own action (in lieu of responding to the other’s) a “sequential stand-off” entailing a contest over “adjacency” or
“nextness” (which play a central role in sequential organization, Schegloff, 2000) can emerge. Using data from
police encounters initiated to address “policeable matters” (Mehan, 1989), this paper briefly documents the ba-
sic features of sequential stand-offs, the sequential contexts in which they emerge, and the methods participants
use to pursue, expand, and resolve them. These observations help to situate a set of methods participants can
use to (re)cast conduct produced to pursue one course of action as a form of “resistance” to the other, thereby
enabling an alternative set of resources (including physical violence) as methods for resolving the emergent
struggle (see Bittner, 1970). The organized methods participants use to pursue and resolve such stand-offs con-
stitute a form of social organization that elaborates previously unders-pecified features of the organization of
action sequencing.
References Cited
Bittner, Egon (1970) The Functions of Police in Modern Society. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office.
Haddington, P., Keisanen, T., Mondada, L., & Nevile, M. (Eds.). (2014). Multiactivity in social interaction: Beyond
multitasking. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Meehan, Albert J., (1989) Assessing the ‘police-worthiness’ of citizens’ complaints to the police: accountability
and the negotiation of ‘facts’. In: Helm, David, Anderson, W.T., Meehan, A.J., Rawls, A. (Eds.), The Interactional
Order: New Directions in the Study of Social Order. Irvington, New York, pp. 116—140.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007) Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis, vol. 1.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stuart, F. (2016). Becoming “copwise”: Policing, culture, and the collateral consequences of street�level crimi-
nalization. Law & Society Review, 50(2), 279-313.
Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2000). Theorizing the standoff: Contingency in action. Cambridge University Press.

332
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The effects of agency on the construction of identities in


political interviews

Panel contribution

Dr. Luisa Granato Grasso 1 , Mrs. Maria Moccero 1


1. Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Issues of identity and positioning become central in public appearances of politicians when they have
access to high-rank positions in government. Identity work in the circumstances demands adjusting to
new challenges, and to changes in the communicative behaviour. As Leipold and Winkel (2016:15) hold
“actors are forced to creatively adjust to new meanings and take up changing subject positions in different
policy making discourses”. Agency is crucial in identity construction, as it produces various effects upon
self-and-other presentation in the development of the talk, and manifests itself mainly through the exploitation
of diverse discursive and linguistic resources. The purpose of this presentation is to determine how agency
is materialized in the speech of the president of Argentina, and what it contributes to the construction of the
identities perceived in interviews broadcast on television. Media interviews offer one of the best opportunities
for politicians to reveal themselves as worthy of support. A socio-pragmatic approach is used as an overall
perspective to analyse meaning, with special attention to the notions of identity and agency. Research on
identity construction chiefly draws upon the Positioning Theory principles that consider the dimensions
of storyline, identity, discourse acts, and rights and duties (Slocum Bradley 2008). Two types of identities
related to the social and to the interactional roles of the interactants are considered: the identity granted by
the institution they represent, and the identity co-built as the discourse unfolds (Van Langenhove 2014). For
the analysis of agency, this work adopts an author-centered approach as described by Leipold and Winkel
(2016). The data emerged from a corpus of seventeen interviews held between December 2019 and May 2022.
A qualitative analysis was conducted, and observation, comparison and interpretation techniques helped
examine the texts in their contexts of production. Results show a relationship among the functions expressed
through the production of discourse acts, the agency exercised by the speaker, and the identities developed. It
was possible to determine that self and other exercise of agency refers to past, present and future actions. Two
closely related resources are salient in agency and identity building: the employment of referring expressions,
particularly first-person pronouns in all their forms, and the use of “ventriloquism” (Cooren, 2010) as the
phenomenon through which an agent makes another being speak, be it human or non-human. Through these
resources the president strives to position himself as conscious of his rights and duties, and to project the
image of a sensitive, determinate, powerful, knowledgeable, and thoughtful head of state.

Cooren, Fraçois (2010). Action and Agency in Dialogue. Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Harré, Ron and Luke van Langhenhove (Eds.). (1999) Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action.
Blackwell. Oxford.
Leipold, Sina and George Winkel. (2016) Discursive Agency: (Re) Conceptualizing Actors and Practices in the
Analysis of Discursive Policymaking. The Policy Studies Journal, 45 (3). 510-534.
Slocum Bradley, Nikki. (2008). The Positioning Diamond: A Trans-disciplinary Framework for Discourse Anal-
ysis. Journal for the theory of Social Behaviour, 40(1), 79-107.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Transgression and tradition in teenage girls’ talk: Positioning


self in a changing world

Panel contribution

Prof. Elena Raymond 1


1. University of California Santa Barbara

An integral element of youth identity that requires further attention within the context of globalization is gen-
der. For young women who live in traditional contexts, in particular, it is expected that globalization processes
will affect their lives more drastically than men’s. For example, global mass migration becomes intricately im-
plicated in the process of gender identity formation because gender ideologies migrate along with people and
are not always in accordance with the local gender discourses of the new social contexts in which they are
embedded.
In the patriarchal context of Cyprus, the dominant gender discourse involves the display of a heterosexual
gendered self, which is framed within the normative confines of gender performance. Differentiation is based
on gender styles, which become symbolic boundaries between different teenage groups. Drawing on a corpus
of data of recorded interactions, participant observations, and in-depth interviews, collected during a yearlong
ethnographic study at a multiethnic middle school in Cyprus, this paper examines how teenage girls navigate
diverse and occasionally contradictory gender ideologies as they encounter and take up the prominent discourse
of heterosexuality and particularly, how some of these girls in specific interactional contexts maneuver their
positions through a matrix of stigmatization and negative connotations associated with sex and female sexuality.
In the social space examined in this study, where the rural meets the urban, the migrant the local, and the re-
ligious the secular, gender practices variably construct different kinds of femininities and masculinities and,
as a result, students can hardly avoid the appropriation, interrogation, ascription or denunciation of particu-
lar gender subjectivities. This paper addresses two main questions: first, how do students negotiate different
gender ideologies (and related moralities) that migrate into the local space via global processes, like migration
and global media, and second, how are students’ understandings of gender expressed through their own gender
practices and also through their articulated interpretations of the gender practices of others.
The symbolic representation of femininity and masculinity at Central Junior School is achieved through an ar-
ray of linguistic and cultural practices. Linguistic practices include positioning, labeling and gossip that become
involved in claims of individual and group identity. These identity practices primarily function to mark the
fault lines between groups, which for girls also demarcate assumptions about moral distinctions. Morality be-
comes involved in the process of gender construction as it is integrated into the patriarchal idealized version
of womanhood, or alternatively, maidenhood. In this school, when students examine their own or other girls’
gender practices, they often make allusions to the ethics of the referenced individual or group. Assessments of
girls’ morality is based on a continuum of sexual practices, from the most liberal to the most traditional, along
which they place different cultural groups (which are often equated with ethnic groups). With the conflation
of sexuality with gender, the sexual practices of girls become fundamental in youth’s interpretations of gender
identity.

334
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Unravelling bureaucratic dilemmas: identity and


communicative style in advice seeking

Panel contribution

Prof. Jenny Cook-Gumperz 1


1. University of California Santa Barbara

Ulrich Beck (2002) describes the challenges of living a late-modern life as presenting precarious social options:
“we live in an age where the social order of the nation state, class, ethnicity and the traditional family are in
decline. The ethic of self-fulfillment and achievement is the most powerful current in modern society. The
choosing, deciding, and shaping human being who aspires to be the author of his/ her own life, the creator of
an individual identity is the central character of our time.” Freed from traditional constraints social options
become subject to institutionalized guidelines (Giddens, 1991). These bureaucratic requirements in turn lead to
gatekeeping through written documents and face-to-face encounters, and to the need for new communicative
strategies.
For example, in a study of advice giving to new mothers in the UK, Heritage and Sefi (1992) studied some of the
interactional pragmatic dilemmas facing health visitors providing support for first time mothers with newborn
babies in their own homes. Health visitors must not appear to press expert knowledge on mothers or risk
rejection of this advice, and mothers themselves often hedge their own requests for advice so as not to appear
incompetent in their new role as mothers. Both participants in the interactional exchange are constantly in
danger of undermining the other’s position as advice giver or taker, by reason of their ambiguous relationship
as private citizens and representatives of a government sanctioned authority.
The studies discussed in this paper will explore advice giving in a different context, one where participants
actively seek help from a public organization. The data come from two different advice centers in the UK Mid-
lands: a local government center specifically for housing advice and a community-sponsored center for advice
on all social welfare issues.
The requested advice exchanges in these two settings provide examples of how any understanding of a per-
sonal self interacts with our position as an institutionalized individual. In managing challenges of daily life and
its regulation we are concerned with who speaks for whom, to whom, and where the authoritative voice rests
in any decision-making. The data show different communicative styles in these two public settings that have
implications for advice-seeking outcomes. In the first case, negotiating bureaucratic constraints both advice
seeker and advice giver develop shared communicative strategies. In the second case, there is need to over-
come traditional institutional roles through participants attempts to redefine their communicative strategies in
solving their particular bureaucratic dilemmas.
Beck U. (1995/2002) A life of one’s own in a Runaway world. In Urich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (eds)
Individualization pg22-29
Giddens, A: (1991) Modernity and self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age.
Heritage J. and Sefi S. ( 1992) Dilemmas of advice : aspects of the delivery and reception of advice in interactions
between Health Visitors and first-time mothers. in P. Drew and J. Heritage( eds) Talk at Work : Interaction in
institutional settings. p:359-417

335
Doctor-child
communication: Insights
from pragmatics
(organized by Ilse
Depraetere, Vikki Janke)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A-typical discourse as creative practice in the interaction of a


care home

Panel contribution

Prof. Almut Koester 1


1. WU Wien

The professional context of a care home is not an obvious choice for an exploration of creativity. In fact, research
has shown that interactions in elder care institutions are highly routinized (Grainger, 2004; Backhaus 2017) due
to the nature and constraints of the work, where carers interact with residents and other co-workers as they do
their rounds. The research presented explores the question of whether any creative practices can be identified
in a corpus of care home interactions and, if so, how these are manifested in language and discourse.
This paper presents findings from a study of typical and a-typical language and discourse in a corpus of ap-
proximately 60,000 words transcribed from over 70 hours of audio-recorded naturally-occurring interactions
in a care home in England. I propose that a-typical language and discourse may potentially involve instances of
creative practice, where care workers depart from routines in the way they interact with residents or creatively
solve problems with co-workers.
Methods used in the study include both corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. While corpus methods are
typically employed to identify frequently-occurring language, such methods can also identify infrequent or a-
typical items. The corpus linguists Hoey (2005) and Hanks (2013) propose that a-typical or rare words and
phrases may also be those that are potentially creative. Corpus methods (word frequency, keywords and con-
cordances) were used to identify rare or a-typical words and phrases as well as instances of (potentially) creative
language, such as figures of speech or hyperbole. The items identified through corpus methods were then in-
vestigated in their discourse contexts to discover any creative uses.
The analysis showed that while creative uses of language and discourse were rare in the corpus, some of the
a-typical items identified did involve creative discourse, where speakers departed from care work routines.
Infrequent, a-typical language was sometimes used by care workers in small talk sequences in which they
engaged relationally with residents. Such relationally-oriented sequences stand in contrast to the routinized,
transactionally-oriented interactions that make up much of the discourse of the care home, and can, therefore,
be identified as instances of creative practice. By engaging relationally with residents, care givers reduce the
asymmetry and power imbalance that is inherent in the nature of the care relationship and frequently rein-
forced through language use (Grainger, 2004).
References
Backhaus, P. (2017). Care Communication: Making a Home in a Japanese Eldercare Facility. Routledge.
Grainger, K. (2004). Communication and the institutionalized elderly. In J. F. Nussbaum & J. Coupland (Eds.),
Handbook of Communication and Aging Research, 2nd Ed. (pp. 479 – 497). Laurence Erlbaum Associates.
Hoey M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge.
Hanks, P. (2013). Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

337
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Building a child-centered participation framework as a


stepping stone to build trust in a medical encounter

Panel contribution

Dr. Stéphanie Caët 1 , Dr. Sara Debulpaep 2


1. Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France., 2. University Hospital Gent

This presentation offers a first analysis of the 32-minute consultation between a pediatrician, a 5 year-old child
and his mother that was presented in the first, introductory presentation.
We focus here on a stepping-stone strategy the paediatrician uses to make the child at ease and build trust:
making him her main addressee.
In the context of this interdisciplinary project, three types of information will be shown to reveal the subtle
construction of a child-centered participation framework:

• qualitative analyses of the paediatrician’s verbal and non verbal behaviour (including the use of terms of
address and pronouns, gestures, gaze, body orientation, touch, object manipulation) enable us to reveal
how she makes sure to address the child directly, thus turning the mother’s status into that of a by-
stander (Goffman, 1981), in a way that seems unusual to the mother and the child in this context (Tates
& Meeuwesen, 2001).
• thanks of the participatory nature of the PANIC2 project, we could identify, together with the paedia-
trician recorded, specific moments when she felt she was being “successful” in making the child more
confident. Quantitative analyses based on the systematic coding of the data confirm that participation
frameworks unfold differently around those landmarks.
• a comparison of the linguistic properties of the utterances addressed to the child vs. to the mother shows
that the paediatrician also involves the child in the conversation by adapting her speech, using features
from child-directed speech.

Although the child does not speak more as the encounter unfolds, the modality of his utterances progressively
changes, from mostly non verbal to mostly verbal, and from mostly answering questions to asking questions
himself.
By involving children in the conversation, not only do paediatricians improve the bond with the child, but they
also augment the possibility for the children to recall medical recommendations (Lewis et al., 1991), gain a
greater sense of control over their medical care (Sisk et al., 2021) and socialise them into the role of patient
(Stivers, 2012).
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lewis, C. C., Pantell, R. H., & Sharp, L. (1991). Increasing Patient Knowledge, Satisfaction, and Involvement :
Randomized Trial of a Communication Intervention. Pediatrics, 88(2), 351�358.
Sisk, B. A., Schulz, G. L., Blazin, L. J., Baker, J. N., Mack, J. W., & DuBois, J. M. (2021). Parental views on commu-
nication between children and clinicians in pediatric oncology : A qualitative study. Supportive Care in Cancer,
29(9), 4957�4968.
Stivers, T. (2012). Physician–child interaction : When children answer physicians’ questions in routine medical
encounters. Patient Education and Counseling, 87(1), 3�9.
Tates, K., & Meeuwesen, L. (2001). Doctor–parent–child communication. A (re)view of the literature. Social
Science & Medicine, 52(6), 839�851.

338
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Doctor-parent-child and facework theory

Panel contribution

Prof. Karin Aronsson 1


1. Stockholm University

In this paper, facework theorizing is discussed in terms of social distance and how distance is regulated in
clinical encounters, more specifically pediatric settings. In his pioneer work on facework, Goffman (1967) dis-
cussed acts of affiliation, on the one hand, and respect displays, on the other. His theorizing has inspired Brown
& Levinson’s (1987) model of directness where power relationships are seen as key factors behind polite dis-
tance, on the one hand, and affiliative communication, on the other. But social distance is not necessarily a
background factor behind mitigation. In our empirical work, social distance instead surfaces as a collaborative
product of doctor-parent-child interaction. The present analyses draw on three data sets: (i) preschoolers and
other young children’s verbal improvisations in doctor-play (Aronsson & Thorell, 1999, 2002) revealing an early
awareness of adults’ collusive moves in triadic encounters. Even very young children, for instance, deployed
collaborate we-formats when playing doctors. A couple of clinical data sets involve (ii) doctors’ indirectness in
communication with asthma/allergy children and parents (Aronsson & Rundström, 1989) as well as (iii) fam-
ily therapy talk involving potentially collusive parent-therapist alignments (Aronsson & Cederborg, 2012). In
the data sets, social distance is partly co-constructed during doctor-parent-child talk. It surfaces as a part of
sequences where parents, children and doctors address each other (e.g. through collaborative ‘we’-formats)
and the ways in which directives are upgraded or downgraded. Moreover, the findings resonate with work on
children in cancer clinics where even quite young children communicate fearlessly with doctors and nurses in
clinics, if potentially threatening procedures are presented in playful ways (Rindstedt & Aronsson, 2012).
Aronsson, K. (1998). Identity-in-interaction and social choreography. Research on Language and Social Interac-
tion, 31, 75-89.
Aronsson, K., & Cederborg, A-C. (2012). Family therapy and accountability. Journal of Applied Linguistics and
Professional Practice, 9 (2), 193-212.
Aronsson, K., & Rindstedt, C. (2011). Alignments and facework in paediatric visits: Toward a social choreogra-
phy of multiparty talk. In C. N. Candlin & S. Sarangi (Eds.). Communication in professions and organizations:
Handbook of applied linguistics 3. (pp. 121-142). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aronsson, K., & Rundström, B. (1989). Cats, dogs, and sweets in the clinical negotiation of reality: On
politeness and coherence in pediatric discourse. Language in Society, 18, 483-504.
Aronsson, K., & Thorell, M. (1999). Family politics in children’s play directives. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 25-47.
Aronsson, K., & Thorell, M. (2002). Voice and collusion in play dialogues: Towards an architecture of intersub-
jectivity. In S. Blum-Kulka & C. Snow (Eds.), Talking to adults (pp.277-293). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction rituals: Essays of face-to-face behavior. Pantheon Books.
Rindstedt, C., & Aronsson, K. (2012). Children’s intent participation in a pediatric community of practice. Mind,
Culture, and Activity, 19 (4), 325-341.
Tates, K., Elbers, E., Meeuwesen, L., & Bensing, J, (2002). Doctor-parent-child relationships: A ‘pas de trois’. Pa-
tient Education and Counseling, 48, 5-14.

339
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gaze functions in repair-like interactions between a 10


year-old communicator with anarthria and his mother

Lecture

Mx. Aleksandra Kurlenkova 1


1. New York University

In CA literature, it has been shown that gaze may play a role in repair activities. Among other functions, it may
be used to claim independent repair completion, or elicit help during word search both in typical (Goodwin
and Goodwin 1986) and atypical interactions (Laakso, Klippi 1999; Laakso 2020).

Research on repair in interactions between speakers with dysarthria/anarthria and their typically speaking
partners, however, has concentrated mostly on the verbal contributions of both partners aimed at resolving
misunderstanding (e.g. Bloch, Barnes 2020, Rutter 2009).
My research aims to bridge the gap in CA literature on repair activities between dysarthric/ anarthric commu-
nicators and their familiar conversational partners, specifically pertaining to the different uses of gaze in such
activities. The video-data I want to present at this panel comes from a collection of around 30 cases of other-
initiated self-repair practices in interactions between a 10 year-old boy with anarthria and mobility limitations
due to cerebral palsy and his typically speaking mother (in Russian). In this dyad, the boy uses conventional
gaze-pointing at the objects in the environment and his mom’s body, while his mom uses orally produced can-
didate understandings to co-construct the boy’s utterances.
The use of both gaze and repair is pervasive in this data. Moreover, I argue that in the analysed interactions,
repair (or repair-like phenomena, similar to hint-and-guess sequences described in Laakso, Klippi 1999, but
based on gaze signs) serves as a major conversational structure underlying most of the boy’s interactions with
his mother (see also Satchidanand, forthcoming). As the boy’s primary communication modality, gaze, in combi-
nation with facial mimics and vocalizations, is used to do different things at different stages of repair sequences,
such as 1) secure / mobilize recipiency; 2) produce initiating actions - gaze-signs; 3) monitor mom’s understand-
ing, and, in case of multi-unit turns, proceed to each new gaze-turn after registering the receipt of the previous
one; 4) confirm or reject mom’s candidate understandings.
In my presentation, I want to analyze the different functions of gaze in repair (or repair-like) interactions in
this dyad.
References

Bloch, S., Barnes, S. (2020). Dysarthria and other-initiated repair in everyday conversation, Clinical Linguistics
& Phonetics, pp. 1-21.
Goodwin, M., Goodwin, Ch. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica,
Vol. 62-1/2, pp. 51-75.
Laakso, M., Klippi, A. (1999). A closer look at the ‘hint and guess’ sequences in aphasic conversation, Aphasiology,
13:4-5, pp. 345-363.
Laakso, M. (2020). Repair Organization in Linguistically Asymmetric Interaction: Comparing Child-Parent Con-
versations and Conversations Involving Speakers with Aphasia. In Wilkinson et al. Atypical Interaction. The
Impact of Communicative Impairments within Everyday Talk. Palgrave Macmillan.
Rutter, B. (2009). Repair sequences in dysarthric conversational speech: A study in interactional phonetics.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 23(12), pp. 887–900
Satchidanand, A. (forthcoming). Repair interaction in Augmented Conversation. Augmentative and Alternative
Communication.

340
18th International Pragmatics Conference

341
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Introduction to PANIC2: ‘Pragmatic ANalysis of Interaction


between Children and medical Caretakers’

Panel contribution

Dr. Vikki Janke 1 , Dr. Sara Debulpaep 2 , Prof. Ilse Depraetere 3


1. University of Kent, 2. University Hospital Gent, 3. University of Lille

In this first presentation of the panel, I introduce the PANIC2 project, which is an interdisciplinary and cross-
linguistic collaboration, initiated by Ilse Depraetere, comprising five researchers from Lille, Ghent and Kent,
who, collectively, offer expertise in paediatrics, pragmatics, language acquisition and the analysis of verbal in-
teractions. Our team aims to uncover the most successful communicative strategies used by paediatric nurses
and doctors when attempting to build a rapport with their child patients. We do this by (a) examining how com-
munication between paediatricians and child patients unfolds, (b) documenting the communicative exchanges
using precise and accessible language, (c) highlighting those aspects that visibly help gain a child’s trust and (d)
synthesising these in way that is easy for a clinician on the ground to understand and implement. A crucial
point of our study is that successful communication with the child goes way beyond careful vocabulary, and
that it is a linguistic approach that can best reveal and bring together those layers of the exchange that are most
beneficial. We start by showing a 6-minute video of a 32-minute consultation between a paediatrician (one of
our team), a 5-year-old boy and his mother, which takes places at Ghent University Hospital. The child is being
prepared for a tricky eye operation for which a strong anaesthetic is not an option, so the onus is on the clinical
team to calm him and familiarise him with the strange tools that will surround him in the operating theatre.
During this video clip, we will ask you to note any aspects of the exchange that seem integral to the trust be-
ing built. We will then revisit these in detail in the subsequent two presentations and invite you to share your
perspectives on the encounter and our analyses of them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press
Cohen, L.L. (2008). Behavioral approaches to anxiety and pain management for pediatric venous access. Pedi-
atrics, 122, S134-S139.
Krauss, B.A., & Krauss, B.S. (2019). Managing the frightened child. Annals of emergency medicine, 74, 30-35.
Kuttner, L.T., Bowman, M., & Teasdale, M. (1988) Psychological treatment of distress, pain, and anxiety for young
children with cancer. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 9, 374-381.
Lang, E., & Laser, E. (2011). Patient sedation without medication: Anglo American Book Company Limited

342
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Making a child feel at ease during a medical consultation:


facework strategies

Panel contribution

Prof. Ilse Depraetere 1 , Dr. Sara Debulpaep 2 , Ms. Siham Ezzahid 3


1. University of Lille, UMR 8163 STL, 2. University Hospital Gent, 3. University of Lille

This presentation reflects further on the 32-minute consultation between a pediatrician, child and his mother
that was presented in the first, introductory presentation.
Building on the second presentation, which shows how the child-centred approach takes shape, here, we focus
on the ways in which the pediatrician establishes rapport by performing facework. First, we spell out in more
detail how the pediatrician involves the child in the conversation through the use of particular types of inter-
rogatives. Of immediate note is the extremely high number of interrogatives addressed to the child. It is mainly
yes-no interrogatives that are used, which facilitate non-verbal responses, the few wh-questions relating to safe,
that is, non-face-threatening, topics. This technique makes the child gain confidence, and, as he grows more
confident, he becomes a more involved interlocutor, which in turn, makes him feel more at ease.
Second, we show how rapport is further built up between child and pediatrician by analyzing the facework
performed by the pediatrician. Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies will serve to demonstrate the
overarching strategy implemented by the pediatrician to make the child feel at ease and to divert his attention
away from the threat to his negative face, which is huge, given the circumstances (i.e. the unfamiliar setting of a
hospital procedural room, the use of a tube to administer medication, the use of a laughing gas mask, the use of
a laser). We illustrate that the abundant use of positive politeness strategies and the quasi-absence of negative
ones is an effective means of making him feel more comfortable.
Overall, our analysis (in presentations 2 and 3) shows that medics move beyond the avoidance of negative words
(like ‘pain’ or ‘hurt’) or imagery and the promotion of terms that communicate sensory information in a positive
way (see references in the introductory presentation). The strategies implemented are rich and multi-faceted.
The linguistic perspective we have employed makes it possible to describe, in a more accurate way, what is
occurring in the communicative exchange. Equally importantly, we have shown how successful communicative
strategies can be formulated in more general terms.

343
Dude food and chick
beer: Linguistic and
semiotic perspectives on
nutrition as a gendered
cultural practice
(organized by Theresa
Heyd, Sofia Rüdiger,
Janina Wildfeuer)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Cute snacks for empowered Chinese middle class women:


How marketing colonizes ideological shifts

Panel contribution

Prof. Gwen Bouvier 1 , Ms. Menghan Deng 2


1. Shanghai International Studies University, 2. Shanghai Jiao Tong University

In this paper, we use multimodal critical discourse analysis to analyse food packaging that targets younger,
single, middle-class women in China. For a range of reasons these comprise a growing demographic group in
China, and they are an attractive niche target group for marketers. It has been observed that there have been
significant changes and tensions, particularly for middle-class women in China, in part as internationalisation
and commercialisation have brought with them newer forms of individualism and notions of self-fulfilment, of-
ten related to neoliberal ideology. These sit alongside traditional Confucian culture, with its sense of family duty
in relation to kinship, marriage and motherhood. Advertising of products, we show in this presentation, tend to
represent this sense of women as getting-ahead, go-getting, good neoliberal individuals, as has been observed
to also be the case in, for example, European societies. But, unlike in other settings, in China such products
also tend to foreground cuteness and softness, known as Kawaii culture, explained in part as a form of comfort
or retreat from social pressures, demands and contradictions. In this paper, carrying out a close multimodal
analysis of food packaging, we explore how these conflicting representations are handled and represented in
food marketing targeting these younger middle-class Chinese women.

345
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gendering craft beer names

Panel contribution

Mr. Steffen Schaub 1 , Prof. Marcus Callies 2


1. University of Greifswald, 2. University of Bremen

Craft beer culture, like other higher-value beverage cultures (wine, whiskey), reflects stereotypes about gender
preferences. The profile of a typical craft beer drinker is “that of a young man, with a higher education and a
medium-high income” (Baiano 2021). Even though women make up a sizable portion of craft beer consumers
and are growingly visible in the industry as producers and experts, craft beer is still a largely male-dominated
and -oriented space. Branding and marketing of craft beer, for instance, has been found to draw heavily on
sexist imagery (Thurnell-Read 2022). Furthermore, research by Darwin (2017, 2018) and Chapman et al. (2018)
has shown that certain beer styles are perceived to be more agreeable to certain genders: bitter or strong beer
styles like India Pale Ales or stouts are perceived as ‘masculine beers’, whereas light and fruity beers are asso-
ciated with femaleness. The male dominance of the craft beer scene in general and the gender-specific stereo-
types about beer styles in particular have an impact on how craft beer is described by patrons (Darwin 2017),
discussed in online forums and blogs (Darwin 2018) and how craft beer is presented in terms of labeling and
packaging (Kappele 2015). Some years ago several major beer producers launched marketing campaigns to tar-
get female consumers by introducing so-called ‘female-friendly’ or ‘feminine’ beers that, however, ultimately
failed (O’Reilly 2014).
Withers (2017: 237f.) identifies marketing as one of three “elements of cultural construction and maintenance”
within the craft beer industry to establish and uphold it as a white male cultural form. Names are a crucial
component of the marketing process, with the naming process and branding involving a complex set of factors,
including copyright considerations, the target consumership, noticeability on a saturated market, a connection
to the brewery and the region, modern cultural references, and, for some, tying in with an international scene.
Since previous research has shown that craft beer is gendered across different communicative domains of the
industry, it is likely that this gendering also extends to craft beer names.
In this study we want to explore two main questions: Do craft beer naming practices and the accompanying
imagery reflect the gendering of craft beer in general and of different craft beer types in particular? Craft beer
names are collected from the database of a popular craft beer app called Untappd, which serves as a compre-
hensive catalogue of existing beers world-wide. We approach this topic from two methodological angles: First,
we use a list of keywords that may exhibit gendering of craft beer names (e.g. bitch as in Hoppy Bitch IPA or male
as in Alpha Male IPA) to explore the database for relevant names and imagery on the labels. In our second anal-
ysis, we extract the names of the most popular beers from different beer styles, differentiating between beer
styles that are perceived as masculine versus feminine. We then analyze how they are named and whether the
naming practice hints at gender-specific advertising strategies.

346
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language, Food, and Sex in Taipivae, New Year’s Day, 2020

Panel contribution

Dr. Kathleen Riley 1


1. Rutgers University

Language, food, and sex are probably multivalent and co-constitutive processes in every corner of the human
(if not also beyond-human) world. That is, human language is implicated in the indexical construction of sex-
ual identities, activities, and orientations; sex is subliminally and explicitly entangled with the production,
exchange, and consumption of food; and food functions as medium, metaphor, and context for linguistic in-
teractions. This paper lays the groundwork for analyzing how language, food, and sex were engaged in the
negotiation of meaning during one discursive event that took place on New Year’s Day, 2020, in the Marquesas,
French Polynesia. In this case, I came to awareness after many years of longitudinal fieldwork on the island of
Nuku Hiva of how my now elderly, female-identified friend “Tahia” was adept at enacting a ”masculine voice”
to create a comfortable setting for her kin (who were serving us crackers and wild beef stomach) given the unex-
pected intrusion of my recording device in this setting. The other men at the event were reticent to engage in any
normal partying-style interactions (despite their gendered meat-grilling labor) until she took hold of the situa-
tion and used Marquesan and sexual innuendo to joke about local politics (specifically the upcoming elections).
Some of the paralinguistic features (deep pitch, loud volume) and lexical choices (“nasty” sex-related allusions)
as well as some of the foodways displayed (bbq, beer, etc.) might seem typical of the gendered dynamics of a
family gathering half a globe away (e.g., in New Jersey). However, the specific values and relationships that
emerged in this situation require some deconstruction based on an understanding of the colonial imposition
of Catholic prudery, French education, and global foodways on the commensal rituals, sexual practices, and
discursive formations of te ’enana ’o te henua (the people of the land) in the valley of Taipivae (where Melville
once spent time). The data to be analyzed in this instance were collected via a range of ethnographic methods,
including participant observation, unstructured interviewing, and the audio recording of natural discourse. For
the conference, I will present some basic ethnohistorical information about the islands as well as analyses of
more general sociocultural and communicative norms and practices derived from years of fieldwork. All this
background is needed to make pragmatic sense of several transcribed moments of interaction that transpired
during this food-mediated New Year’s event. The primary focus will be on identifying and comprehending
the gendered indexicality of various multimodal signs (food and language) and their implications for ongoing
transformations in the construction of gendered communicative norms and foodways given the longue durée
of colonization and now globalization in this part of the world.

347
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Linguistic and semiotic perspectives on nutrition as a


gendered cultural practice – An introduction

Panel contribution

Prof. Janina Wildfeuer 1 , Prof. Theresa Heyd 2 , Dr. Sofia Rüdiger 3


1. University of Groningen, 2. University of Greifswald, 3. University of Bayreuth

Food and drink, and consumption more generally, is deeply linked to cultural practice, and to the negotiation
of social status and other aspects of social identities. This connection is entrenched in classical sociological
theory (Veblen; Bourdieu), and has been increasingly explored in linguistics in recent years. Thus, linguistic
approaches to food practices (Rüdiger and Mühleisen 2020; Tovares and Gordon 2020) have highlighted how
social status and categories of belonging are talked into being around practices of food and drink consumption
(e.g., Silverstein 2003 on wine talk and status anxiety; Cotter and Valentinsson 2018 on bivalent class index-
ing in specialty coffee discourse; Mapes 2020 on palatable eliteness; Schneider 2020 on third wave coffee and
cosmopolitan discourse).
However, the gendered dimension of food and drink talk has so far received less attention. In cultural and
social theory, approaches such as Contois’ (2018, 2020, 2021) work on food and masculinity have pointed to
these connections: ideologies of gender are cast upon practices of eating and drinking, from gendered product
ranges and eating places to gendered assumptions and regimes of un/healthy eating, dieting, and cooking (see
also Bouvier and Chen 2021).
In a similar vein, foodie culture and practices have been shown to perpetuate the performance of stereotypi-
cal, classed femininities and masculinities, while also allowing an escape from them, particularly for women
(Cairns, Johnston and Baumann 2010; but see Brookes and Chałupnik 2022 on masculinity-asserting discourse
representations of vegan men). Dichotomous gendered eating practices have also been observed in the con-
text of fitness magazines (Fuller, Briggs and Dillon-Sumner 2012). In addition, cookbooks authored by female
chefs emphasize aspects of hegemonic femininity such as care for self and others, while concurrently offering
competing discourses of self-fulfillment and independence (Matwick 2017).
In this introductory session, we provide an overview of previous research on gender and food-and-drinks talk.
In particular, we focus on pragmatic and discursive, sociolinguistic and multimodal aspects in order to contex-
tualize the “Dude food and chick beer: Linguistic and semiotic perspectives on nutrition as a gendered cultural
practice” panel contributions.

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On ‘pale hipsters’ and ‘well-educated young women’: A


diachronic corpus-assisted analysis of gender stereotypes in
German veganism discourse

Panel contribution

Mr. Markus Majewski 1


1. University of Hamburg

The increasingly important role of food as an identity-forming practice in affluent western societies is linked
to gender. Studies in nutritional science show that 60-80% of vegans in Germany are female (Englert/Siebert
2016:13, Fleischatlas 2021). Sociological and psychological research suggests a close connection between gender
and veganism (e.g., Modlinska et al. 2020). Researchers in discourse analysis have examined ’vegaphobia’ in
print media (Cole/Morgan 2011), moral aspects of veganism (Drescher 2020), and the connection of veganism
and masculinity on social media (Brookes/Chalupnik 2022). However, linkages between veganism and gender
in public discourse, and in particular the role of gender in the discursive construction of stereotypes of vegans
and veganism, have not yet been examined.
To address this issue, this paper presents findings from a qualitative case study that is part of a larger on-
going project on the diachronic development of veganism discourse in German print media. Based on a large
diachronic corpus with over 9,000 German newspaper articles from 1959-2020, this paper focuses on how veg-
anism as a specific diet choice is linked to gender and how this linkage changed in the last 30+ years.
Based on the larger diachronic corpus a small-scale corpus of articles with a high frequency of the string vegan*
was created by using AntConc’s method of visualizing the ‘density’ of chosen lexemes in plot-graphs (Anthony
2018). It is assumed that media pieces with a high frequency of this keyword are particularly rich sites of
veganism discourse. Drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA, Reisigl/Wodak 2009) this sample is
qualitatively analyzed to identify discursive stereotypes at the level of nomination and predication structures.
The analysis focuses on (a) gendered nominations that are linked to vegans (e.g. phrases such as loud bodybuilder
and good housewife, which are grammatically gendered in German), and (b) respective predications that feature
gender-stereotyped actions (e.g. posing with his muscular body and baking a pink cake). To check whether these
are singular occurrences or recurring patterns in the discourse, these gendered nominations and predications
are used as search terms and queried in the entire corpus.
The findings suggest a small number of constant gender stereotypes in German media discourse, some linked
to general discourses on gender and food, others more specific to veganism discourse. At the same time there
are also changes in the representation of vegans over time, which go hand in hand with general changes in the
discourse, for instance the motivation to opt for a vegan diet.

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‘Eat your gender’: critical multimodal perspectives on


gendering through food in global health and lifestyle
magazines

Panel contribution

Ms. Iwona Gibas 1 , Prof. Sylvia Jaworska 1


1. University of Reading

As much as being an organic product and a major source of energy, food is a social, cultural, and inevitably
discursive practice through which social identities (“you are what you eat”), including gender, are produced
and reproduced. Yet while linguistic and discourse analytical research on gender has attracted substantial
scholarly interest across multiple disciplines, less attention has been dedicated to food as a discursive practice
of gendering. Even fewer studies exist that address both natural and synthetic (i.e., dietary supplements) forms
of food as distinct vehicles for gendering and social inequalities.
This study turns to these hitherto under-researched areas by investigating gendering through natural and syn-
thetic food in a corpus of food advertisements collected from two of the most popular sibling health and lifestyle
magazines, i.e., Women’s Health and Men’s Health published in Britain in 2017-2021. Both magazines have large
readerships across the globe, with Men’s Health being the world’s largest men’s magazine (60 million readers
worldwide in 64 countries) and Women’s Health the fastest growing international women’s magazine in the
world available in 52 countries.
The primary interest of this study is in exploring the extent to which advertisements of both natural and syn-
thetic food, as a discursive marketing practice, produce and reinforce stereotypical constructions of femininity
and masculinity. Considering that food adverts are essentially ‘multimodal ensembles’, this study adopts a crit-
ical multimodal discourse analysis to study a corpus of 111 ads collected from issues published in the 2017-2021
time period. It explores the kinds of natural and synthetic food products that target female and male audiences
and the discourses and other semiotic resources, for example colour, corporeal representations, gestures, and
gaze, frequently exploited in order to sell food to a particular gender audience.
The results show that food adverts disseminated in Women’s Health and Men’s Health reproduce and reinforce
stereotypical gender constructions, rendering particular foodstuffs masculine while linking others almost ex-
clusively to femininity; this is observed for both natural and synthetic food types. This disparity is further
reinforced through the use of various semiotic resources that construct the food and its corporeal ‘receiver’
the body in distinctly gendered ways. We conclude the paper with observations that despite some advances in
equality and occasional focus on inclusivity and bodily positivity in advertising, the food marketing in health
and lifestyle magazines continues to reinforce homogenised and stereotypical ideals around femininity and
hegemonic masculinity; it constructs binary gendered personae through both: ‘what you eat’ and ‘how you eat
it’.

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“Thirsty for More?”: Gender in Food and Beverage Advertising

Panel contribution

Ms. Elisabeth Zimmermann 1 , Dr. Anna Islentyeva 1 , Ms. Hannah Graf 1


1. Universität Innsbruck

Promotional culture and advertising are considered to be “one of the most populous and pervasive modern
discourse types” (Fairclough 2015: 60). Against the backdrop of the complex relationship between language,
visuals, marketing strategies, and gender stereotypes, this study aims to investigate the key strategies that are
systematically employed in the representation of men and women in modern food and beverage advertising.
The data set used for this study comprises 40 posters that advertise products that fit into two major categories:
(alcoholic) beverages and (fast) food. The advertising campaigns in question were launched between 2000 and
2022 and displayed in public (outdoor) spaces. Among the brands advertised are Burger King, Carl’s Jr., Coca-
Cola, McDonald’s, KFC, Lay’s, and Pepsi.
In terms of methodology, the discourse analysis and visual analysis are complemented by an analysis of the
Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA) that aims to analyse the most frequent verbal patterns identified in
the sample of the posters analysed. The corpus analysis thus reflects on and supports the key findings of the
study, which show that language and advertising operate in a distinct circular structure and mutually impact
one another.
The findings show that contemporary advertising discourse continues to promote traditional gender stereo-
types. For instance, prototypical masculinity is frequently associated with the consumption of meat (cf. Klain-
berger 2020), which is especially evident in fast food advertising. One of the McDonald’s posters analysed in
this study advertises a burger made from Irish beef, with a slogan that reads Serious man food. Furthermore,
Coca-Cola intentionally links femininity with Diet Coke and thus with diet and dieting in a more general sense,
while Coke Zero is promoted as a “healthy” drink for sporty men.
We conclude that unattainable archetypes of femininity and masculinity are still often propagated as the norm
in advertising; stakeholders should be called upon to challenge these stereotypes and present us with a new
normal.
References
Fairclough, N. (2015). Language and Power (3rd ed.). Taylor & Francis.
Klainberger, S. A. T. (2020). The beef between men and animals: Meat-eating and masculinity in the U.S. - A case
study of objectifying fast-food advertising in the Anglosphere. Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English,
(6), 128–148. https://doi.org/10.7146/lev.v0i6.118865

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Emancipatory
pragmatics: Interactional
modality from the
perspective of Ba-theory
(organized by Scott Saft,
Sachiko Ide, Yoko Fujii)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A pragmatic study of interactional explanation in Chinese


from a Ba perspective

Panel contribution

Dr. Yansheng Mao 1


1. Harbin Engineering University

This paper aims to systemically explores ba-theory as a dynamic approach to interactional explanation in Chi-
nese by introducing the concept of interactional modality, while catering to both propositional content and
attitudes toward the content and their addressees, from a perspective of Ba theory. In this sense, the paper
will take a step further to describe how participants employ various interactional practices, including linguis-
tic forms as well as non-linguistic acts such as gestures, head nods, and laughter, etc, that contribute to the
construction and dissolution of boundaries between people through the act of interactional explanation. With
data collected from conflict-meditating TV programs in Chinese, the paper is intended to answer the ensuing re-
search questions: first, what types of modalities are employed in the act of interactional explanation? How are
these modalities manipulated for the sake of interactional explanation. The tentative answers to the research
questions above may help to highlight that modality may be the most important aspect of interaction as it plays
such a significant role in creating and negotiating interpersonal relationships in oriental culture where Guanxi
(relationship) is valued most.

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Accommodation or appraisal: sentence-final-particles in ‘Ba’


dynamics

Panel contribution

Dr. Yasuhiro Katagiri 1


1. Future University Hakodate

Human face-to-face interaction takes place in an interactional ‘Ba’: a space (basho), both psychological and
physical situation/context, that supports, mediates, and orients the development of interaction. The conception
of ‘Ba’ emphasizes the ambivalent nature of ‘Ba’ between intentional/conscious or articulated/unarticulated.
This often hard-to-characterize nature of ‘Ba’ can be traced back to the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural ex-
amination of divergent phenomena in human conversational interactions. The conception of ‘Ba’ includes, not
only explicitly characterizable elements in dialogue context, such as time, place, speaker, hearer of utterances,
but also factors such as culturally established behavioral norms which have historically been developed and im-
plicitly enforced, hence indigenous to a specific conversational community, or shared interpretive conventions
created spontaneously in a specific instance of conversational interaction.
Japanese have a variety of (sentence-final)-particles, used exclusively in spoken language (or in written texts
that describe spoken interactions). They are mostly used in the sentence-final, as well as phrase-final positions.
Some of them can be used in utterance-initial positions or as sole utterances, and play such roles as attention-
getters, backchannels, or emotional displays. Their interactional functions have been studied in Japanese usage
grammars. We propose a ‘Ba’-based functional model of sentence-final-particles, through the examination of
sentence-final-particles ‘ne’ and its variants ‘yone,’ ‘kane,’ and ‘none’ in Mr O. conversation corpus and other
dialogue data. We stipulate ambivalent functions on conversational ‘Ba’ of appraisal for the acknowledgment or
appreciation of ‘Ba,’ and of accommodation for the modification of ‘Ba.’ We argue that ‘Ba’-oriented conception
is better than speaker-oriented conception for capturing interactional functions of sentence-final-particles.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analyzing Libyan Arabic interaction and communication from


social and cultural perspectives: localization of CA and DA

Panel contribution

Prof. Mayouf Ali Amarif 1


1. Sebha University

This paper investigates the applicability of CA and DA conventions and practices, postulated by Western ana-
lysts, to interactional data from a different social and cultural background (e.g. Eastern). Naturally-occurring
interactions in both social and institutional contexts in Libya are analyzed in this paper. The analysis shows
that the long occupation of turns and the other-initiate/ other-repair strategies practiced by fathers when in-
teracting with sons, which is seen as impoliteness from Western perspectives, are interpreted as high social
status and respect of the father. Moreover, the analysis of Mr. O Corpus data (teacher/students conversations)
reports exceeding silence by the students. According to Libya culture, such silence can be interpreted as a sign
of agreement and respect. In contrast, other cultures may describe silence as a sign disagreement and uncol-
laborativeness. Furthermore, expressing agreement/disagreement seems to be governed by the interactants’
social and cultural norms rather than the CA/DA standards of interaction. Other institutional data from Libya
(elderly patient/younger physician) shows what can be interpreted by Western analysts as off-target verbosity
and talkativeness associated with ageing. The elderly patients call their doctors as “sons” and ask them about
their social and familial background. In fact, taking the Libyan social and cultural values into account, the more
reasonable interpretation of such practice can be described as an interactional strategy by the elderly patient
to change the context from institutional (physician has the power) into social where the elderly patient regains
the power from his younger physician. This paper concludes that the analysis and interpretation processes of
CA and DA claimed by Western analysts are not importantly appropriate for other interactions and communi-
cations from different social and cultural background.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Atmosphere in Japanese and Chinese Conversations:


Relevance of Context and Interaction

Panel contribution

Mr. Yusuke Mochizuki 1


1. Ritsumeikan University

In student-student (S-S) conversation (Japanese and Chinese), they do not keep certain distance, they talk in a
relaxed and friendly manner. However, in teacher-student (T-S) conversation, they keep certain distance and
try to read tense feelings from the beginning of the conversation.
As the conversation goes on, however, students come to talk to the teachers in a relaxed and friendly way.
However, in this thesis, the question is asked; why does the T-S conversation become similar to the student-
student (S-S) conversation half way through? These phenomena are relevant to contexts and relationships.
This research uses Mister O Corpus, which is a video recording between two people who cooperate to solve the
task and make a story by rearranging fifteen cards. In this data, we could observe a conversation as it follows:
e.g.)
T 啊，���？���������
Oh, is it correct? Look at the order.
S [⾛路，����������
He walked a road, and found a precipice.
T [⾛路，������，��=
He walked a road, and found a precipice, and then
S =跳不过[去，��������，���������，��������，���，�����，������，��，�，{xxxx}。
He couldn’t jump over so came up with an idea to pick up a stick and try to jump over with it, but it broke. He
was in a hurry, went to pick up another stick again and tried a few times.
T [嗯，�������去捡棍⼦，���，���{xxxx}试了⼀下，���，���，����，��������，���然后过来了�
Yes, he came up with an idea, right? He happily went to pick up a stick and tried a few times, but it broke.
Then he got angry and went there again and found another thick stick. All right? And he came back here.
At the beginning of the conversation, the student has less expression and less utterance, but during the last
part, we can observe the cooperativeness between them like repeating sentence as above and even the student’s
laughter, body language and eye contact.
That is a conversation which is influenced by an age difference and relationships. In addition, there are con-
versations which are not influenced by an age difference, but a pure relationships. Let us take example from
a Japanese TV programs, two women comedians quarrel with each other. This conversation seems to be im-
polite from viewers, but these two women talk to one another in a relaxed tone. Why do they talk in such a
relaxed manner through such a quarrel? This research tries to analyze and observe atmosphere in Japanese
and Chinese conversations.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ba theory and deictic systems

Panel contribution

Prof. Federica Da Milano 1


1. University of Milano-Bicocca

In traditional grammars, terms like ‘proximal/distal’ or ‘near/far’ from the speaker are typically used to define
the meaning of demonstratives. However, these definitions are only an approximation of a complex semantic
and pragmatic domain. In particular, an important issue concerns the distinction, as found in the literature,
between so-called ‘distance-oriented’ and ‘person-oriented’ systems. The question is: is that a real distinction,
or are they two instantiations of a more general system? In this paper, we will try to apply ba theory to the
analysis of demonstrative systems in different languages, showing that this approach can better describe the
uses of demonstratives. This dynamic approach will be applied to Japanese demonstratives, on the one side,
and to other Western, European languages.
The concept of interactional modality as expressed through ba-theory will show that modality may be the most
important aspect of interaction in creating and negotiating deictic reference. In particular, the theory of ba will
further develop the concept of ‘dyad of conversation’, already introduced in the analysis of deictic systems by
Jungbluth and Da Milano: the concept goes beyond the traditional distinction between ‘distance-oriented’ and
‘person-oriented’ systems because it is based on a detailed physical analysis of the orientation of speaker and
addressee.
Starting from his work on deixis in Yucatec Maya, (1990), Hanks substituted a sociocentric approach to the tra-
ditional, Western egocentric approach to deictics; in this paper, we will adopt the new concepts developed by
Hanks et al. of primary and secondary ba: the primary ba is the ontological field of mutual dependence, inartic-
ulated, fluid, whereas secondary ba is the level at which, through interactional linguistic modality, distinctions
and categorization emerge.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ba Theory and the Creation of Humor Modality Through


Pragmemic Triggers

Panel contribution

Dr. William Beeman 1


1. University of Minnesota

Ba theory, as articulated in the philosophy of Kitaro Nishida and Hiroshi Shimizu can be thought of as cognitive
space for developing relationships—both interpersonal and in relationship to shared environments. However, a
state of ba does not arise sui generis. It arises in social interaction, and for individuals to enter this state there
need to be pragmatic signals—something I have termed “pragmemic triggers” in other publications—to initiate
creation and sustaining of a ba state. One of the most universal social rituals in which humans engage is the
creation of humor. Humor is one of the fundamental dimensions of modality in linguistic interaction. All humor
has a common structure. It involves “double framing” in which a scenario, understanding, or agreed-upon reality
is presented that is suddenly revealed to be something else, often by being recontextualized during the humorous
presentation. The apparent “frame” of the humorous item is broken to reveal the second (and occasionally a third
or fourth) frame to the surprise of the listener. The combination double framing coupled with surprise produces
an autonomic reaction—usually spontaneous laughter. Consumers of humor are moved from stage to stage in the
humor event through the use of “pragmemic triggers”—signaling mechanisms that keep consumers focused on the
framing structures of the humor. For people to participate in this process of humor creation, I posit that they must
be in a state of ba with each other; they must share the knowledge and understanding of the frames to which they
are exposed. Cultural differences in humor creation arise because of the variety of bases for framing in different
social traditions, conditioned by history, shared knowledge and behavioral expectations. For this reason, it is often
difficult for persons from one cultural tradition to understand the humor generated by other traditions. When one
is in a state of ba with others, it is possible to enter the process of humor creation, and the sharing of humor—being
able to engage in spontaneous laughter together–in turn reinforces the strength of the ba relationships. This paper
will illustrate this process with examples from Japanese, Chinese, German, Persian, Arabic, and English humor
creation.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Deictic expressions, interactional modality, and the ba-based


cognition in Japanese and Korean

Panel contribution

Prof. Kaoru Horie 1 , Mr. Kangwon Lee 2


1. Kansai Gaidai University, 2. Nagoya University

Interactional modality is manifested in a very different manner in languages such as Japanese and Korean
despite having much similarity in lexico-grammatical structures. This was demonstrated by the higher sensitiv-
ity of Japanese utterance particles to the knowledge and emotive state of the addressee, typically indexed by ne
in Japanese, as contrasted with their Korean counterparts (see Horie and Narrog 2014). From the perspective
of ba-theory (Hanks et al. 2019), the degree of inclusion of the addressee into the immediate contingent ba may
interpreted to be higher in Japanese than in Korean.
The higher degree of inclusion of the addressee into the immediate contingent ba is also manifested in the use
of deictic demonstrative pronouns in Japanese as contrasted with its Korean counterparts. Both Japanese and
Korean are known to have three deictic demonstrative pronouns, i.e. proximate ko (Japanese, J)/i (Korean, K),
medial so (J)/ku (K), and distant a (J)/ce (K). Superficially, these deictic demonstrative pronouns in both languages
seem to behave alike.
However, there are cases where they behave differently, as shown in (1)-(2). A word on the context of the
utterance is in order. Both the speaker (A) and the addressee (B) are seeing a movie in a movie theater. They
are approximately 30 meters away from the movie screen. A is asking B about an actor whose name she cannot
recall.
(1) A: (J) {Kono/Ano} hito dare dakke?
this/that person who wonder (who) it was
‘(I wonder) who was {this/that} person was.’
(2) A: (K) {?I/Ce} salam nwukwu-y-ess-ci?
this/that person who-COP-PAST-SFP
‘(I wonder) who was {?this/that} person was.’
Another context where a similar contrast emerges concerns two people (the speaker (A) and the addressee
(B)) working together to make a desk, as shown in (3)-(4). A and B are about two meters away, and A is asking B
about the object which she holds in her hand (and which A cannot readily identify).
(3) A: (J) Un? Nani {kore/sore}?
huh what this/that
‘Huh? What’s {this/that}?’
(4) A: (K) E? Mwe-ya, {?ike/kuke} ?
huh what-COP this/that
‘Huh? What’s {?this/that}?’
In both situations, the deictic demonstrative pronouns that straightforwardly index the physical distance be-
tween the speaker and the referent are felicitous in both languages.
This is where the similarity ends, however. Speaker A can felicitously use the proximate deictic demonstra-
tive ko in Japanese (see (1) and (3)). This option (i.e. the proximate ‘i’) is not available in Korean. Why is this
latter option possible in Japanese in spite of the apparent mismatch between the ‘objective’ physical distance
involved and the use of the proximate demonstrative?
We argue that the speaker’s perception of her interactive space (or ‘ba’) can be expanded relatively easily
beyond the physical bounds in Japanese especially when she views it being shared by the addressee, which

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

explains the use of the proximate ko. As far as the Korean deictic demonstrative pronouns are concerned, they
do not seem to show a similar ‘intersubjectively’ motivated deviance from the norm.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Describing Experiences in ‘Languages of Craft’: Quotations


Functioning as Interactional Modality in Japanese Discourse

Panel contribution

Ms. Yuko Nomura 1


1. Juntendo University

Explaining one’s own experiences to others is a commonplace form of interaction. Speakers use various linguis-
tic devices to help listeners understand events that they have not experienced and what they felt during these
occurrences. One such method is the use of quotations that describe experience. For example, one can say,
Hajimeteno keikende fuan datta kedo, seikou shitanode, “yokatta,” to omotte, hotto shita (‘I was anxious because
it was my first experience, but after having been successful, I thought, “Oh, good.” And I felt relieved.’).
The purposes of this study are to analyse quotations in interviews wherein Japanese actors talked about their
appearances in films and to clarify how such quotations function in interviews. The results showed that state-
ments with omou (‘think’) as a quotative verb are frequently uttered, as is evident in the following statements:
Zettaini kono yaku wo kachi tori tai’ tte omotta (“‘I definitely want to win this role,” I thought.’) and Sugoku gam-
baritai’ to omotta (“‘I really want to work hard,” I thought.’). The analysis employs the idea of ba-theory that
a state of non-separation is the very beginning of human activity and explains that these quotations are direct
transmission of the words in mind that emerge in the moment. Such quotations function as an interactional
modality that directly invites the listener into the world of the speaker’s experience and induces the listener to
experience it with the speaker.
The characteristics of the quotations observed in this study share similarities with Waza Gengo or the ‘Language
of Craft’. It is defined as the ‘language that encourages the sharing of bodily-based sensations that cannot be
expressed in scientific language’ (Ikuta and Kitamura 2011), and it enables the listener to relive the speaker’s ex-
perience. This is the language used in the transmission of traditional Japanese performing arts and has recently
been applied in educational settings in Japan. Finally, this study suggests that communicating by quotation has
an affinity with traditional Japanese culture and education, thereby it is familiar to Japanese speakers.

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Habitual practices of gender presentations in Japanese


society: How young and middle-aged generations self-disclose
and react on Instagram

Panel contribution

Prof. Ayako Namba 1 , Ms. Yuka Nishiyama 1 , Prof. Masataka Yamaguchi 2


1. Kwansei Gakuin University, 2. Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

The new media’, including the Internet, allow people to shape ‘a wide range of non-mainstream identities’
(Khosavinik, 2014: 287) resonating with voices of minority-group people; women’s voices are no exception.
‘Self-presentation’ (Goffman, 1959) on Social Networking Sites (SNSs) covertly affects the ‘presenters’ and ‘fol-
lowers’ in constructing gender ideology. Self-disclosure is a key source of a resonant relationship between them
while revealing perspectives on gender roles in society. However, much room remains to examine interconnec-
tions between self-presentation and self-disclosure in the new media as reflecting gender ideology in society.
This paper explores how female fashion models maintaining profiles and updates on SNSs achieve their self-
presentations through self-disclosure, how their followers react to them, and how they build ‘togetherness’
through exchanges which covertly reflect their shared perspectives on gender ideology. In comparing two dif-
ferent generations, the young (20s) and the middle-aged (30s–40s), this paper investigates how each generation
undertakes self-disclosure and considers how such a treatment distinctively affects both gender-related presen-
tations and their evaluations, revealing through ‘emancipatory pragmatics’ the construction of gender ideology
in Japanese society, drawing on the notion of ‘primary ba’, defined as ”basho of absolute nothingness” (Hanks
et al., 2019: 3).
We selected eight fashion models with Instagram accounts who have contracted with major fashion magazines.
The data comprise: 1) updates and profiles including text messages and emoticons with the relevant photos
posted by those models; and 2) reactions including texts and emoticons posted by their followers. They were
collected between 1 September 2021 and 30 September 2022.
The first type of data were categorised based on the relationship between self-disclosure and social space and
compared between generations. Posted updates were classified as ‘public self’ (public relationships) or ‘private
self’ (personal relationships; Bernland, 1975). Self-disclosure by the younger generation was less likely, given
the public nature of their self-presentations than for the middle-aged, whose followers preferred posts on their
private lives.
The second type of data concerned the followers’ reactions to the posts. Findings indicate that the major types
of reactions were complimenting and synchronous reactions, strongly reinforcing ‘attraction’ (attributed to the
presenters) and linked to ‘evaluation’ (Hayes, 2018). To discover factors of such evaluations, we analysed the
followers’ reactions in terms of physical attractiveness, similarity, familiarity, and fallibility. The reactions of
the young-aged mainly concerned physical attractiveness, while those of the middle-aged involved sharing the
dilemmas and struggles in their lives.
We then discuss in greater detail how the relationship between the posted presentations and their reactions
exerts a huge impact on gender ideology in society through the notion of ‘primary ba’—“a way of model[l]ing
something like contextual embedding” (Hanks et al., 2019: 3). We argue that the reactions shape a habitual
practice that constructs gender ideology more broadly in Japanese society, and propose that a single voice can
shape the collective voice of the society dynamically yet covertly. Thus, the reactions reflect an invisible practice
strongly rooted in everyday communication as a key source of ‘primary ba’.

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Interactional Functions of ‘Deferential’ ‘-supnita’ in Korean


Conversation

Panel contribution

Prof. Myung-Hee Kim 1


1. Hanyang University, ERICA

As the hierarchical structure of modern Korean society has flattened, the complex system of honorifics in the
Korean language is undergoing rapid changes. For example, ‘-yo’, a so-called informal polite marker, is widely
used, and other polite markers are disappearing or picking up other pragmatic functions. In contrast to ‘-yo’,
‘-supnita’, a so-called formal ‘deferential’ marker, is mainly used in formal and uni-directional scenes such as
news reports, lectures, and wedding vows. Examining a Korean talk show, Brown (2015) claims that ‘-supnita’ is
used as a resource for indexing presentational and performative stances of authority and to mark talk as public
or ritualistic.
In line with these findings, this study aims to show how speakers use ‘-supnita’ in conversation to create mock
formal or ritualistic scenes and add a comical element to their interactions. There are two main uses of ‘-supnita’
in the data. First, it was frequently used as a formulaic expression such as greeting or thanks. Second, it was
used when making a formal announcement, suggestion, or question at an important point such as the end of
a conversation. These attempts to make the scene mock-formal are often accompanied by a tone and voice
that pretends to be serious, and laughter between the speakers. In this way, the use of ‘-supnita’ completes the
conversation and enhances the intimacy between the speakers.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interactional Modality in Japanese verbal interaction

Panel contribution

Prof. Yoko Fujii 1


1. Japan Women’s University

Interactional modality can be defined as “the use of language to express the speaker’s attitudes toward the
content and the addressees in interaction.” This presentation illustrates that the Japanese language is rich in
interactional modality through which the speaker shows his/her attitude toward the speech content and the
addressees in communication.
Fujii (2012, 2014) conducts a comparative analysis of Japanese and English in the interactions involving
problem-solving tasks in terms of the interactional linguistic features displayed by participants. The results
show that the Japanese speakers interacted with each other by embedding themselves in ba (lit. “field”) through
language use that induces the partner’s responses, situating themselves as if entraining themselves and resonat-
ing with each other. They seek understanding and agreement at every moment and need congruity at every
step of the task. Thus, they show interdependent and mind-sharing interaction using rich linguistic devices
that display interactional modality such as the frequent use of various question forms, final particles inducing
the partner’s responses, sentence co-construction, and repetition. The results of these findings illustrate that
Japanese employ various kinds of linguistic practices of interactional modality to show their attitude toward
the addressee in communication. This pattern of interaction results in a state of self-other non-separation,
where the speaker and the addressee embed themselves in ba and resonate with each other, and the boundary
between self and other disappears. In this sense, it is a ba-oriented type of interaction. In other words, it is more
inclined to Primary ba(Hanks, et. al, 2019), an interactive context of mutual dependence, impermanence, and
non-separation. Thus, it is different from the widely-accepted pragmatic concept of “context” in Western-based
pragmatics.
Based on this finding and assumption, this study further demonstrates rich linguistic practices of interactional
modality in the Japanese language, focusing on the speaker’s attitudes toward both the content and the ad-
dressees in interaction. The Japanese language employs abundant morphemes to express the speaker’s feelings
and attitudes toward events that involve, for example, “giving/receiving” verbs implying indebtedness to the
addressee, auxiliary verbs implying the speaker’s disappointment or pleasure with regard to unexpected con-
sequences, modal expressions relating to territory of information, and final particles illustrating the speaker’s
identity and politeness toward the addressee. Although Japanese does not require obligatory representation of
the agent, it has rich linguistic resources to express the agent’s/speaker’s attitude and emotion toward events
and the listener to maintain resonance and entrainment in the interaction.
Fujii, Yoko. 2012. Differences of situating self in the place/Ba of interaction between the Japanese and American
English speakers, Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 636-662.
Fujii, Y. and M. Kim. 2014. A cultural and linguistic study of task-based interaction – a comparative analysis
of Japanese, Korean, and English. Ide. S and Y. Fujii (eds.) Emancipatory Pragmatics – Culture, Interaction,
Language. Tokyo: Kuroshio Shuppan. pp. 57-90.
Hanks, et. al. 2019. Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to
language practice. Journal of Pragmatics 145, 63-71.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The fun of repeating: How Japanese speakers jointly engage in


conversational playfulness

Panel contribution

Dr. Saeko Machi 1


1. Rikkyo University

This study examines how Japanese interactants repeat each other’s humorous expressions to jointly engage in
conversational playfulness, and hence create an interpersonal connection. Repetition of another’s utterance,
or cross-speaker repetition, is prominent in Japanese conversation, fulfilling various important functions to
manage a smooth conversation as well as interactants’ harmonious relationships (Machi, 2021). This study
focuses on its yet underexplored aspect—the entertaining aspect—to underscore the significance of the device
in Japanese conversation.
Previous research on humor has claimed that Japanese humor is different from that of American or British
English in terms of the context where humor is produced, its purpose, as well as the rhetoric. According to
Takekuro (2006) and Oshima (2013), while English jokes appear in formal business settings or even between
strangers as well as close friends, Japanese jokes appear only within close personal and familial relationships.
As for the purpose of jokes, it has been reported that English jokes are told as an ice breaker or expression
of identity and sense of humor, whereas Japanese jokes and humor are shared among close friends to index
and reinforce their solidarity (Oshima, 2013; Zawiszová, 2021). Additionally, what is equally noteworthy is
the rhetorical difference between Japanese and English humor. According to Takekuro (2006), in English jokes,
speakers creatively and wittily introduce new informational material in the punch line to make them humorous.
In Japanese jokes, in contrast, interactants pay close attention to words and phrases used in each other’s previous
utterances and refer back to them to make a joke or a word play. This rhetorical difference is meaningful as it
suggests that cross-speaker repetition might be a key device in understanding Japanese style of humor.
To build on the previous research, this study analyzes cross-speaker repetition in seemingly playful exchanges,
utilizing six triadic conversations taken from a Japanese TV talk show. The study demonstrates how Japanese
interactants, instead of using ready-made jokes or imaginative jokes that have a different context, jointly engage
in playfulness by closely attending to each other’s humorous expressions that are rooted in the given ba (space)
of a conversation and sharing them in the form of repetition. The study shows that cross-speaker repetition
performs in five different ways—1) tease, 2) reaction to a tease, 3) savoring echo, 4) developing humor, and 5)
enjoyment of repetition. By employing these five types of repetition, interactants interweave their playful utter-
ances and jointly create a lively and amusing atmosphere as well as a sense of connectedness among themselves
in an ever-shifting flow of conversation. The study further explores why the device of repetition, which is often
associated with boredom in some Western languages, can be entertaining and conducive to interactants’ inter-
personal connection in Japanese by referring to the concept of ba and its related ideas of mutual dependency
and non-separation of self and other. The study reinforces how Japanese interactants value the state of oneness
or connectedness in the given space of a conversation and pursue it through cross-speaker repetition.

365
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Usage of Self-reference Terms in Japanese: An


Interpretation Based on Ba Theory

Panel contribution

Dr. Kishiko Ueno 1


1. Tokyo City University

The Japanese language has a variety of self-reference terms (corresponding to “I”), such as watashi, watakushi,
boku, and ore, each differing in social indexicality, the choice of which depends on the speaker’s age, gender,
topics, and situations where they are used. This study regards the speaker’s choice of self-reference terms as a
representation of “interactional modality” and explicates it in terms of ba theory.
As the panel proposal indicates, the concept of interactional modality assumes that “speakers employ language
to express not only propositional content but also their own attitudes toward the content and their addressees”
and, more importantly, emphasizes that “such attitudes are highly ephmereal and constantly in flux as interac-
tion unfolds.” This approach is based on ba theory, which assumes “all aspects of contexts starting in a state of
non-separation” and thus allows us to explore how taken-for-granted self-other distinctions “emerge from and
sometimes dissolve through social interaction.”
The current study analyzes some excerpts of conversation in which shifts in self-reference terms are observed.
One of the excerpts to be analyzed comes from a TV program in which Hanyu, the winner of the 2018 Winter
Olympics figure skating competition, and Uno, the runner-up, are being interviewed by the presenter. Hanyu
intuitively shifts his choice of self-referent terms between boku and ore. Both terms are used mainly by men, but
ore sounds more masculine and is often used in casual situations with an equal or junior partner, while boku
sounds more neutral and can be used even in formal situations with a superior partner. Hanyu’s usage of boku
and ore accords with the ever-changing context of the interview, representing international modality—that is,
his constantly changing attitudes toward the propositional content, the addressee(s), and the assumed audience
behind the camera. Based on ba theory, this phenomenon can be further explicated in terms of the articulation
of self and, thus, the emergence of self-other distinction, which underlies all language use and social interaction.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Why Emancipatory Pragmatics, Why ba-theory, and why


interactional modality?

Panel contribution

Dr. Scott Saft 1


1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

This presentation explains why the major concepts promoted through this panel, particularly, Emancipatory
Pragmatics, ba-theory, and interactional modality, are essential to extending our understanding of language
usage within the field of Pragmatics. Toward such an explanation, the presentation features a critique, more
generally, of the approach to context commonly employed in pragmatic research and, more narrowly, of the
conception typically adopted of the individual as an autonomous social actor that is easily distinguishable within
a context. It will be argued that such an approach, which derives from Euro-American thought, serves as an
impediment to achieving a deeper grasp of how language is used throughout the world’s languages.
As an alternative, this presentation offers ba-theory as an approach to context that views all aspects of any sit-
uation, including people, as beginning in a state of non-separation and nothingness. Ba-theory derives from
the Japanese concepts of ba and basho (both usually translated into English as “field” and/or “context”) and
possesses a “consciously Asian register” that links to both Zen Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism (Hanks et al.,
2019). It is particularly this side of ba-theory that distinguishes it from Euro-American thought and that encour-
ages a ba-theory approach to context to consider interaction, including the individual bodies and identities of
the participants, as emergent from states of non-separation, nothingness, and impermanence. Ba-theory, it is
argued, also requires researchers to extend beyond concepts such as discourse modality, which typically see
language as generated from individual speakers, to an interactional modality that examines language and non-
verbal behaviors as they emerge from ba. A concept such as interactional modality, it is argued, is essential
to our understanding of the processes through which language and linguistic categories emerge from social
interaction.
To support the claims of this presentation, examples are given from two non-Euro-American languages,
Japanese and Hawaiian, to demonstrate that aspects of of language, particularly pronouns and possessive forms,
can leave speakers in states of non-separation within an unfolding ba. Additionally, the argument is made that
ba-theory and interactional modality have the potential to widen our understanding of the way interaction
works in a Euro-American language such as English. Through these examples, this presentation hopes to facili-
tate a critical discussion of context that will advance the agenda of Emancipatory Pragmatics, namely, to attain a
more comprehensive understanding of how language is employed in the diverse set of languages that populate
the world.

367
Embodied and linguistic
repair practices in
atypical child-adult
interaction (organized by
Minna Laakso, Barbara A.
Fox)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversational repair in child-adult interaction of children


speaking L1 or L2

Panel contribution

Prof. Minna Laakso 1 , Ms. Minea Tikkanen 1


1. University of Helsinki

This paper compares repair organization in child-adult interaction involving children who were using Finnish
as their first (L1) or second (L2) language. Five of the children were monolingual and five multilingual with
immigrant background. Multilingual children had lived in Finland for at least two years, and were attend-
ing Finnish speaking day care. All children were videotaped for one hour in dyadic interaction with an adult
who was a native speaker of Finnish. The data (10 hours) was studied using ethnomethodological conversa-
tion analysis. In the analysis, self- and other-initiated repair phenomena were identified and annotated with
ELAN software. Also embodied visual practices during conversational repair sequences were annotated and
examined.
Preliminary results of the analyses showed more trouble sources and repair sequences in the interactions of
children using L2 compared to children using their L1. Repair sequences were also longer in L2 interactions. In
L1 interactions 2/3 of repair sequences were swift self-initiated self-repairs within one turn, whereas in L2 in-
teractions 2/3 of repair sequences took four or more turns. Regarding self-repair, word searching was common
by children speaking L2, whereas L1 children most often self-repaired their speech by replacing, abandoning,
or adding. Adults made other-initiations of repair more often with children using their L2 than L1. L2 children
responded to adults’ other-initiations by repeating their prior turn, or accepting the candidate offered by the
adult, whereas L1 children also clarified their prior turns in more detail. The linguistic construction of speaking
turns was the most common trouble source both in L1 and L2 interactions.
Regarding embodied practices during repair sequences, descriptive hand gestures were much more frequently
used by children using their L2 compared to children using L1. Similarly, adults interacting with L2 children
used hand gestures and other multimodal resources more often than adults interacting with L1 children. This
finding suggests that embodied visual practices may enhance intersubjective understanding in L2 interaction.
Typical combinations of embodied and linguistic repair practices in L1 and L2 interactions will be the main
focus of the presentation, and their significance for developing language will be discussed.

369
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Embodied and linguistic repair practices in in


non-institutional play and language assessment by 5 to
6-yers-old children with developmental language disorder and
typical language development

Panel contribution

Dr. Inkeri Salmenlinna 1 , Prof. Minna Laakso 1


1. University of Helsinki

This study focuses on self- and other-initiated repair practices in child-adult interaction involving children with
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typically developing children aged 5 to 6 years. The data consist
of videotaped play interactions (child-parent) and language assessment interactions. All repair sequences in
which children used self-initiated self-repair (SIR) or other-initiations of repair (OIR) were identified following
the conventions of conversation analysis (based on turn units and sequential structure of the conversation).
All repair sequences were annotated following the annotation template developed in the COMPAIR research
project (2020-2024). The template included verbal turn units, the length of repair sequences (number of turns
and duration), parts of the repair sequence, the types of SIRs and OIRs, gaze, and gestures of face, body and
hands. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis were utilized to compare children’s SIRs and OIRs in different
interactions.
The distribution of SIR and OIR indicates that SIR was more common than OIR both among children with DLD
and with typical development. However, children with DLD used more and longer SIR than typically developing
children in play interaction. This can be explained by the difficulties that children with DLD have in word finding
and speaking. In non-institutional play interactions, all the children used OIRs in a similar way. The problems
were solved smoothly: The OIR sequences consisted mainly of a short insertion sequence of two turns. In
language assessment children with DLD used more OIRs than in non-institutional play, and the use of embodied
means as part of the OIR was more common. There was also a difference in the problems that the children
with DLD were dealing with in non-institutional play interaction and in language assessment sessions. These
findings indicate that children’s use of SIRs and OIRs might partly reflect the problems they face in different
interactions.

370
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Using video-based motion tracking to track movement during


repair practices in child-adult interaction.

Panel contribution

Dr. Satu Saalasti 1 , Dr. Jaakko Kauramäki 1 , Prof. Minna Laakso 1


1. University of Helsinki

Problems of mutual understanding in natural conversation may be repaired with embodied (also called mul-
timodal, visual bodily or embodied) practices. Recent research suggests that there are subtle differences in
embodied repair practices during self- (SIR) and other initiated repair (OIR). In OIR-sequences the embodied
focus is on upper body, head, facial expressions and gaze. In SIR, and in word search in particular, hand ges-
tures are more typical. Interestingly, the embodied practices occur early in the repair sequence, in SIR even pre
trouble source. However, some more holistic phenomena may be difficult to examine with human eye, for ex-
ample inter-personal synchrony of movement or kinematic entrainment. Recently, video-based motion tracking
methods have become more common in studying movement in interaction. We aimed to find out how to take
advantage of these advancements to complement theoretically informed conversational analytic information.
First, we aimed to study if movement of dyads in real-life videos can be quantified with machine learning based
algorithm. Furthermore, we explored whether movement in repair sequences differed from movement in other
kinds of interactional sequences.
Data were two corpuses of dyadic adult–child interaction. In the first datasets eight parent-child dyads were
filmed twice (16 videos) while reading the same book (duration 3–5 min) and in the second dataset 20 videos (10–
12 min) of parent-child dyads were playing with a playhouse. The videos were annotated with ELAN software
according to a template developed for COMPAIR project, and these annotations were used to identify time points
of linguistic repair sequences, both SIR and OIR. Then we estimated the poses of individuals in the videos by
running OpenPose pipeline (Cao et al., 2018), which recognizes the poses of humans frame-by-frame. The data
obtained by the algorithm was further processed to extract the movements of the child and the parent. This
allowed us to investigate the dynamic change of children’s and parents’ poses, individually and how postural
attributes relate to each other. Next, these data were combined with annotations, to explore movement 10 s
before repair onset and 10 s after repair offset.
In the presentation we will share our experiences in utilizing machine learning based pose estimation algorithm
to quantifying movement related to embodied practices during repair sequences. We also share some recom-
mendations for optimal video recording enabling successful analysis. We found that hand and body movement
can be reliably estimated. When we examined how the postural attributes were related to each other, we found
that the combined activation of parents and children was somewhat heightened 10 s prior to repair onset. We
conclude that using video-based motion tracking presented here may complement findings from human anno-
tated conversational analysis.

371
Emerging otherness in
social interactions:
Multimodal and
multicultural approaches
(organized by Keiko
Tsuchiya, Valentina
Fantasia)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An interaction among governmental policies, communities


and individuals with developmental difficulties in England

Panel contribution

Dr. Kyoko Aizaki 1


1. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

In many countries, the population of individuals identified with ASD has been growing. However, research
has established that adults with ASD, including those with and without accompanying intellectual impairment,
are at risk of experiencing high rates of unemployment and social isolation when compared to individuals
with other disabilities or those without a disability (Hedley et al. 2016). This had led governments to set out
social policies to support this population and their access to education, employment, and society in general.
What remains unclear is how such policies are experienced by the individuals and families they are intended
to support.
The researcher interviewed four adults with ASD and four parents who have children with ASD in the UK,
which has established provisions for individuals with ASD. These covered their personal experiences of having,
or being a parent to someone with, ASD, such as [1] diagnostic process, [2] impacts on relationships with their
relatives, friends or colleagues, [3] financial situation including employment, and [4] education. The interviews
were transcribed and analysed thematically to identify recurring themes, topics and ideas. From this analy-
sis, salient social aspects which impact on individuals with ASD were identified. It explores, for instance, the
relationships between this group and local communities and peer groups within other communities.
The findings suggest that the diagnosis system and its costs, both financial and logistical, are borne by individ-
uals with ASD and/or their families. The families of people with ASD may limit opportunities to socialise with
other local community members and/or may even be discriminated against by the community. They reported a
struggle to find employment, insufficient employment support and, consequently, problems with coping finan-
cially. The major consequence of this was that they were prevented from living independently. This created a
gap between the aspirations of the policies and their outcomes. However, a further consequence of such expe-
riences was that they motivated the creation of groups and communities among individuals with ASD. Conse-
quently, these individuals with ASD and their parents were positioned as either representatives of, or powerful
decision-makers, of informal networks beyond legal provision.

373
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Bodies, languages, and other material conditions on migrant


students’ interactions in Brazilian High Education

Panel contribution

Prof. Joana Plaza Pinto 1


1. Universidade Federal de Goiás

This paper discusses a theoretical and analytical basis to approach how bodies and languages are involved in
the material conditions of interactions. This approach was developed during a longitudinal ethnography on the
interconnections of bodies and daily basis metapragmatics among migrant students in Brazilian High Educa-
tion. The students migrated through a cooperation program between Brazil and Global Southern countries, in
which they undertake full undergraduate studies at Brazilian public universities free of charge. Although the
majority are non-white women, the profile is diverse in terms of countries of origin, undergraduate courses
and known languages. During the collaborative activities registered in the ethnography, the analysis showed
the interaction is regulated by heterogeneous parameters, which dispute the meaning and legitimacy of lan-
guages and bodies uses and establish material resources’ hierarchies of interpretation. This regulation creates
conditions to permissions, stimuli, interdictions, or punishments of practices in the migrant students’ networks.
By analyzing the migrant students’ interactions, this paper argues that the material conditions are differently
distributed in global populations. Geopolitical and historical dynamics affect bodies, affect the intersubjective
and interactional processes of bodies, and together they all affect acts of speech that only exist because of bodies.
This means language is triggered, but other material resources may be more important in a given interaction
– bodies, objects, spatiality &c. These decisions are not made in a homogeneous way by all the people partic-
ipating in the interaction, since the control of decisions about what counts as an interpretable resource in a
given interaction depends on power structures, interests, previous hierarchies, and differences at play. Fol-
lowing these analytical insights, several categories are brought together from different fields to approach the
metonymic relation between languages, bodies, and other material conditions in interaction. A pragmatic basis
for language materiality (Scollon & Scollon 2003; Silverstein 1993, 2003) and a feminist approach to bodies con-
structions (Anzaldúa 1999, Butler 2004, Povinelli 1999, 2011) are the key fields for this critical endeavor, helping
to re-thinking the conditions governing the interaction with alternating patterns in the modern/colonial world-
system (Wallerstein 2004). These patterns are structured layers: 1) of geopolitical and historical dynamics that
work on the body; 2) of intersubjective and interactional processes that make the body work; and 3) of linguistic
processes that depend on the body to work.
Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands/ La Frontera (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Povinelli, E. A. (1999). Grammaires intimes. Langage, subjectivité et genre. Anthropologie et Sociétés, pp. 121-
147.
Povinelli, E. A. (2011). Economies of abandonment: social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place. Language in the material world. New York: Routledge.
Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In J. Lucy, Reflexive language,
reported speech and metapragmatics (pp. 33-58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, pp.
193-229.
Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-systems analysis: an introduction. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

374
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emerging intersubjectivity in multicultural interactions: The


diversification of interactional resources in second language
Spanish

Panel contribution

Mr. Victor Garre Leon 1


1. The University of Texas at Austin

This study investigates the developmental trajectories of second language (L2) learners’ interactional resources
occurring in interactions with native speakers (NSs) of Spanish. Focusing on the emergence of intersubjectivity
between interactants following EMCA (ethnomethodological conversation analysis) and discursive-pragmatics
approaches, I analyze language acquisition as it emerges through use in interactions with others (De Bot, Lowie,
& Verspoor, 2007). Despite many qualitative studies after the ‘social turn’ (Block, 2003; Firth & Wagner, 1997) in
second language acquisition (SLA), there is a dearth of research on the development of interactional competence
from a socially-oriented perspective, and research dealing with longitudinal perspectives on intersubjectivity
has only recently started to appear (Lindström, Laury, Peräkylä, & Sorjonen, 2021; Pekarek Doehler & Eskildsen,
2022). By analyzing how meaning in talk-in-interaction is co-constructed and jointly achieved by participants
to establish common ground (Clark, 1996), and following the call to study L2 interactional competence from a
longitudinal perspective (Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018; Pekarek Doehler & Eskildsen, 2022), I submit that
research on L2 social interaction should investigate what resources both L2 and native speakers deploy in in-
teraction as they develop a dialogic ‘habitus’ over time (Bourdieu, 1977). As such, this presentation sheds light
on how Spanish L2 learners’ interactional competence resources develop to co-construct a so-called ‘sphere of
intersubjectivity’ (Kramsch, 1986) with their interlocutors. Because intersubjectivity must be “achieved, moni-
tored and maintained in the sequential course of interaction” (Sorjonen, Peräkylä, Laury, & Lindström, 2021, p.
19), in this presentation I show how it emerges in multicultural interactions by analyzing L2 learners’ resources
to employ (i) appropriate speech acts, (ii) turn-taking, (iii) topic management, and (iv) repair strategies in the
interaction. The research questions guiding the study are the following:

1. How do interlocutors establish and maintain intersubjectivity in multicultural settings over time?
2. How are interactional resources exploited in the process of establishing intersubjectivity in interaction?
How do these resources evolve over time in L2-NS interactions?

The study design is longitudinal in nature, comparing six intermediate-level L2 Spanish learners speaking with
native speakers. Each dyad completed four semi-elicited conversation tasks (Nguyen, 2017, 2019) collected
throughout a semester to account for a stepwise progression of interactional resources over multiple collection
times. The qualitative data were analyzed with the software NVivo using conversation-analytic tools (Schegloff,
2007; Schegloff et al., 1977).
Results showed L2 learners’ functional diversification of interactional and multimodal resources over time,
revealing how these speakers gradually deployed interactional strategies to carry out more effective sequences
in acts involving requests, humor, listener responses, and postures as they become familiar with their NS in-
terlocutors. Over time, L2 learners expanded their strategies to deploy more extended turns at talk to avoid
interactional trouble, showing also how the interlocutor shaped the learners’ talk and identity to promote in-
tersubjective understanding during the interactions. These findings have implications providing further under-
standing of language learning and language use as a situated and co-constructed social practice, where being
interactionally competent in another language entails engaging in joint action with others in locally adaptive
ways.

375
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal construction of pretend play interactions in


kindergarten children

Panel contribution

Dr. Valentina Fantasia 1 , Dr. Arianna Bello 2


1. Lund University, 2. Università Roma 3

Pretend play is usually defined as an activity wherein objects and actions (but also affective expression, at
times) are separated from their original meanings. Its developmental appearance is set around the second year
of life, when kids show brief pretend gestures and engage in object substitutions (Jackowitz, Watson 1980).
Pretense then increases dramatically in duration, frequency and quality when play episodes start becoming
more complex, both linguistically and interactionally (Piaget 1945), to reach its peak in preschool years (Smith,
Lillard 2012). From a sociocultural perspective, imaginative play is regarded as a fundamentally social and
culturally constructed activity (Gaskins 1999, 2013); an activity in which imaginative or make-belief realities are
built upon and developed through the shared coordination of meanings (Giffin 1984). Within this perspective,
the broadest socio-cultural environment shapes the quality and content of the pretense scenarios, crafting ways
and opportunities to participate in it. To date, however, little attention has been devoted to investigating the
developmental foundation of pretend play such as early non-verbal pretense activities among toddlers (Fantasia
& Nomikou, 2022).
Our study focuses on early social pretend play, aiming at investigating early spontaneous pretend play interac-
tions occurring in two small groups of Italian kindergarten children (aged 20-28 months) during six observation
sessions (31 episodes in tot). Along with behavioural descriptions of the most frequent social pretend activities
children engaged in (e. g. cooking with toy food and utensils, nursing and caring for babydolls, or play pretend
characters by using clothing to dress up), we used multimodal micro-analyses on video-recorded group inter-
actions to uncover children’s use of non-verbal resources (gestures, facial expressions, spatial configuration,
verbalization) to coordinate play episodes, e.g. in terms of negotiation and repairs.
Our preliminary results showed two distinct aspects in how children engaged in and managed the pretend
play episodes: 1) in different degrees, all children in the two groups individually played with pretend toys in
functional ways, that is, they used objects in their standard function (e.g., cooking or eating toy vegetables in
pans or plates). However, they rarely engaged others on this type of play. At the same time, however, 2) episodes
of parallel pretend play, wherein children played with toys on their own but willingly coordinated actions and
communications in a shared interactional space, emerged frequently and lasted longer. In particular, we found
that children displayed a wide array of multimodal resources to negotiate not only what toys they chose or used,
but also the shared spaces (e.g. the toy kitchen, the dressing/costumes area) in sequentially organised, situated
ways. For instance, they did so by making relevant or sustaining particular participatory frameworks over
others, thus constructing shared play spaces and formats; by re-cycling and building on others’ previous moves
or behavioural displays; by verbally marking transitions from one activity to one another. These findings seem
to support a view of social pretend play as an early social activity constructed through situated and embodied
shared meaning-making practices.

376
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prosodic variations in everyday interaction and how they


guide social decision-making

Panel contribution

Dr. Jonathan Caballero 1


1. Independent Researcher

Prosody refers to the set of suprasegmental cues in speech and can provide a plethora of relevant information
to guide social interaction in everyday life. The richness of social cues that it conveys makes it a fruitful area
of inquiry to understand better how and why we react to these seemingly “hidden” cues, and how they influ-
ence the way in which people regulate their social behavior. This work summarizes common types of socially
relevant information that prosody conveys in everyday interaction and describes how game theory and exper-
imental games – widely used theoretical and methodological approaches in cognitive science and behavioral
economics – can be used to test the effects of prosody on social interaction. Because these methodologies in-
tend to model key characteristics of social interaction, such as the interdependence of outcomes of interacting
social agents, they constitute a flexible methodology that can be adapted to simple and complex experimental
designs in basic research and applied scenarios. To illustrate it, we summarize the results of studies using this
approach to research a) how emotional cues in prosody influence listeners’ behavioral tendencies, b) how ac-
cents influence listeners’ social behavior towards the speakers, and c) how individuals with Parkinson’s Disease
use social information conveyed by prosody to guide social decision-making. Because it is intended to provide
a concrete illustration of how experimental games can be adapted to study a variety of topics, we focus on key
considerations for using this methodology to tackle linguistic and pragmatic research questions rather than
going in-depth into the minutiae of the examples themselves.

377
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When a proposal is rejected: Distributing deontic rights in


emergency care team interactions in Japan and the UK

Panel contribution

Dr. Keiko Tsuchiya 1 , Prof. Kyota Nakamura 2 , Prof. Frank Coffey 3


1. Yokohama City University, 2. Yokohama City University Medical Centre, 3. Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust

Emergency care involves dynamic complexity, where a multidisciplinary team collaborates to conduct medical
procedures, making numerous decisions for ascribing joint actions under time pressure. Joint decision making
in team interaction is key to successful health care as described with the terms, team talk (Sarangi, 2016) and
collective competence (Lingard, 2012). In such context, the leader’s rejection to a colleague’s proposal could
happen, which could be face-threatening (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1955).
In line with the argument, this panel presentation reports a multimodal analysis on team interactions in emer-
gency care simulation in two different sociocultural contexts, Japan and the UK, capturing the moment when
a team leader rejects a member’s proposal of future actions. Drawing on the notion of deontic authority (Ste-
vanovic & Peräkylä, 2012), the negotiation of their deonticity and epistemicity in interprofessional (intercul-
tural) communication is cross-culturally investigated.
Four simulation training sessions (two each in both sites) were filmed with video cameras and an eye-tracking
device, which was worn by the team leader. In the four data sets, about 50 occurrences of members’ proposals
were identified, most of which were accepted by the leader, distributing the agency and deontic rights to team
members. On few occasions, members’ proposals were rejected, most of which accompanied the leader’s ac-
counting, displaying his epistemic primacy and deontic reasoning. With providing accounts, the leaders seemed
to simultaneously reassure the proposers’ legitimacy and responsibility to contribute to joint decision making,
which is a shared practice observed in the trauma team interactions in the two distinctive sociocultural contexts.
However, a difference in the team dynamics was foregrounded through the practices of the Japanese and the
British leaders’ rejection; the deontic rights were given to a proposer in the former while they were distributed
by the leader in the latter.
References
Brown, P., & Levinson, S., C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry, 18, 213-231.
Lingard, L. (2012). Rethinking Competence in the Context of Teamwork. In B. Hodges, D. & L. Lingard (Eds.),
The Question of Competence: Reconsidering Medical Education in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 42-69). Cornell
University Press.
Sarangi, S. (2016). Editorial: Teamwork and team talk as distributed and coordinated action in healthcare de-
livery. Communication and Medicine, 13(1), 1-7.
Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2012). Deontic authority in interaction: The right to announce, propose, and
decide. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 45(3), 297-321.

378
English address terms in
a globalized world.
Socio-cultural impact on
recent language variation
and change (organized by
Svenja Kranich, Anke
Lensch)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Change and variation in address terms during oral arguments


at the U.S. American Supreme Court

Panel contribution

Dr. Elisabeth Reber 1


1. University of Bonn

On the official website of the United States Courts, the opening of an oral argument at the U.S. American Supreme
Court (SCOTUS) is described as follows: “After the Court is seated, the Chief Justice acknowledges counsel for
the petitioner, who already is standing at the podium. The attorney then begins: ‘Mr. Chief Justice, and may
it please the Court . . . .’ ” The website continues: “Only the Chief Justice is addressed as Mr. Chief Justice.
Others are addressed as ‘Justice Scalia,’ ‘Justice Ginsburg,’ or ‘Your Honor.’ ” (https://www.uscourts.gov/about-
federal-courts/educational-resources/about-educational-outreach/activity-resources/supreme-1) This quotation
shows that in oral arguments, terms of address should be used in normative ways defined by the institution.
In the history of English, nominal terms of address have been generally described as resources to calibrate
interpersonal relations, ranging from “nicknames and terms of endearment” to “terms of abuse” and “formal
terms of address”, and have been considered as markers of in/formality and im/politeness (Taavitsainen / Jucker
2016). The study of institutional interaction has found that nominal terms of address serve functions depending
on the speakers’ institutional roles, e.g., in news interviews (e.g., Clayman 2012, Margutti 2022, Rendle-Short
2007).
This paper offers a diachronic, interactional study of the forms and functions of address terms in SCOTUS oral ar-
guments and examines how these verbal practices of address may have undergone change between 1960-2019.
The analysis is grounded in a self-compiled, machine-readable database of audio recordings and corresponding
transcripts which allows for a mixed approach involving corpus-linguistic and interactional linguistic method-
ologies. A first analysis revealed a varied set of nominal address terms for 1) justices: honorifics (“Your Honor”,
“Sir”, “Ma’am”), professional title (“Judge”), Mr + professional title (“Mr Chief Justice”), and professional title +
surname (e.g., “Justice Ginsburg”), 2) counsels: Mr / Ms + surname (e.g., “Ms Blatt”), and professional title (“Coun-
sel”), and 3) collective recipiency (“gentlemen”). Based on these observations, we ask: What is the distribution
of these nominal address terms? Have they changed in terms of their relative frequency and use since 1960?
Specifically, how do the counsels address the Justices? The data suggest that the use of professional titles such
as “Mr Chief Justice” shows a higher relative frequency than that of the honorific “Sir” and a greater increase
over time. These address terms tend to be used together with minimal response tokens (“Yes / No, Sir”) or in
ritualized structures (e.g., “(Thank you) Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court”) in the question-answer
sequences during the oral arguments.
Clayman, Steven E. 2012. “Address terms in the organization of turns at talk: The case of pivotal turn extensions”,
Journal of Pragmatics 44(13): 1853–1867.
Margutti, Piera. 2022. The multiple constraints of addressed questions in whole-class interaction: Responses
from unaddressed pupils. Discourse Studies 24(5): 612–639.
Rendle-Short, Johanna. 2007. “Catherine, you’re wasting your time”: Address terms within the Australian polit-
ical interview. Journal of Pragmatics 39(9): 1503–1525.
Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker. 2016. Forms of address. In Carole Hough (ed.), Oxford Handbook of
Names and Naming, 427-437. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

380
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Connecting socio-cultural developments and language change:


Recent variation in gender-inclusivity in the USA and the UK

Panel contribution

Ms. Hanna Bruns 1


1. University of Bonn

Linguistic studies on the topic of gender-fair address and reference indicate that attitudes are becoming more
positive (cf. Sarrasin, Gabriel & Gygax 2012) and that gender-inclusive forms are used more frequently over
time (e.g., Baranowski 2002). Furthermore, variational studies indicate that AmE is more conservative than
BrE in regards to their use (Adami 2009). This development is often discussed in the context of socio-cultural
changes: e.g., Baker (2010: 144) connects his results on changes in gendered address to Mair’s (2006) idea of
democratisation and colloquialisation.
This study aims at making this connection more explicit: in order to find out how the development of gender-
fair language use compares across cultures and over time, the frequencies of generic referentials, pronouns,
and gendered occupational titles are traced in a corpus study. To further shed light on any trends from the
quantitative analysis, the data will also be examined through a qualitative lens. Then, developments in the use
of individual forms are contextualised by tracing changes in socio-cultural norms regarding specific groups (e.g.
police officers).
The corpora used for the analysis belong to the BROWN family corpora: first, a small, balanced sample-corpus
of the BROWN family corpora is examined, and then the full versions of the corpora: BROWN & LOB (1961),
FROWN & FLOB (1991), and BE06 & AME06 (2006) as well as the newly created BE2021 (2021). Socio-cultural de-
velopments regarding specific groups of people are traced by making use of official statistics and public debates
on the topic.
The results indicate that the use of gender-fair language is very much context- and item-constrained and that
developments in BrE and AmE previously observed may need to be re-evaluated from this more context-bound
perspective. One such instance is the use of gender-inclusive pronouns and occupational titles: while the
trajectory of use of inclusive singular they has been rising steadily since the 1960s in both cultures – with
BrE in the lead, BrE turns out to be much more conservative than AmE when it comes to the use of inclusive
occupational titles. What is more, the analysis reveals that individual occupational terms behave very
differently even within one culture. The look into socio-cultural developments regarding specific groups may
help to determine reasons for the change in use of certain terms and structures.

Adami, E. (2009). To each reader his, their or her own pronoun: prescribed, proscribed and disregarded uses of
generic pronouns in English. In A. Renouf & A. Kehoe (Eds.), Corpus linguistics: Refinements and reassessments
(pp. 281–308). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Baker, P. (2010). Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four
diachronic corpora of British English. Gender and Language, 4(1), 125–149.
Baranowski, M. (2002). Current usage of the epicene pronoun in written English. Journal of Sociolinguistics,
6(3), 378–397.

Mair, C. (2006). Twentieth-century English: History, variation and standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Sarrasin, O., Gabriel, U., & Gygax, P. (2012). Sexism and attitudes toward gender-neutral language: The case of
English, French, and German. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 71(3), 113–124.

381
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Democratization effects on nominal address terms – Sir and


Guys in 20th and 21st century American English

Panel contribution

Prof. Svenja Kranich 1 , Ms. Hanna Bruns 2


1. Universität Bonn, 2. University of Bonn

Democratization, a tendency gaining ground since the 1960s in many societies, tends to be reflected in linguistic
practices that increasingly avoid stressing hierarchical differences (cf. Farrelly & Seoane 2012: 393) and may
thus be visible, among other areas, in a decline in formal address (titles and last name) and an increase in more
colloquial forms of address (cf. Leech 2014: 293).
The present paper focuses on general changes in the use of generic address and reference terms, such as sir,
madam, dude, for singular addressees, and ladies and gentlemen, guys for a group of addressees using the Cor-
pus of Historical American English (focusing on the 1900s-2010s). The first hypothesis, that formal terms are
decreasing and informal terms are increasing, is clearly borne out: comparing 1900-1909 to 2010-2019, sir de-
creases by more than half, while guys rises dramatically from 0.55 to 241.36 per a million words.
Our second hypothesis posits that this is due to a loss of acceptable contexts for more formal terms and an
increase of contexts where informal terms have become the norm, both occurring as a consequence of democ-
ratization. Based on a random sample of sir and guys from different decades (1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2010 – each
200 instances per term, with a total of around 2000 instances), we have classified speaker-addressee relations,
based on Buyle (2021), to investigate the type of power and distance relation that exists in speaker-addressee
pairings. The qualitative analysis conducted supports the hypothesis of an ever-increasing range of situations
in which guys is acceptable, showing its trajectory from an informal and highly colloquial address term in the
early 20th century to a term acceptable in various neutral contexts in present-day American English. At the same
time, we can observe a growing restriction in the range of acceptable contexts for sir, the latter moving from
very wide-spread in all types of constellations to its restricted niche of +P interactions, especially formal power
contexts, such as the military or police.
References
Buyle, A. (2021). Between grammar and pragmatics: Social deixis in English address terms and directives. [Un-
published doctoral dissertation]. KU Leuven.
Farrelly, M., & Seoane, E. (2012). Democratization. In T. Nevalainen & E. C. Traugott (Eds.), The Oxford handbook
of the history of English (pp. 392–401). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leech, G. N. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

382
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hi bestie! Address terms in communication between fashion


companies and their customers on Instagram

Panel contribution

Dr. Minna Nevala 1 , Dr. Hanna Limatius 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Vaasa

In social media discussions, people are often categorized on the basis of positive and negative values, beliefs, or
practices into disparate sociocultural groups (cf. Moscovici 1984; van Leeuwen 2008). In this paper we will study
how Instagram (IG) creates social circumstances for interaction between companies and customers, i.e. the ways
in which three fashion brands address their customers in IG comments and captions. We focus on politeness
theory, and positive politeness markers such as the use of first names, nicknames and friendship/endearment
terms (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987; Nevala 2010). In addition to claiming common ground, the speaker usually
wants to convey that the speaker and hearer are cooperators. In other words, positive politeness involves show-
ing in-group membership, and it is one of the linguistic strategies IG posters commonly use to approach their
followers. In general, friendliness and involvement are an important feature of understandings of politeness
particularly in the context of Anglo-centered social media (Culpeper, O’Driscoll & Hardaker 2019).
Our data consist of IG posts collected from the official accounts of three international fashion brands that pro-
mote their products in English. The dataset includes all IG posts (including feed posts, reels and responses
to comments) published by the brands Princess Polly (Australia), Adore Me (US), and Cider (China), between 1
September and 30 November, 2022. Our analysis investigates promotional language across different geographi-
cal and cultural contexts. The companies were chosen for the analysis because they utilize social media actively
to engage with their customers and have a considerable following on IG (between 790,000 and 3.8m followers).
Our preliminary results indicate that when fashion companies directly approach their customers in their IG
posts, the majority of the terms used show positive politeness in an attempt to include followers in their in-
group. Moreover, the companies participate in drawing the boundaries of this in-group by adopting language
that emulates the language use of Instagram users, young adults in particular. The ways in which the companies
address potential customers thus create a sense of community with a particular audience (Limatius 2020) –
at the same time, however, they risk distancing themselves from customers who do not belong in the same
sociocultural group.
References
Brown, P. & S.C. Levinson (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Culpeper, J., J. O’Driscoll & C. Hardaker (2019) Notions of politeness in Britain and North America. In E. Ogier-
mann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness: Multilingual and
Multicultural Perspectives, 175–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Limatius, H. (2020) Communities of Empowerment: Exploring the Discourse Practices of Plus-Size Fashion Blog-
gers. Tampere: PunaMusta Oy, Tampere University.
Moscovici, S. (1984) The phenomenon of social representations. In R.M. Farr & S. Moscovici (eds.), Social Repre-
sentations, 3–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nevala, M. (2010) Politeness. In A.H. Jucker & I. Taavitsainen (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Pragmatics,
419–450. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
van Leeuwen, T. (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.

383
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intercultural perceptions of endearments and regional


identity in Northern England

Panel contribution

Dr. Nicole Baumgarten 1


1. University of Sheffield

The paper explores user perceptions of the usage and interactional functions of endearment ‘love’ in ‘mono-’
and intercultural communication in the UK. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire on usage and
attitude towards ‘love’.
Public stereotypes of endearment ‘love’ associate the term and its use with specific regional (’northern’), some-
times local (’Sheffield’), socio-economic (’working class’) and socio-ethic (’white’) identities, as well as with spe-
cific communicative stereotypes (’northern friendliness’). However, there is only very little research to under-
pin these perceptions.
The bulk of body of research available on address forms and practice is dominated by research on pronominal
and inflectional systems, and where nominal forms of address are considered, by a focus on ‘male’ forms such
as for example the class of English familiarisers (’mate’, ‘bro’, ‘dude’). While address terms in general have im-
portant functions for human sociality in that they are makers of social relationships and indexes of individuals’
rights and obligations interaction, these male nominal forms of address have been shown to be used to express
affiliation with, or a reworking of, larger cultural, ethnic, or national identity constructs and discourses (e.g.
‘dude’ in American English or ‘mate’ in Australian English, Kiesling 2004; Almoradian 2014). These indexicali-
ties can be strategically introduced by speakers in interaction in the pursuit of communicative goals.
Recent corpus-based research on endearment ‘love’ (Baumgarten 2021) suggests that ‘love’ is undergoing a prag-
matic shift towards indexing disaffiliative stances and becoming more generally available as a negative evalu-
ative token for non-normative behaviour. This indicates that the indexicalities around ‘love’ are changing and,
as a consequence, that the endearment may be understood and used in different ways by different groups of
people.
In order to show the extent to which endearment ‘love’ plays a role in creating local or regional identities that are
played out in communicative interaction (enregisterment, Agha 2005; Johnstone 2006), this paper specifically
addresses

• the current pragmatic scope of ‘love’ as understood by members of a wide range of socially and linguis-
tically different English language user groups in the UK;
• the availability of ‘love’ for linguistic (dialect) and social/geographical stereotyping as well as speakers’
identity work;
• the degree to which ‘love’ is claimed by ‘northern’ users as part of ‘their’ semiotic register.

Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of linguistic anthropology, 15(1), 38-59.
Alimoradian, K. (2014). ‘Makes Me Feel More Aussie’: Ethnic Identity and Vocative Mate in Australia. Australian
Journal of Linguistics, 34(4), 599-623.
Baumgarten, N. (2021). Love as a term of address in British English: Micro-diachronic variation. Contrastive
Pragmatics, 3(1), 31-58.
Johnstone, B., Andrus, J., & Danielson, A. E. (2006). Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburgh-
ese”. Journal of English linguistics, 34(2), 77-104.
Kiesling, S. F. (2004). Dude. American speech, 79(3), 281-305.

384
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The informal address term system of Sri Lankan English

Panel contribution

Dr. Tobias Bernaisch 1


1. Justus Liebig University Giessen

The first contact between English and Sri Lanka dates back to the end of the 18th century. During its more than
200-year-long Sri Lankan history, English – after a short initial period of British disregard concerning organised
language policymaking until the 1830s – became the official language of Sri Lanka, entering many spheres of
everyday communication. Even after Sri Lankan independence in 1948 and subsequent attempts to dislodge
English via the Sinhala-only policy, English remained de facto an official language and is currently defined as a
link language in the Sri Lankan constitution.
Partly rooted in its century-long evolution, Sri Lankan English (SLE) has received notable scholarly attention.
Anecdotal descriptions of the structures of SLE (e.g. Gunesekera 2005; Meyler 2007) have been complemented
with corpus-based descriptions (e.g. Bernaisch 2015), but their focus has been on SLE lexis, lexicogrammar
and/or syntax. As verbal negotiations with other speakers involving requests, expressions of gratitude, regret
etc. represent probably the integral part of our day-to-day communication and need to follow particular culture-
specific conventions to be successful, the pragmatics of SLE (and postcolonial Englishes more generally) must
be considered especially responsive to indigenisation effects. Still, pragmatic research in world Englishes is still
largely lacking, although noteworthy and statistically reliable exceptions exist – also for SLE (e.g. Degenhardt
2021; Funke 2022).
Against this background, this study investigates the SLE informal address term system. The spoken part of the
Sri Lankan component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SL; Bernaisch et al. 2019) is the empirical
basis to explore informal address terms like machang, men or dude in SLE with multifactorial statistical models
considering speaker- (e.g. age or gender) and context-related (private vs. public setting) factors with the aim of
answering the following research questions:

• What are the frequencies of the individual informal address terms used in SLE?
• What factors influence the choice of a concrete informal address term in a given communicative context
in SLE?
• To what extent can the informal address term system in SLE be considered nativised?

Localised informal address terms such as men and machang are more dominant in SLE than international forms
like bro or dude, but their frequency of occurrence is particularly sensitive to speaker-related parameters, but
only marginally to context. The quantitative insights are complemented with qualitative perspectives on indi-
vidual informal address terms to profile the nativised facets of the informal address term system of SLE.
References
Bernaisch, T. 2015. The Lexis and Lexicogrammar of Sri Lankan English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bernaisch, T., D. Mendis & J. Mukherjee. 2019. Manual to the International Corpus of English – Sri Lanka. Giessen:
Justus Liebig University, Department of English.
Degenhardt, J. 2021. Requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English. World Englishes [Early View]. 1–21.
Funke, N. 2022. Pragmatic nativisation of thanking in South Asian Englishes. World Englishes 41(2): 136–150.
Gunesekera, M. 2005. The Postcolonial Identity of Sri Lankan English. Colombo: Katha Publishers.
Meyler, M. 2007. A Dictionary of Sri Lankan English. Colombo: Mirisgala.

385
Experimental and corpus
perspectives on
(socio)pragmatics
(organized by Anne
Bezuidenhout, Andreas
Jucker)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Can expressive meaning be negotiated? Insights from a


corpus-based study on lexical expressives

Panel contribution

Ms. Mireia Cabanes-Calabuig 1


1. University of Cambridge

Expressive content is defined as a type of meaning that conveys information about the emotions, attitudes or
feelings of an agent (e.g., a speaker and/or a referent) (Kaplan, 1999). Consequently, the study of expressives
has put a strong focus on the speaker, with the hearer being relegated to a passive role in explorations on the
meaning(s) conveyed by lexical expressives (Potts, 2005, 2007; Amaral, 2018; Hess, 2019). However, theories
of interactional meaning acknowledge that communication is not just concerned with speakers intending to
convey meanings and hearers attempting to infer them. Instead, they propose and show how meanings are co-
constructed in interaction between speakers and addressees (Clark, 1996; Sanders, 1987; Arundale, 1999, 2010;
Kecsckes, 2008, 2010; Elder and Haugh, 2018). These accounts of meaning apparently clash with traditional
views on expressive meaning and pose the following question: can expressive meaning be negotiated?
The present study addresses this question using empirical data retrieved from the spoken component of the
BNC2014. A database of 1700 occurrences containing lexical expressives was retrieved and compiled. All the
occurrences and their contexts were examined with the aim of providing insights into how the expressive
meaning of lexical expressives is conveyed in real-life interactions. This examination joined theories of
meaning negotiation with my novel typology of expressives (classified as modifiers, ascriptives, referentials
and exclamatives (Cabanes-Calabuig, 2022) in order to provide a holistic account of the behaviour of lexical
expressives in communication. The talk summarises the results observed in the database about whether
expressive meaning is actually negotiated/co-constructed, how and under what circumstances, and advocates
going beyond meaning theories centred on the speaker(’s) attitudes with regards to the study of expressives.

References
Amaral, P. (2018). Expressive meaning. In F. Liedtke and A. Tuchen (eds.) Pragmatik-Handbuch (Handbook of
Pragmatics), 325-33. Metzler: Springer. 325-333.
Arundale, R. (1999). An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory.
Pragmatics, 9: 119-53.
Arundale, R. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement. Journal
of Pragmatics, 42: 2078-2105.
Cabanes-Calabuig, Mireia (2022): «Expressive ‘dimension’? Towards a redefinition of lexical expressives», Cam-
bridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 14 (2), 1-26.
Clark, H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Elder, C. and M. Haugh (2018). The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Towards a formal account
of conversational inference. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(5): 593-625.
Kaplan, D. (1999). The meaning of Ouch and Oops. Explorations in the theory of meaning as use. Ms. University
of California Los Angeles

Kecskes, I. (2008). Dueling contexts: A dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(3): 385-406.
Kecskes, I. (2010). The paradox of communication: Socio-Cognitive Approach to Pragmatics. Pragmatics and
Society, 1(1): 50-73.
Hess, L. (2019). Expressive meanings and expressive commitments – a case of meaning as use. In P. Stalmaszczyk
(ed.) Philosophical Insights into Pragmatics. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 193-223.

387
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Potts, C. (2005). The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Potts, C. (2007). The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics, 33(2): 165-198.
Sanders, R. (1987). Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech. Albany: State University of New York Press.

388
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Identifying the core genre-related components of online


discourses: Experimental and qualitative corpus analytical
methods

Panel contribution

Ms. Júlia Ballagó 1


1. Eötvös Loránd University

The issue of genre is getting increasing attention in recent scholarly discourse in the field of internet pragmatics
(cf. Gruber 2019; Herring, Stein, and Virtanen eds. 2013). The talk reports on an empirical study that strives
to (i) provide experimental and corpus-based evidence for the proactive nature of the functioning of genre
knowledge, and (ii) offer a well-grounded methodology for identifying the core genre-related components of
discourses. The study rests on the theoretical assumption that genres are discursive schemas and categories
that dynamically emerge in discourses. Thus, genres are knowledge types activated during the production and
processing of utterances (cf. Busse 2014; Steen 2011). However, we only have evidence for the functioning of
this knowledge from the discursive practice.
In this context, the empirical study focuses on the investigation of two specific genres in Hungarian: online
food recipes and book reviews. Regarding them, I address two central research questions: (RQ1) What are the
core components of the discursive schema of online food recipes and book reviews? (RQ2) How can we retrieve
these components from the discursive practice?
The talk answers these questions by presenting a two-pronged empirical study. On the one hand, I conducted
an experiment in which two groups of informants (25–25 persons) were asked to produce (i) “the recipe for a
good novel” and (ii) “the review of a good recipe”. As a result of contaminating the two genres under study,
informants activated the most crucial elements of their genre knowledge, i.e., aspects of construal that make a
text a recipe or review. In addition, they did not only activate this knowledge retroactively but in a creative,
proactive manner. Experimental data were analysed in MAXQDA software. The qualitative analysis focused on
the emerging patterns of linguistic construal along several criteria: structural organization of the experimental
texts, speech acts, deictic person-marking, verbal construction types, genre-related signals of metapragmatic
awareness, etc. On the other hand, I carried out the systematic analysis of a small-scale research corpus com-
prising 50 food recipes and 50 book reviews. The “authentic” online food recipes and book reviews were also
analysed in MAXQDA software along the same criteria as the experimental texts. Qualitative analyses were
supplemented with descriptive statistical data. A final comparison of the two datasets allows us to precisely
identify the core components of the discursive schema of food recipes and book reviews. The talk will primarily
focus on the presentation of the experiment.
References:
Busse, Beatrix 2014. “Genre.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, ed. by Stockwell, Peter and Sara Whiteley,
103–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gruber, Helmut. 2019. “Genres, Media, and Recontextualization Practices. Re-considering Basic Concepts of
Genre Theory in the Age of Social Media.” Internet Pragmatics 2(1): 54–82.
Herring, Susan C., Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen (eds.) 2013. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communica-
tion. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Steen, Gerard 2011. “Genre between the Humanities and Sciences.” In Bi-directionality in the Cognitive Sciences,
ed. by Callies, Marcus, Wolfram Keller, and Astrid Lohöfer, 21–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

389
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Misinformation flourishes in L2: The Effect of Processing


Disfluencies on Epistemic Vigilance

Panel contribution

Prof. Didier Maillat 1


1. University of Fribourg

Relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber & Wilson 1995, Wilson & Sperber 2012) posits a specific cognitive mod-
ule whose main function consists in assessing and filtering the pieces of information which enter the cognitive
environment of the hearer. This set of mechanisms is known as the Epistemic Vigilance filter (Sperber et al.
2010, Mercier & Sperber 2017). This filter evaluates the quality of the information conveyed by an utterance
both in terms of its content and of its source. When a given utterance is found to be deficient in one of these
two dimensions, the epistemic value of the information communicated by the utterance will be decreased. As a
result, the probability that this piece of information will be accepted in the cognitive environment of the hearer
is lowered.
Working on the impact of foreign accents on the processing of information, Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) argued
for a ‘processing fluency’ effect, whereby the un/ease with which a given piece of information is processed has
a direct negative impact on the evaluation of its source’s credibility. Within the relevance-theoretic framework,
it follows from Lev-Ari and Keysar’s claim that ‘processing fluency’ can be seen as affecting epistemic vigilance.
Specifically, processing disfluencies would lower the epistemic value of an utterance. However, Lev-Ari and
Keysar’s results have been hard to replicate (De Meo et al. 2011, Podlipský et al. 2016, Stocker 2017; see Wetzel
et al. 2021 for a discussion) casting some doubt on the effect.
In a follow-up to Lev-Ari and Keysar’s research question, we will present an experimental study in which 60
English native speakers and 60 non-native EFL participants took part in an information evaluation task to assess
the impact of processing disfluencies introduced by L2 (EFL in this instance) on epistemic vigilance. While our
results do confirm a processing fluency effect on epistemic vigilance, the effect triggered by L2 is the opposite
of that observed by Lev-Ari and Keysar. The processing disfluencies experienced by our non-native speakers
correspond to a significantly improved evaluation of the epistemic value of the information.
We will propose a relevance-theoretic account of the processing disfluency effect and of its influence on epis-
temic vigilance. Crucially, we will argue that our EFL-based, reversed replication of the processing fluency
effect can help us understand some of the contrasting results obtained in foreign-accent-based studies, as well
as some of the difficulties encountered when trying to replicate the effect. To conclude, we will discuss the im-
plications of our findings in a social environment in which the consumption of information in L2 is the norm
rather than the exception.

390
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic and social analyses of the discourse marker órale


in Mexican Spanish

Panel contribution

Ms. Elisa Camps Troncoso 1 , Dr. Lori Czerwionka 2


1. Purdue University/Duolingo, 2. Purdue University

Discourse markers (DMs) are multifunctional linguistic units that guide inferences about discourse organiza-
tion, interpersonal relationships, and stances (Heine, 2013; Schiffrin, 1987). DMs can also index social meaning
(e.g., Arnold et al., 1993; Bolden, 2006; Erman, 2001). Considering the multiple types of meanings, researchers
must engage with a variety of methods to gain more complete understanding of how a given DM functions in
discourse and society. The current project implements such an approach to examine the pragmatic functions
and social meanings of the DM órale, a salient DM in Mexican Spanish (Mejía-Gómez, 2008; Mendoza-Denton,
2011; Navarro, 2005), but one that has been seldom examined.
From a pragmatic variationist approach (Barron, 2014), we analyzed the 189 tokens of órale in the Corpus So-
ciolingüístico de la Ciudad de México ‘Sociolinguistic Corpus of Mexico City’ (Butragueño & Lastra, 2011–2015).
To analyze the pragmatic functions, we conducted an interative, qualitative, discourse analysis that considered
previously mentioned functions of órale, turn position, surrounding discourse, and also the positioning work of
the DM. For the positioning analysis, social acts (similar to speech acts) and interlocutor positions in the interac-
tion were examined (Davies & Harré, 1990). The pragmatic functions identified were: affirmation (agreement,
understanding), exhoration (command, motivation), and resultative (presentational, discourse anaphora) (see
examples). The three functions share a proposed core meaning relating to an immediate change, whether that
be a change in activity, knowledge, or attention.
Affirmation (agreement)
“ven, vamos a que le ayudes allá a mi mamá” “¡pues órale!” (CSCM-37)
“come, go help my mom over there” “well órale!”
Exhortation (command)
“órale métete al baño” (CSCM-103)
“órale get in the shower”
Resultative (presentational)
entonces aplicó al Itam, pasó el examen y viene: “¡¡sí lo pasé!!” y no sé qué, bueno, pues órale, ahí va al Itam
(CSCM-33)
then he applied to the Itam, he passed the exam and he comes: “yes I passed it!!” and I don’t know what, okay,
well órale, there he goes to the Itam
In addition to analyzing the pragmatic functions, statistical models were examined to understand the use of
órale by different populations (i.e., gender, education, age). Results indicated that men used órale more than
women. When predicting the use of the three órale functions, education was an important variable, particularly
as education relates to the use of órale for affirmation and exhortation.
Overall, the results provide a new, economical, and thorough understanding of órale as a pragmatic variable and
as a resource to construct social identities. The triangulated pragmatic approach provided a valid approach to
examining órale’s pragmatic functions, making the pragmatic results more reliable. The sociolinguistic results
demonstrate the need to consider pragmatic function in sociolinguitic analyses, and they also comment on the
relationship between language use and social identity. The discussion will address how mixed-methods allow
for new insight into the intertwined pragmatic and social meanings contributed by DMs.

391
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic variation in Britain: A corpus-based study of


politeness and social variation

Panel contribution

Ms. Isolde van Dorst 1 , Dr. Mathew Gillings 1 , Prof. Jonathan Culpeper 2
1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, 2. Lancaster University

British culture is said to be characterised by off-record or negative politeness (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1987; Stewart,
2005) and norms giving prominence to social distance (e.g., Bargiela-Chiappini & Kádár, 2011). However, this
assumes that politeness works in the same way across all speakers and contexts. Work constituting variational
pragmatics (e.g. Barron and Schneider 2005) – a field at the interface of pragmatics and sociolinguistics – has
shown this to be an over-simplification. A meagre amount of research on politeness variation has looked at us-
age differences between certain groups across Britain, though often limiting itself to one or two social variables
at a time (e.g. Culpeper & Gillings, 2018). This paper explores the wider scope of politeness variation in Britain,
using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Love et al., 2017), by looking at seven social variables
simultaneously: sex, age, region, population density, social class, highest qualification, and setting.
We selected 50 key British formulaic politeness expressions, each allotted to one of three different types of po-
liteness (tentativeness, deference or solidarity), and differing levels of formality (e.g., relatively formal goodbye
versus relatively informal bye). Our selection of expressions was driven by the academic literature and/or non-
academic literature (e.g., newspaper articles complaining about politeness); our own knowledge of politeness
practices; or extrapolations from other expressions (e.g., thank you would lead to a consideration of thanks, ta,
cheers). Instances of these 50 expressions were retrieved from a subset based on setting (private; public; insti-
tutional) of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, and then manually screened to remove non-genuine cases
of politeness (e.g., sarcasm).
We applied a linear mixed effects model to analyse the effect of each social variable on the use of politeness
expressions. Clear differences across politeness types and levels of formality emerged. The most frequent sig-
nificant difference was the setting of the conversation. There is also an observable difference in politeness
usage based on residency density, and between speakers in rural areas versus metropolitan cities specifically.
There are likely to be multiple and complex reasons for each finding; we will offer some tentative possibilities.
References
Bargiela-Chiappini, F., & Kádár, D. (eds.). (2011). Politeness Across Cultures. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schneider, K. P., & Barron, A. (eds.). (2008). Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric
languages (Vol. 178). John Benjamins Publishing.
Blum-Kulka, S. 1987. “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics, 11,
131-146.
Culpeper, J., & Gillings, M. (2018). “Politeness variation in England: A North-South divide?” In V. Brezina, R.
Love, and K. Aijmer (eds.), Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech: Sociolinguistic studies of the
Spoken BNC2014. New York: Routledge.
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). “The spoken BNC2014: Designing and building
a spoken corpus of everyday conversations”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319-344.
Stewart, M. 2005. “Politeness in Britain: It’s only a suggestion”. In Politeness in Europe, edited by Leo Hickey
and Miranda Stewart. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 116-130.

392
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatics and mind-reading: an experimental investigation


on the derivation of implicatures from the listener’s
perspective

Panel contribution

Prof. Napoleon Katsos 1 , Ms. Blanche Gonzales de Linares 2 , Dr. Ekaterina Ostashchenko 3
1. Cambridge University, 2. University of Cambridge, 3. Manchester Metropolitan University

Influential theories of meaning propose that listeners understand a speaker’s implicit meaning thanks to mu-
tually assumed norms of conversation that take into account what the speaker has said, as well as contextual
factors, including what the speaker knows. Emerging psycholinguistic research shows that listeners derive a
particular kind of implicit meaning, quantity implicatures, when their speaker is knowledgeable about the sit-
uation but suspend it otherwise. This work does not focus on if and how listeners use the knowledge that is
available only to themselves, i.e. the listener’s perspective. Here we explore the derivation of ad hoc quantity
implicature in situations where the speaker does or does not have full knowledge of the situation, while, in the
latter case, the listener have two types of privileged knowledge in her perspective. We report two versions of a
study with English-speaking adults which show that listeners are influenced by their own perspective, as well as
the speaker’s. We discuss the implications of these finding for models of common ground, pragmatic processing
and interpretative strategies.

393
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Resonance and Engagement ‘applied’ in Chinese


Doctor-Patient interaction: A Western vs Traditional Chinese
medicine divide

Panel contribution

Dr. Vittorio Tantucci 1 , Dr. Carmen Lepadat 2


1. Lancaster University, 2. RomaTre University

Resonance in interaction involves speakers re-using (parts of) the utterances of their interlocutors (Du Bois
2014). When resonance is creative, speakers engage with other people’s language to express something new. In
this respect, important methodological and applied considerations are in order. Persistent creative resonance
is a key indicator of interactional engagement. Conversely, consistent absence of it underpins interactional de-
tachment, which is distinctive of ASD speech (Tantucci & Wang 2002). This study tackles creative resonance
in Chinese Doctor-Patient interaction. We created a corpus sourcing 60 conversations, including 1415 utter-
ances from the ChunyuYisheng online medical consultations’ platform and compared the speech of Western
medicine doctors (WMD) with Traditional Chinese medicine doctors (TCMD). Doctors’ engagement is central in
medical communication, (Jin et al 2022). Palliative care textbooks evoke ‘active listening’, backchanneling and
repetitions of patients’ words (Jenkins et al. 2021).
We propose that creative resonance is key for diagnostic assessment, as it is not limited to repetition, but in-
volves engagement as joint creation of knowledge (Tantucci et al. 2022) between specialist and patient. We
devised a corpus-based multifactorial model, accounting for medicine type, gender, turns and words’ count, pe-
ripheral particles of intersubjectivity, overt acknowledgement of interlocutors’ speech, illocutionary force and
creative resonance. A mixed effects linear regression shows that TCMD’s textual engagement with patients is
higher than in WMD. Creative resonance in TCMD’s speech correlates with overt relevance acknowledgment
and marked intersubjectivity. We also discovered that TCMD’s language is inherently directive, whilst WMD’s
speech is more assertive. This suggest that TCM is more distinctively geared towards advice-giving (Yip 2020),
while WM favours etiological assessment. TCM involves a holistic approach to the body with its social and natu-
ral environment (Lu et al. 2004:1854), with stronger emphasis on harmonious interaction (Spencer-Oatey 2005).
This is reflected in the sociopragmatic enactment of TCMD’ behaviour in contrast with WMD.
References:
Du Bois, J. W. (2014). Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive linguistics, 25(3), 359-410.
Lu, A. P., Jia, H. W., Xiao, C., & Lu, Q. P. (2004). Theory of traditional Chinese medicine and therapeutic method
of diseases. World journal of gastroenterology: WJG, 10(13), 1854.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. (2005). (Im)Politeness, face and perceptions of rapport: unpackaging their bases and
interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1), 95–119.
Jenkins, L., Parry, R., & Pino, M. (2021). Providing opportunities for patients to say more about their pain without
overtly asking: A conversation analysis of doctors repeating patient answers in palliative care pain assessment.
Applied Linguistics, 42(5), 990-1013.
Jin, Y., Kim, Y., & Carlin, A. P. (2022). Co-Topical Small Talk: Troubles-Telling in Traditional Chinese Medical
Encounters. Applied Linguistics, 43(3), 493-516.
Tantucci, V., & Wang, A. (2022). Dialogic priming and dynamic resonance in Autism: Creativity competing with
engagement in chinese children with ASD. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1-17.
Tantucci, V., Wang, A., & Culpeper, J. (2022). Reciprocity and epistemicity: On the (proto) social and cross-cultural
‘value’of information transmission. Journal of Pragmatics, 194, 54-70.
Yip, J. W. (2020). Directness of advice giving in traditional Chinese medicine consultations. Journal of Pragmatics,
166, 28-38.

394
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speaker trustworthiness: shall confidence match evidence?

Panel contribution

Prof. Diana Mazzarella 1 , Ms. Mélinda Pozzi 1


1. University of Neuchâtel

Communication is open to the risk of misinformation. As a result, humans have evolved a suite of cognitive
mechanisms that allows them to assess others’ trustworthiness and guide partner choice (referred to as ‘epis-
temic vigilance’, Sperber et al., 2010). An important component of epistemic vigilance is the ability to track
epistemic commitments and evaluate their credibility. Speakers can endorse or distance themselves from the
truth of their claims through different linguistic and pragmatic devices, thus modulating their epistemic com-
mitments and managing their reputation as trustworthy informants (Boulat and Maillat, 2017; Mazzarella et al.
2018). Previous literature suggests that confidence expressions (such as epistemic modals) function as commit-
ment signals: confident speakers are more likely to be believed than unconfident speakers, but suffer greater
reputational costs than unconfident speakers if their claims turn out to be false (Vullioud et al. 2017). Little is
known, though, of the extent to which judgments of speaker trustworthiness are affected not only by the accu-
racy of the speaker but also by their evidential basis (in line with the Gricean sub-maxim of Quality: “Do not say
that for which you lack adequate evidence”).
The present study investigated the role of ‘confidence-evidence calibration’ in the assessment of speaker trust-
worthiness. We tested two hypotheses. First, overconfidence does not backfire when a confident but inaccurate
claim is justified (Hypothesis 1). Second, confidence can backfire if a confident and accurate claim is not justi-
fied (Hypothesis 2). We conducted two pre-registered online experiments adapted from Tenney et al. (2008), in
which participants (Exp 1: N = 107; Exp 2: N =109) were presented with two testimonies concerning a car acci-
dent, one from a confident witness and the other from an unconfident witness. In Experiment 1, both witnesses
were inaccurate but were justified by strong evidence. In Experiment 2, both witnesses were accurate but had
weak evidence. Participants judged their credibility and were asked to choose which of the two depositions
they believed at different times during the experiment, as information about accuracy and evidence unfolds.
We measured participants’ credibility judgments (on a scale from 1 to 6) and believability choices (Which depo-
sition do you believe?).
Experiment 1 showed that the perceived trustworthiness of a confident speaker who communicates false infor-
mation is at least partially restored when it turns out that the speaker was justified by strong evidence (thus
supporting Hypothesis 1). Experiment 2 showed that a confident speaker who makes an accurate claim but is
not supported by enough evidence loses their trustworthiness (thus supporting Hypothesis 2). These two find-
ings suggest that speaker trustworthiness as a source of information depends on how confidence expression is
calibrated to the speaker’s evidential basis, and that to keep their own reputation, a speaker should first and
foremost commit to what they have evidence for. Committing to the truth of a message only when one is justified
is a better sign of epistemic responsibility than actually sharing true information, which may be accidentally
transmitted by people who are not deeply concerned about truth.

395
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Third-wave im/politeness theory: Swearwords and the


company they keep

Panel contribution

Prof. Andreas Jucker 1


1. Universität Zürich

To what extent can swearwords be seen as carrying impolite meanings? Is their use generally – or perhaps even
by definition – linked to impoliteness? These are important questions if swearwords are to be used in a corpus-
based assessment of im/politeness levels in specific contexts. In a first-wave approach to politeness, linguistic
expressions were taken to have relatively fixed politeness values. In a second-wave approach, im/politeness
values were taken to be locally and discursively negotiated. A third-wave approach provides a rapprochement
between the first and second. It assumes some default values that can be re-negotiated in specific contexts. But
how can modifiable default values be used in a corpus-based investigation?
Corpus-based investigations generally rely on (relatively) fixed values in order to provide a basis for large-scale
generalisations across entire corpora. They also tend to require time-consuming and laborious manual inspec-
tions of the retrieved hits in order to eliminated deviating instances. To solve this problem, Lutzky & Kehoe
(2016, 2017) proposed a method of using contextual information in order to automatically sort through lists of
swearwords, such as shit or bastard, and apology expressions, such as sorry, pardon or excuse, respectively.
In this presentation, I introduce a further development of this approach. Lutzky & Kehoe rely on collocates of
their search terms, i.e. expressions that regularly occur in close vicinity to the search term. I propose a more
global approach – a topic approach – which relies on the keywords that characterise those texts in which a
specific search term tends to occur. Keywords are expressions that appear in a specific text with a frequency
that is much higher than their frequency in the entire corpus. They are a good indication of the topic structure
of the text in which they occur, and they provide not only a useful tool to disambiguate the search terms (as in
Lutzky & Kehoe’s approach), but they also offer nuanced information on the im/politeness level of the search
terms themselves, and they afford an empirical basis for the evaluation of the severity of certain swearwords.
As a result, they help to uncover additional swearwords with similar distribution and usage patterns, and they
turn swearwords into useful diagnostics in contrastive or diachronic investigations of varying im/politeness
levels in specific contexts.
References
Lutzky, Ursula, and Andrew Kehoe. (2016) Your blog is (the) shit: A corpus linguistic approach to the identi-
fication of swearing in computer mediated communication. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21.1,
165-191.
Lutzky, Ursula, and Andrew Kehoe. (2017) “I apologise for my poor blogging”: Searching for apologies in the
Birmingham Blog Corpus. Corpus Pragmatics 1, 37-56.

396
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Why do we use the same words when we disagree with each


other? An experimental approach to interactive alignment

Panel contribution

Dr. Nele Põldvere 1 , Dr. Victoria Johansson 2 , Prof. Carita Paradis 3


1. University of Oslo/Lund University, 2. Lund University/University of Kristianstad, 3. Centre for Languages and Literature,
Lund University

Interactive alignment, or the reuse of ideas and constructions from prior speaker turns, is a compelling type
of meaning negotiation, dialogue management and stance coordination in everyday face-to-face conversation.
Du Bois (2014) argues that engaging in this way with prior speaker contributions is a socially motivated phe-
nomenon that speakers use for various communicative purposes. Garrod and Pickering (2004) consider align-
ment to be a largely automatic cognitive process that makes conversation smooth and easy. In a previous corpus
study (Põldvere, Johansson & Paradis, 2021), we brought these two approaches together to investigate why and
when speakers make use of each other’s contributions in conversation, and what the social and cognitive un-
derpinnings of this behaviour might be. The study showed that (i) speakers tend to align with each other when
they disagree, and (ii) the disagreements are produced very quickly (with no-gap-no-overlap). Both of these
results point to the mitigating function of alignment in disagreement situations.
Using the overhearer paradigm (Bögels & Levinson, 2017), we investigate how participants perceive interactive
alignment in disagreement situations in a controlled laboratory setting. This experimental study concerns the
social processes underpinning the interpretation of alignment by drawing on insights from Du Bois’ notion
of dialogic engagement and Garrod’s and Pickering’s observations of turn transitions. From the perspective
of an overhearer of a conversation, does alignment influence the overhearer’s judgments of social closeness
among speakers in disagreement situations? Are there differences between the different types of alignment?
What role does timing play in the overhearer’s reactions? In the experiment, the participants listen to pre-
recorded conversations between two people who disagree with each other. The stimuli were recorded with
two actors who spoke with a British English accent. The manipulations involved the presence or absence of
alignment, the extent of the alignment (formal vs. semantic) and the timing of the disagreement (no-gap-no-
overlap vs. a gap of one second). The participants in the experiment are native speakers of British English. After
listening to the recordings, the participants rate their agreement with two statements on a seven-point Likert
scale, designed to elicit their intuitions about social closeness among speakers in the recordings (I feel that these
people share similar views, these people seem to be comfortable with each other). Contrary to expectation,
though, alignment, and particularly formal alignment, received lower ratings of social closeness in the pilot
study than non-alignment. This result was modulated by time whereby alignment expressed after a no-gap-no-
overlap was rated higher than non-alignment that was expressed after a gap.
References
Põldvere, N., Johansson, V., & Paradis, C. (2021). Resonance in dialogue: The interplay between intersubjective
motivations and cognitive facilitation. Language and Cognition, 13, 643–669.
Bögels, S., & Levinson, S. C. (2017). The brain behind the response: Insights into turn-taking in conversation
from neuroimaging. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(1), 71–89.
Du Bois, J. W. (2014). Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(3), 359–410.
Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy? TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1), 8–11.

397
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘You anti-semantic bastard!’ Impoliteness as a linguistic


phenomenon.

Panel contribution

Dr. Marta Andersson 1 , Dr. Daniel Van Olmen 2 , Prof. Jonathan Culpeper 2
1. Umeå University, 2. Lancaster University

According to the arguments put forward in recent literature, a systematic explanation of the concept of
(im)politeness should consider multiple perspectives and approaches (e.g., Haugh and Culpeper 2018). The
study of the phenomenon should therefore not so readily dismiss the pragmalinguistic dimension in favour of
the sociopragmatic phenomena (e.g., Leech 2014). However, the dominant view in the field of (im)politeness
studies is that (im)politeness does not reside in the linguistic form but rather depends on the contextual judge-
ment of the participants involved (e.g., Locher 2006). Contrary to this idea, we present a corpus-driven cross-
linguistic perspective on the extent to which linguistic form is a stable component of impoliteness and demon-
strate that linguistic structures compatible with the expression of impoliteness not only exist in several lan-
guages but also exhibit a high degree of conventionalization. Our focus is on the phrase YOU + NP in English,
Polish and Dutch. Our investigation of the TenTen web corpora and samples of 200 instances of the expression
indicates that, despite the presence of other uses in all three languages (e.g., positive ‘you beautiful girl!’), gen-
uinely impolite cases (excluding closely related uses in banter or dirty talk) account for 70% of the English and
Dutch data and 90% of the Polish data. This phrase, in other words, has a strong bias toward negative addressee
evaluation.
This predilection is further corroborated by instances of evaluatively neutral NPs that are coerced into a neg-
ative interpretation (e.g., ‘you man!’) and by the frequency with which adjectival modifiers occur to ensure a
positive interpretation (e.g., ‘you charming man’). Our findings are thus consistent with both pragmatics re-
search, as theorized in Terkourafi’s (2005) frame approach to politeness, which states that if an expression is
frequently used in polite contexts, it becomes conventionalized as such. Since this theory has been extended
to account also for impoliteness (Culpeper 2011), we contend that YOU + NP is a (partially) conventionalized
structure particularly well-suited to cause offense. As we argue, the reason for this pertains to the pragmatic
explicitness of the involved pronoun, which not only increases the impact of the evaluative NP by making a
direct reference to the addressee but also creates a sense of distance between the interlocutors.
References
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Haugh, Michael, Culpeper, Jonathan, 2018. In: Ilie, C., Norrick, N.R. (Eds.), Integrative pragmatics and
(im)politeness theory. Pragmatics and Its Interfaces. John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 213-239.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 2004. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Locher, Miriam A. 2006. Polite behavior within relational work: The discursive approach to politeness. Multi-
lingua 25(3), 249-267.
Terkourafi, Marina. 2005. Pragmatic correlates of frequency of use: The case for a notion of “minimal context”.
In Sophia Marmaridou, Kiki Nikiforidou & Eleni Antonopoulou (eds.), Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converg-
ing Trends for the 21st Century. Berlin: De Gruyter, 209-233.

398
Exploring the body as the
source of
meaning-making in sign
language interaction
(organized by Emily
Shaw, Alysson Lepeut)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Collaborative signing in a multiparty interaction: the case of


overlap

Panel contribution

Dr. Alysson Lepeut 1 , Dr. Emily Shaw 2


1. Université de Namur, 2. Gallaudet University

In this paper, we discuss the results of a microanalysis of sequences (Bavelas, et al. 2011) during moments
when two or more signers are signing at the same time. Overlapping discourse can occur for different reasons;
signers may need to clarify misunderstandings, reinforce another’s point, or vehemently disagree. We are in-
terested here in one specific type of simultaneous signing—referred to as cooperative overlap—which consists
of extended moments of turn-exchanges that move along the unfolding discourse while cohering interlocutors
in relation to each other. This aspect of signed interaction has received very little attention by sign linguists
(see Coates & Sutton-Spence, 2001 for an exception) but appears to be a crucial component of language in the
wild – one part of the “enchronic glue” (Enfield 2009) binding interactions (and interactants) together. Some
early work on signed interactions touches on the practice (Wilbur & Petitto, 1983) but little is known about the
underpinnings of these seemingly messy interactive moments. We seek here to understand how these extended
overlaps are achieved by deaf co-participants on a local basis where the outcome results in a forward movement
of the topic at hand.
One four-party interaction of roughly 15min. between deaf, fluent ASL signers was analyzed using techniques
from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) to primarily answer the following questions:

1. What embodied practices are used to negotiate overlaps while maintaining interactional synchrony?
2. When extended overlaps occurred, what interactional joint actions do the participants engage in (e.g.,
the careful monitoring of one another’s actions in progress)?

In addition to specific lexical repetition strategies identified previously in earlier work (Wilbur & Petitto 1983;
Baker 1977), it was hypothesized that these closely timed sequences of overlapping signing occur often in multi-
party interactions and are successful specifically because they engage multiple articulators coordinated across
signers, especially eye gaze. Further, it appears that these practices that are symbolic of the joint coordination
of co-constructed discourse are a behavior that signers both willingly engage in and recruit to achieve specific
interactive tasks (likely, clarification and assessment sequences that manage the dynamically evolving informa-
tion state and the relationship between fellow interactants). Results do not only account for how deaf signers
achieve cooperative overlaps but also reveal the interactive reasons signers engage in these messy moments of
interaction in the first place—beyond those identified in earlier studies (namely, gender expression and topic
flow coordination).

400
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Communication without a language model: The pragmatic


skills of Balinese homesigners

Panel contribution

Dr. Josefina Safar 1 , Dr. Connie de Vos 1


1. Tilburg University

Homesign refers to the communication of deaf individuals who have not been exposed to a conventional sign
language and co-create a new communication system with their family members and other frequent interlocu-
tors. Developed in the absence of a language model, homesign systems offer a window to investigate the earliest
stages of language emergence. Previous work has focused heavily on the genesis of linguistic structures in home-
sign and been based mainly on elicited and experimental data. Studies on homesigners’ interactional skills,
however, remain scarce. Adding homesign interactions to our research agenda is essential for understanding
whether human beings really possess an “interaction engine” (Levinson, 2019), i.e., an innate communicative
ability that precedes language. If we want to know where pragmatic competence comes from, we need to direct
our attention to the interactional mechanisms homesigners use when engaging in signed discourse.
Our study draws from the Balinese Homesign Corpus, which represents the first extensive collection of var-
ious types of linguistic data from deaf homesigners. The corpus currently involves 14 deaf individuals with
different social and communicative profiles (in terms of age, gender, amount of interaction with other deaf
and hearing people). It includes spontaneous conversations between deaf adult homesigners and their regu-
lar communication partners as well as conversations between homesigners and a deaf research assistant from
outside their village. We adopt a Conversation Analysis approach to investigate if and how pragmatic skills are
affected by language deprivation, and in turn to what extent the interaction engine is a precursor to language
emergence. Examining 4h45min of conversational data from 8 adult homesigners, we provide evidence that
Balinese homesigners indeed possess interactional abilities on a par with speakers and signers of conventional
languages, including turn-timing, feedback signals and sequence organisation. The presence of these robust
pragmatic skills demonstrates that homesigners can monitor mutual understanding in conversations, foresee
and repair communicative trouble. Focusing on Other-Initiated Repair (OIR) – sequences dedicated at pinpoint-
ing and repairing breakdowns in conversation – we show that OIR occurs frequently in Balinese homesign, and
that it exhibits clear parallels with other spoken and signed languages, regarding the formats of repair initiators
and the types of trouble they address. Homesigners incorporate features of visual interactions in their environ-
ment, e.g. manual emblems, pointing gestures, facial expressions and eyegaze, as sources of meaning-making
in repair sequences. We also find that the amount of shared context with their interaction partner influences
the frequency of OIR and the choice of repair strategy: homesigners exploit common ground (e.g., shared cul-
tural/geospatial knowledge) with their interlocutor as a resource to achieve intersubjectivity in conversation.
To summarise, our study clearly reveals that homesigners are competent interaction partners, capable of iden-
tifying and fixing communicative trouble and accommodating their interlocutors to maintain mutual under-
standing. It proves that certain aspects of pragmatic competence are so resilient that they emerge even in
absence of conventional linguistic input.
Levinson, S. (2019). Interactional foundations of language: The interaction engine hypothesis. In P. Hagoort
(Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 189–200). MIT Press.

401
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversational Repair in a Local Family Sign Language from


Guatemala

Panel contribution

Dr. Laura Horton 1


1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Previous research on a diverse array of languages, both spoken and signed, provides crosslinguistic evidence
that language users have strategies for resolving “trouble spots” in conversation (Dingemanse, et al., 2015; Man-
rique, 2016; Schegloff, 1992; Schegloff et al., 1977). In this study, I ask whether the widespread existence of re-
pair strategies in conversation extends to signers of a local family sign language used in a community without
a standardized national sign language.
In Nebaj, Guatemala, signers do not know LENSEGUA, the national sign language of Guatemala, but there are
several local ecologies in which hearing and deaf signers interact with each other regularly. I asked signers
to engage in a dyadic communication game – a director-matcher task – in which one signer described a set of
photos of familiar local items (food, clothing, locations, etc.) to another signer in their immediate family or social
network. Five signers participated in the study. Two of the signers are deaf – they are a mother and daughter
who live together with their hearing relatives, also participants. The daughter, Sara, age 10, was a participant
in each of four dyads.
30 trials were coded for each dyad. A trial consisted of the initial description of the photo from the director
followed by any clarification questions from the matcher until the matcher selected the correct photo from the
array. On average, matchers were very accurate – matchers selected the correct photo with one or two guesses
in more than 93% of all trials – suggesting they understood the communicative demands of the task. In the
analysis, I ask: (1) how often repairs were initiated for each dyad; (2) what types of repairs were most common;
and (3) how often repetition was part of the repair request.
There were variable rates of repairs across the dyads, but they happened quite frequently (range 16-29 repairs
across 30 trials). I coded each repair (N=88) for repair type. Repair types included: open repairs, initiated
without indicating the source of the misunderstanding; restricted repairs, initiated while specifying the source
of the misunderstanding; and implicit repairs, described as a “freeze look” in which the signer does not engage in
an expected turn but merely makes eye contact with their interlocutor (Manrique, 2016). There was substantial
variation in the distribution of repair strategies across dyads. In two dyads, restricted repairs were the most
common strategy. Open repairs were most common in the conversation between Sara and her mother. Sara’s
mother often expressed a general sense of confusion about Sara’s utterance, without specifying any particular
source of misunderstanding. In terms of repetition as a repair strategy, this was only employed regularly by
one signer: Sara’s hearing father. Sara’s father would frequently repeat all or part of her utterance back to her
before selecting a photo. These findings suggest that even in a two-generation family sign language, hearing
and deaf signers have robust strategies for conversational repair, but there is significant individual variation
in the types of repair strategies used across signers.

402
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Head Movements as Backchannels in American Sign Language


Conversations

Panel contribution

Mr. Paul Gabriola 1


1. Gallaudet University

When people are engaged in everyday conversation, turns that are exchanged occur almost immediately after
each other, or sometimes overlap, typically occurring at a transition-relevance-place (TRP) (Sacks, Schegloff &
Jefferson, 1974). In order to achieve this natural turn-taking sequence, those engaged in conversation must plan
their next utterance during the preceding turn, before they take the floor. Producing a backchannel at a TRP is
an indication from the addressee to the narrator that there is no attempt to take the floor for a turn.
Addressee responses in face-to-face (spoken) discourse are typically short reactive vocal cues, like; oh, yeah,
and uh-huh. These responses are called backchannels, and their expression shapes narrative development in
interaction (Bavelas et al., 2000). Research conducted on spoken language discourse shows addressees utilize
both short vocal utterances and gestures when backchanneling (Bavelas et al., 2000). In ASL conversations,
backchannels frequently take the form of both manual signs (e.g., YEAH or UNDERSTAND), and non-manual
signals (head movements, eye rolls, eyes widening/narrowing, eyebrow movements, and mouth movements)
simultaneously. There are instances where non-manual backchannels are produced solely without a manual
accompaniment.
Documenting the form and function of various types of non-manual backchannels in context will help us under-
stand how Deaf people’s backchannels operate. This paper specifically reports on the form and function of head
movements, as a means of backchanneling from the addressee, in ASL conversations. Analysis of three previ-
ously recorded dialogues, on Zoom, between Deaf ASL signers from a current study taking place at Gallaudet
University called, “A Motivated Look At Indicating Verbs in ASL” (Hochgesang et al., 2019), is utilized. After ex-
amining five minutes of addressee feedback from three selected videos, several different forms of head move-
ments were identified using a coding scheme adapted from the CorpAGEst Annotation Manual (Bolly, 2016).
The head movements were analyzed as serving different interactive functions based on the utterance that was
produced by the active signer either before the backchannel or following the backchannel.
The primary functions of these head movements appears to indicate to the active signer that the addressee was
understanding (or not) the conversation. Some patterns of head movements are expected to be seen during
specific moments in conversation. Analysis of the data provides a novel categorization of the different forms of
head movements as backchannels, labeled; nods, nod-up, nod-down, shakes, or side tilt. The head movements
serve one of the following functions for each instance; tracking function (a strong emotional response), contin-
uer function, affirmative function, or hesitation function (Maynard, 1997 & Puupponen, 2015). The study has
unveiled that head movements do not occur in isolation, rather, they are typically produced in conjunction with
other non-manual features of the face, and sometimes with manual sign pairing.
The scope of this paper solely looks at how fluent ASL signers use head movements as a backchannel during
conversation in a virtual space. The research presented is the preliminary step in a larger planned study which
will incorporate analysis of other types of non-manual backchannels that can be produced.

403
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Self-initiated repair in German Sign Language (DGS) – results


from the Public DGS Corpus

Panel contribution

Ms. Elena Mpadanes 1 , Prof. Okan Kubus 2


1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2. Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences

Conversational repairs have been investigated across a variety of languages to date. But only a few studies so
far have focused on signed discourse, e.g. Manrique (2016), Skedsmo (2020) or Safar and Vos (2022). This work
connects to these recent studies and adds to the understanding of functional, visual, and sequential proper-
ties of conversational repair as a part of the interactional foundations of human languages. Here, a repair is
understood as dealing with problems in producing, perceiving, and/or understanding (Manrique, 2016, pp. 1–2).
We approached repairs in German Sign Language (DGS) through a descriptive analysis of the published data
from the DGS-Korpus project, the Public DGS Corpus (Konrad et al., 2020). It comprises a balanced selection of 50
hours of signed videos presenting signers from various German regions and age groups conversing and narrat-
ing about topics culturally relevant to the d/Deaf community. A variety of corpus queries were used to identify
self- and other-initiated repair sequences which were then tagged in iLex (Hanke, 2002), coded, categorized by
repair type, formats and components.
Besides giving a first-time overview of practices in DGS repair, we also shed light on the visual bodily behavior
used for initiating and organizing repair in signed discourse while looking at the structural aspects of DGS
repairs. In the presentation we will focus on strategies in DGS self-initiated repairs which are prompted by the
signer who produced the trouble source turn (repair types total = 361; self-initiated repairs = 287). A significant
variety of self-initiated repair operations could be detected, e.g., searching (n=108), replacing (n=86), inserting
(n=66).
DGS self-initiated repairs indicate structural and technical similarities to the ones found in both signed and
spoken languages (e.g. Dingemanse et al., 2015). The use of visual bodily behavior like gaze patterns and move-
ments of the head and eyebrows was found to play a pivotal role in the organization of turn allocation following
repair initiations.
References
Dingemanse, M., Roberts, S. G., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Drew, P., Floyd, S., . . . Enfield, N. J.
(2015). Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems. PloS One, 10(9), e0136100.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136100
Hanke, T. (2002). iLex - A tool for sign language lexicography and corpus analysis. In G. Rodriguez & C. Paz
Suarez Araujo (Chairs), Proceedings of the third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation,
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
Konrad, R., Hanke, T., Langer, G., Blanck, D., Bleicken, J., Hofmann, I., . . . Schulder, M. (2020). MEINE
DGS – annotiert. Öffentliches Korpus der Deutschen Gebärdensprache, 3. Release. Universität Hamburg.
https://doi.org/10.25592/DGS.CORPUS-3.0
Manrique, E. (2016). Other-initiated Repair in Argentine Sign Language. Open Linguistics, 2(1).
https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2016-0001
Safar, J., & Vos, C. de (2022). Pragmatic competence without a language model: Other-Initiated Repair in Balinese
homesign. Journal of Pragmatics, 202, 105–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.10.017
Skedsmo, K. (2020). Other-initiations of repair in Norwegian Sign Language. Social Interaction. Video-Based
Studies of Human Sociality, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v3i2.117723

404
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Hey, look! This-is-im-por-tant!” Embodied focus during


signing and speaking family dinners

Panel contribution

Dr. Marion Blondel 1 , Dr. Fanny Catteau 2 , Prof. Christelle Dodane 3 , Dr. Karine Martel 4 , Prof. Aliyah
Morgenstern 5
1. CNRS, France, 2. SFL, CNRS-Paris8, 3. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4. INSHEA, 5. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

How do parents and children pragmatically activate the semiotic resources at their disposal to negotiate, bring
and maintain information to the foreground during the family dinner?

The family dinner is a privileged occasion to study the orchestration of prosodic/pragmatic resources (Morgen-
stern et al. 2021), because it contains a multitude of resources which are intertwined (Lombart 2021) with mul-
tiple factors expressing inter- and intra-individual variation. We investigate the “DinLang” recordings, which
consist in a collection of family dinners in LSF and spoken French, in order to compare the resources activated in
similar conditions for signing and speaking families (two diners, each lasting 60 minutes). We are particularly
interested in the prosodic (gestural) resources of signers and how this can in turn shed light on the gestural
resources used for the same pragmatic function in ‘speakers’. After the realization of an inventory of these
prosodic resources (higher pitch, stronger intensity and acceleration of the speech flow at the vocal level, in-
crease of signing speed or holding a sign at the gestural level, etc.), we established their systematic and common
characteristics across various situations and articulatory modalities. We pinpointed gestural prosodic markers
as described in the SL literature (van der Kooij et al. 2006; Wilbur & Malaia 2018) or associated with vocal fo-
cus, as described for spoken languages (Ferré, 2019; Graf, et al. 2002). We identified an intermodal “scansion”
pattern that allows signers/speakers to stress the relevance of an utterance. All these observations support the
unified and physiognomic approach to language (Cornejo & Musa, 2017): some parts or the whole body can be
mobilized to realize a hyper-articulated prosodic pattern and to make the focused piece of information salient.
Moreover, taking the gestural dimension of these phenomena in SLs into account allows us to emphasize the
multimodality of the resources available to hearing speakers.
Cornejo, C. & Musa, R. (2017). The physiognomic unity of sign, word, and gesture. The Behavioral and brain
sciences, 40, e51.
Graf, H. P., Cosatto, E., Strom, V. and Huang, F. J. (2002). ‘Visual prosody: Facial movements accompanying
speech’. Proceedings of Fifth IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face Gesture Recognition, 396–401.
Ferré, G. (2019). Analyse de discours multimodale. Gestualité et prosodie en discours. UGA Éditions.
Lombart, C. (2021). Au croisement des ressources orales, gestuelles et signées: Comparaison de la prosodie du
français et de la LSFB. Papers of the LSFB (Vol 15).
Morgenstern, A., Caët, S., Debras, C., Beaupoil-Hourdel, P. & Le Mené, M (2021). Children’s socialization to multi-
party interactive practices: Who talks to whom about what in family dinners. Language and Social Interaction
at Home and School, 32, 45-86.
Kooij, E. van der, Crasborn, O. & Emmerik, W. 2006. Explaining prosodic body leans in Sign Language of the
Netherlands: pragmatics required. Journal of Pragmatics 38, 1598-1614.
Wilbur, R. & Malaia, E. 2018. A new technique for analyzing narrative prosodic effects in sign languages using
motion capture technology. In A. Hübl & M. Steinbach (eds) Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and
Sign Languages (15-40). John Benjamins.

405
Exploring “image work”
in Chinese
communication
(organized by Xinren
Chen)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constructing positive image at the first workplace meeting:


insights from Chinese workplace reality show interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Haidan Wang 1 , Ms. Shu-Yu Huang 1


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Image or self-presentation plays an important role in every aspect of social life, particularly in workplaces
where how one is viewed affects their working performance and career development. Previous pragmatic and
discourse studies have illuminated how images are dynamically constructed in naturally occurring discourses
in mass media (e.g., Jin & Chen, 2022) and employment interviews (e.g, Adelswärd, 1988). This study aims to
extend the investigation of image work by examining how Chinese speakers discursively create positive images
through self-introductions at their first workplace meeting. As interactional studies show, self-introductions
are a key locus for self-presentation (Pillet-Shore, 2011). However, possibly due to the difficulty in accessing
an organization with newcomers present, research of self-introduction has been limited to ordinary interac-
tions. We overcame the obstacle by resorting to reality shows where the interactions are improvised and the
interactive practices are recognizable in real life (Sinkeviciute, 2019).
In the show this study examined, eight interns competed for two job offers at a Chinese law firm. At the first
meeting, four supervisors and the interns took turns introducing themselves. Adopting Lim & Bowers’ (1991)
competent and fellowship face framework, we analyzed how participants constructed themselves and each
other as competent and sociable through audience-designed referential terms and self-disclosures.
First, the findings show that, in referential terms, participants elevated the status of addresses (e.g. “the winners
of interviews”, “senior partners”) and created camaraderie among interns themselves (e.g. “little fellows”). Sec-
ond, supervisors constructed an image of competence by disclosing their seniority. However, they also sought
to related themselves to the interns and presented themselves as a source of inspiration through delineating
their progression from their time as an intern. The interns established their competent selves by highlight-
ing their achievements and personal traits—whether adaptive, stoical, or logical—while demonstrating their
understanding of the law sector and evaluating themselves vis-à-vis other interns according to their supervi-
sors’ reactions. Moreover, the interns developed sociable selves through offering (e.g. teaching Cantonese)
and proposing joint activities (e.g. shopping) based on their disclosure of personal interests and abilities, con-
structing themselves as amiable colleagues. In conclusion, the analysis shows that participants oriented to both
competent face and fellowship face, suggesting that image construction via self-introductions is seldom simply
a beautifying work of solo nature, but rather, dynamically established via references and situated interactions
to build future working relationships in this round-table format and specific context. We thus argue that both
context and local interactions need to be taken into account when investigating image work.
Adelswärd, V. (1988). Styles of success: On impression management as collaborative action in job interviews
[Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Linköping University.
Jin, Y. & Chen, X. (2022). Image management in officials’ radio-mediated responses to call-in complaints. Foreign
Language Teaching, 43(4), 30-36.
Lim, T.S., & Bowers, J.W. (1991). Facework solidarity, approbation, and tact. Human communication research,
17(3), 415-450.
Pillet-Shore, D. (2011). Doing introductions: The work involved in meeting someone new. Communication Mono-
graphs, 78(1), 73-95.
Sinkeviciute, V. (2019). Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A pragmatic analysis of social interaction.
John Benjamins.

407
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Context-dependent identity work in a workplace observation


reality TV show

Panel contribution

Dr. Weihua Zhu 1


1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

This study investigates how Chinese people display fluid and multiple identities in different local contexts in a
workplace observation reality TV show. A few studies (e.g., Zeng & Ma, 2020; Xue, 2021) have examined Chinese
workplace observation reality TV shows. However, they only discussed the innovative design and social value of
these new shows. None of them has examined the context-dependent identity work of the participants in these
shows. To fill this gap, I examine twenty episodes of 令⼈⼼动的Offer ‘The Exciting Offer’, a Chinese workplace
observation reality TV show, and employ interactional sociolinguistic methods to analyze the data. Theoreti-
cally speaking, identity could be categorized into master identity, interactional identity, and personal identity
(Tracy, 2013). It can be constructed, negotiated, and modified in context (e.g., Goffman, 1959; Tracy, 2013; Chen,
2022) and located in language (Bucholtz & Hall, 2010). But do people maintain the same identity at the same
workplace? Which one of these—master identity, interactional identity, and personal identity—changes in dif-
ferent local contexts? What linguistic strategies can be deployed to present a certain identity? This research
attempts to answer these questions using ‘The Exciting Offer’ as a case study. On ‘The Exciting Offer’, eight
interns, after successful interviews, work in groups under the guidance of four supervisors who are attorneys
in a top law firm in China. Results demonstrate that the participants, despite at the same workplace, did not
retain the same identity. Their interactional identity in particular shifted in accordance with their interactional
goal in a specific local context. In other words, their identity modification was constrained by contextual fac-
tors including but not limited to interactional goals and status differences. The participants also changed their
linguistic strategies when modifying their identities. For instance, during the interviews, they presented their
confident, capable, and competitive side through assertive statements. When interacting, as an intern, with
an attorney, they appeared to be a respectful, agreeing, and sometimes worried/anxious student using polite
expressions, questions, and mitigated requests. But when interacting with other interns, they revealed another
identity—a normal person who made metapragmatic commentaries on their supervisors. These findings can
promote our understanding of context-dependent identity work from a linguistic/pragmatic perspective.
References:
Bucholtz, Mary, & Hall, Kira. 2010. Locating identity in language. In Carmen Llamas & Dominic Watt (Eds.),
Language and Identities (pp. 18-28). UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Chen, Xinren. 2022. Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Tracy, Karen. 2013. Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities. New York: The Guilford Press.
Xue, Wenjuan. 2021. 观察类真⼈秀�令⼈⼼动的offer》的创新表现及价值. West China Broadcasting TV, 10: 125-127.
Zeng, Yanan, & Ma, Jing. 2020. 律政职场观察类真⼈秀节⽬的设计与创新——以�令⼈⼼动的offer》为例. New Media
Research, 21: 84-86.

408
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Heroes in harm’s way: Constructing images of healthcare


workers in Chinese government microblogs during COVID-19

Panel contribution

Dr. Xueyu Wang 1 , Ms. Zheng Zheng 1


1. Nantong University

Chinese front-line healthcare workers (HCWs) have been labeled as “heroes in harm’s way” by the public and the
media for their commitment and accountability in the fight against COVID-19. Stories about these heroes have
emerged on various social media platforms, offering rich data for studying the images of HCWs constructed in
social media discourse. In this study, we looked at how a Chinese government microblogger, under the user-
name @healthchina（“健康中国”）, constructed various images of the front-line HCWs in these stories during
the outbreak of COVID-19. Specifically, based on 275 stories told and retold by @healthchina during the pan-
demic, we investigated how the front-line HCWs were named, depicted, and evaluated discursively in these
stories. The results show that HCWs in the stories were depicted as loving and caring, competent and confident,
and unselfish and dutiful. These images were constructed via the discursive strategies of nomination, predi-
cation, argumentation, perspectivation, and intensification. We argue that Chinese government microbloggers
constructed HCWs’ images to mobilize affect, gain trust, and reinforce social cohesion in the war against COVID-
19.

409
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal Evaluation and the Promotion of China’s National


Image

Panel contribution

Dr. Dezheng Feng 1


1. Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

In this study, I will develop a framework for the systematic analysis of the multimodal construction of China’s
national image in a promotional film. In my approach, national image is conceptualized as a set of semantic
categories (i.e., evaluative attributes), which enables us to understand their multidimensionality and inner com-
plexity. The analysis gives us a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted image China intends to present to
the world, which includes economic achievements, sustainable development, social fairness, racial harmony,
expanding democracy, cultural prosperity, and so on. Moreover, it shows how the attributes are constructed
through the deployment of complex filmic devices, such as the selection of characters and the design of their
actions in the mise-en-scene, the selection of events and sceneries, the cinematography (e.g., shot distance), and
the editing techniques (e.g., fast cut and match cut). I will also discuss how the promotional film has become a
new register of national discourse and an important means for branding China’s image in the world. The Field,
Tenor, and Mode of the register are explicated, which provides new understandings of China’s public diplomacy
and nation branding in the postmodern world. It shows how the promotional film balances the dual intentions
of constructing an all-round positive image of China for purposes such as attracting investment and tourism
on the one hand, and engaging the interest and emotions of the international audience on the other hand. The
framework may also allow the formulation of more rigorous analytical methods for related areas of political
studies, cultural studies, and international relations studies

410
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Image Work by Chinese Grass-root Officials in their Initial


Interactions with Villagers

Panel contribution

Ms. Hao Liu 1 , Prof. Xinren Chen 1


1. Nanjing University

Embracing the view that image is a discursive construct in the latest identity literature, the study aims to address
various types of image work by Chinese grass-root officials in their initial interactions with villagers. Getting
acquainted with people through initial interactions is part and parcel of one’s personal and professional lives
(Haugh and Sinkeviciute, 2021), based on which people decide whether and how to pursue getting further ac-
quainted. While there has been some literature on the actual discursive practices through which people get
acquainted with whom they are previously unmet, little attention has gone to how they work out and maintain
their image through their initial interactions in order for further contacts and interactions in the future, espe-
cially in institutional settings. On this account, this study investigates how and why Chinese grass-root officials
manage their image when getting acquainted with rural villagers in first encounters, based on an analysis of
26 transcribed recordings of naturally-occurring initial interactions. It is found that the officials not only ac-
quisitively construct positive images (e.g. deferential, amiable) by volunteered self-discourses but protectively
deconstruct the negative images (e.g., inexperienced, utilitarian) emerging from the negative assessments in the
villagers’ response to their self-disclosures. These tendencies in the officials’ image management practices in
these initial interactions are argued to be underpinned by their long-term transactional needs with the villagers.
Moreover, they may reflect the efforts of Chinese officials to build a service-oriented grass-root government, as
well as the complex interplay between power and seniority deeply rooted in the wider socio-cultural environ-
ment. This study might also shed some light on what a lens of image work can bring to our understanding of
initial interactions in institutional settings.

411
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of Chinese as interlanguage: A study of


compliment responses by British L2 Chinese learners

Panel contribution

Dr. Yun He 1 , Dr. Chengyu Zhuang 2


1. Cardiff University, 2. Oxbridge AcaVice

This study reports our preliminary findings of an ongoing project, aimed to provide insights into teaching and
learning Chinese as a foreign language and contribute to compliment response scholarship by opening up new
avenues for research.
Compliment response is presumably the most studied speech act behaviour in Chinese applied linguistics and
pragmatics. Nevertheless, while overwhelming attention is given to native speakers, little work has been done
thus far to characterize the way it is used by L2 Chinese learners. This study, therefore, redresses this gap by
investigating compliment responses in Chinese as an interlanguage in UK HE institutions.
Two datasets were analysed. The main set is a corpus of compliment responses collected by administering
modified DCT questionnaires designed by Chen (1993) and Chen & Yang (2010). The participants are second,
third and fourth/final academic year native British English-speaking L2 learners on the Chinese programme
at two Russel Group universities. The second set, qualitative in nature, consists of participants’ comments or
evaluative judgements of compliment responses and metapragmatic knowledge about the behaviour provided
by fifteen randomly selected learners through semi-structured interviews (cf., Kasper & Zhang 1995, Spencer-
Oatey et al 2000, He 2012).
Based on the taxonomy of compliment responses in Holmes (1988), Chen and Yang (2010), He (2012), the cor-
pus was coded into different ‘politeness strategies’, roughly corresponding to different semantic formulae or
syntactic realizations of compliment responses. Findings from our quantitative and qualitative analyses were
compared with previous major studies of compliment responses in Chinese and British English as native lan-
guage. They were discussed within the general framework of identity proposed by Zhuang and He (2020), with
reference to the notions of image (Chen 2022) and face (Goffman 1959). Supported by the interview data, we
argue that the compliment responses are characteristic of L2 Chinese users. The divergence and convergence
are in effect L2 learner identity work, a product of their negotiation of individual (‘agency’) and cultural iden-
tity (‘structure’) conflict. The presentation concludes with a discussion of how this study makes contributions
to compliment response as a topic of research in applied linguistics and pragmatics.
REFERENCES
Chen, R., & Yang, D. (2010). Responding to compliments in Chinese: Has it changed? Journal of pragmatics,
42(7), 1951-1963.

Chen, X. (2022). Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication. London: Bloomsbury Academic
He, Y. (2012). Different generations, different face? A discursive approach to naturally occurring compliment
responses in Chinese. Journal of Politeness Research, 8(1), 29-51.

Holmes, J. (1988). Paying compliments: A sex-preferential politeness strategy. Journal of pragmatics, 12(4), 445-
465.
Kasper, G., & Zhang, Y. (1995). ‘’It’s good to be a bit Chinese”: Foreign students’ experience of Chinese pragmatics.
Pragmatics of Chinese as native and target language, 1-22.
Spencer-Oatey, H., & Ng, P. (2000). Responding to Compliments: British and Chinese evaluative judgements.
H. Spencer-Oatey (eds) Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures, 98-121. London:
Continuum.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Zhuang, J. C., & He, A. Y. (2020). Managing multiple identities: A new perspective on compliment responses in
Chinese. East Asian Pragmatics, 5(1), 9-39.

413
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Bushi wo V(P)+ ni”: Managing the speaker’s image in


interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Xiaohong Liu 1


1. Nanjing University

The metapragmatic negation expression bushi + (S) + V + (NP) has extensively examined in the literature. How-
ever, research has almost exclusively focused on negatively oriented verbs in the construction bushi + (S) + V +
(NP) while neglecting positive ones, most probably because the first outnumber the latter. The present paper
is an attempt to redress the balance in favor of positively oriented verbs, i.e. “bushi wo V(P)+ ni”, which may
have its unique function. Based on the data from the existing corpora and TV series, i.e. an etic perspective,
supplemented by a questionnaire, i.e. an emic perspective, it is claimed that the speakers may resort to “bushi
wo V(P)+ ni” when they are aware of a potential or actual threat to their own or expected image. To be more
specific, Chinese speakers may deploy “bushi wo V(P)+ ni” to manage their image by emphasizing the facticity
of what they said. Speakers’ image is thus negotiable and contestable. The study on the role of “bushi wo V(P)+
ni” in managing the speaker’s image is able to provide some insights into how the metapragmatic expression
serves as a rapport-oriented mitigating device in Chinese interpersonal interaction as proposed in the existing
literature, as well as broadening the study on image work by including the meta-level approach.

414
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Wo zhege ren…” (“I am a person who …”): Self-image


foregrounding as a disclaiming device in Chinese televised
interviews

Panel contribution

Dr. Yingzhe Jin 1 , Prof. Xinren Chen 1


1. Nanjing University

People present themselves in one way or another in communication. They explicitly or implicitly claim
themselves to be a person of a particular kind, the process of which is referred to as ‘self-presentation’
(Goffman, 1959). Studies (e.g., Kim and Dindia, 2011; Yang and Brown, 2016) have shown that self-presentation
includes 5 dimensions: breadth, depth, positivity, authenticity and intentionality. The first four dimensions are
all concerned with content, while the last dimension concerns whether the interlocutors disclose information
intentionally or consciously (Yang and Brown, 2016: 403-404). With the ‘discursive turn’ of many sociological
notions, research on the discursive phenomena of identity construction and image construction in verbal
communication has proved fruitful. To date, while previous researchers (e.g., Guo and Ren, 2020) focused
on how language users construct their own image in implicit ways, they have rarely touched upon how
speakers make an explicit presentation or claiming of self in interaction, which is termed as ‘self-image
foregrounding’ in this study. By the term we refer to the deliberate discursive effort of “providing explicit […]
information” (Chen, 2022: 119) of one’s image. With Chinese televised interviewing data collected from MLC
(Media Language Corpus), this study explores the types and roles of self-image foregrounding adopted by the
interviewees. Results demonstrate that self image foregrounding, as a discursive practice, is a disclaiming
device in interaction. It manifests interlocutors’ metapragmatic awareness of addressing interpersonal
concerns through avoidance of unexpected risks and retypifications. Both positive and negative self images
would be foregrounded in televised interviews. Positive self image foregrounding could mitigate potential
risks by highlighting positive attributes of self, while negative self image foregrounding performs disclaiming
function by revealing weakness and seeking a reasonable justification for self.

References:
Chen, Xinren. 2022. Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication. London/ New York: Bloomsbury Aca-
demic.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Guo, Yaping, and Ren, Wei. 2020. Managing image: The self-praise of celebrities on social media. Discourse,
Context & Media 38, 100433.
Kim, Jinsuk, and Dindia, Kathryn. 2011. Online self-disclosure: A review of research. In Wright, K. B. & Webb,
L. M. (eds.), Computer-mediated Communication in Personal Relationship, pp. 156-180. New York: Peter Lang
Publishing.

Yang, Chia-chen, and Brown, B. Bradford. 2016. Online self-presentation on Facebook and self development
during the college transition. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45, 402-416.

415
First-order pragmatics:
How lay people talk about
speech (inter)actions
(organized by Klaus
Schneider)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expectations of and influences on politeness – Lay


perspectives in the context of human-human and
human-robot interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Eleonore Lumer 1 , Dr. Hendrik Buschmeier 2


1. Bielefeld University, 2. University of Bielefeld

Investigating lay people’s conceptualisation of politeness is relevant for understanding the general cultural per-
ception and interpretation of the phenomenon and will allow for a comparison of folk notions of politeness with
scientific theories and models. We collected expectations of and influences on politeness in semi-structured in-
terviews with seventeen native speakers of German. As our research has a focus on human-robot-interaction,
we compared (within subject) participants’ expectations for human politeness with their expectations for robot
politeness. We analysed the interview data using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and retrieved par-
ticipants’ conceptual ideas for politeness and their expectations. We also examined which words they used to
describe ideas aiming at finding differences in terminology used regarding human or robot politeness.
Overall, participants described politeness to be a result of cultural and social aspects, using expressions such as
“norms” and “societal rules”, or, more generally, “being friendly”. Alongside these socio-cultural components,
they often mentioned the inclusion and consideration of the interactional partner. Here they often spoke of
“respect” and not “hurting someone’s feelings”. Participants also expected politeness to be situationally adaptive
and personally motivated, also considering the mood of interlocutors.
These descriptions are in line with different theoretical concepts of politeness. The consideration of an inter-
locutor’s feelings and the idea of showing respect can be attributed to the face concept (Goffman, 1955). The
notion of politeness as being governed by cultural rules, in contrast, is in line with discernment theories of
politeness (Ide, 1989; Gretenkort & Tylén, 2021).
When comparing what participants described regarding general and human politeness in contrast to politeness
in human-robot-interaction, we observed that many expressions used for the former were not used for the
latter, for example those that described politeness as “attentiveness”, “considerate”, or “accommodating”. Other
concepts were mentioned for both types of interactional partners, for example the consideration of culturally
learned concepts such as honorifics, or saying “thank you”. However, while participants talked about “norms”
in the context of human interaction, they mostly mentioned “rules”, “learned”, or “programmed” politeness in
the context of human-robot-interaction.
Besides contributing to politeness research, our study also provides insight into human-robot-interaction de-
sign. Here, our analysis indicates that the goal of developing robots that are highly anthropomorphic might not
be desirable, at least given the current state of technological development.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology, 3(2),
77-101. doi:10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.
Brown, P. (2015). Politeness and language. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural
Sciences (IESBS),(2nd ed.) (pp. 326-330). Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53072-4.
Gretenkort, T., & Tylén, K. (2021). The dynamics of politeness: An experimental account. Journal of Pragmatics,
185, 118-130. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.09.003.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry, 18(3), 213-231.
doi:10.1080/00332747.1955.11023008.
Ide, S. (1989). Formal forms and discernment: Two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness.
doi:10.1515/mult.1989.8.2-3.223.

417
18th International Pragmatics Conference

418
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Folk concepts of politeness, respect and successful


communication in Namibian English

Panel contribution

Prof. Anne Schröder 1 , Dr. Pawel Sickinger 1


1. Bielefeld University

The analysis of politeness phenomena in communicative interaction has frequently been undertaken from the
perspective of an overarching theory of politeness such as face theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) or the theory
of relational work proposed by Locher and Watts (2005). This approach runs the risk of superimposing theoret-
ical constructs onto phenomena that might not be fully compatible with the mode of analysis employed, which
is especially problematic in the context of research work in cultural contexts not shared by the researchers
themselves.
For this reason, we instead take a bottom-up, data-driven approach in our current project on the pragmatics
of Namibian English (PraProNE) regarding politeness and related concepts, following principles laid down in
Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2006, cf. Charmaz and Thornberg 2020). In 15 interviews with staff
and students at the University of Namibia in 2022, we have prompted our participants to talk about different
aspects of communication in the context of Namibia’s multilingual, multicultural ecology. This includes concepts
of polite and impolite conversation, pragmatic norms and expectations, respect and appropriate behaviour
as well as the recognition and management of intercultural differences. In a distinct series of 30 interviews
conducted in 2023, we have asked participants to comment on and elaborate their own pragmatic performance
in a DCT questionnaire they had previously filled out. Their reflections on their own pragmatic choices are
illuminating regarding, among other things, the perceived need for politeness, indirectness, deference etc. in
specific communicative scenarios, giving us a way to validate our use of Brown and Levinson’s micro-social
parameters in the design of the questionnaire.
Via examples from these two data sets, we will discuss the conceptualizations of linguistic politeness we find
in this group of speakers of Namibian English and situate it within well-known theoretical frameworks in po-
liteness research. We will furthermore describe and evaluate our methodological approach to this issue and
demonstrate how it informs our ongoing research on speech act performance in Namibian English.
Brown, P. & S.C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: CUP.
Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory. A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. London: SAGE.
Charmaz, K. & R. Thornberg. 2020. The Pursuit of Quality in Grounded Theory. Qualitative Research in Psychol-
ogy 18(3), 305-327.
Locher, M. & R.J. Watts. 2005. Politeness Theory and Relational Work. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1), 9-33.

419
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Talking about national and regional boundaries: The public


discourse on communicative differences in German

Panel contribution

Ms. Ronja Eggenschwiler 1


1. University of Zurich

This presentation is set in the context of the trinational project “Variational Pragmatics of German: Compar-
ing Communicative Patterns”, whose overarching goal is to investigate how pragmatic variation in German is
distributed geographically and how common assumptions about communicative patterns compare to data on
actual language use. My talk will examine such assumptions in more detail, i.e. it will approach the question
how speech (inter)actions are perceived and presented from a lay-linguistic point of view (e.g. ‘German direct-
ness’ versus ‘Swiss politeness’).
Crucially, I will focus both on statements pertaining to communicative differences between the national borders
of Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland as well as on those pertaining to divergent patterns
within these countries. While the literature often emphasizes the existence of such differences (cf. e.g. Auer
& Hausendorf on East and West Germany), evidence from empirical analyses is lacking. The primary aim
of this presentation, however, is not to clarify how this may be approached methodologically; but rather
to illustrate what types of lay-linguistic statements are found in Swiss, Austrian and German newspapers,
blogposts and popular guidebooks (e.g. Lord 2011; Reihl 2013; Steinfest 2017). To render these materials useful
for linguistic analysis, a corpus is currently being compiled that covers comments on putative differences in a
wide range of pragmatic phenomena including, for instance, a tendency of German speakers in Switzerland
to switch from the more formal address pronoun Sie to more familiar du much sooner (“Sölle mir nöd Duzis
mache?”) than speakers living in Germany or Austria. The talk, which will present some preliminary findings
from a pilot study, is organized as follows: First, an overview of the project will be given, then a selection of
statements will be analyzed to identify and discuss some of the recurring topics found in public discussions
on pragmatic variation in German. Finally, I will pursue the question whether lay-linguistic comments in the
public discourse are predominantly characterized by generalizations along national lines or whether they also
address more fine-grained patterns of regional variation.

Bibliography
Auer, P. & H. Hausendorf (2000): Kommunikation in gesellschaftlichen Umbruchsituationen: Mikroanalytische
Aspekte des sprachlichen und gesellschaftlichen Wandels in den Neuen Bundesländern. Berlin & New York: De
Gruyter.
Lord, R. (2011): Germany: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette. New York: Marshall Cavendish.
Reihl, B. (2013): Der feine Unterschied: Ein Handbuch für Deutsche in der Schweiz. St. Gallen: Midas-
Management-Verlag.
Steinfest, H. (2017): Gebrauchsanweisung für Österreich. München: Piper.

420
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What the meta-illocutionary lexicon can tell us about speech


act taxonomies

Panel contribution

Mr. Dominik Schoppa 1


1. University of Augsburg

The meta-illocutionary lexicon (e.g., request, congratulated, begging, apologetic(ally)) is a subset of the lex-
icon which anchors second-order pragmatic notions (i.e., illocutions) in first-order (i.e., ordinary) language
(cf. Schneider 2017: 225). When used in interaction, the meta-illocutionary lexicon entails explicit meta-
communication (cf. Hübler 2011: 108–116) by definition, and therefore intersects with (some of) Verschueren’s
(2021) metalinguistic activity types: quoted and reported speech, self-reflexive speech, and talk about linguistic
forms and utterances (cf. 2021: 120–125). Building on Verschueren’s (2021) classification, a model is developed
according to which meta-illocutionary items can realize three fundamental functions with respect to the illocu-
tions they denote in context: A DESCRIPTIVE function, where the speaker presents a mapping between an the
relevant illocution and an external utterance as congruous, a PERFORMATIVE function, where talk about an
illocution conflates with the performance of this illocution (under the presupposition of felicity), and an EVAL-
UATIVE function, where the speaker explicates (in)congruencies in the mapping between an illocution and its
felicity conditions. The research question this study aims to answer is how these communicative functions
are distributed quantitatively with regard to directive illocutions (i.e., requesting, commanding, begging) and
expressive illocutions (i.e, thanking, apologizing, congratulating). Moreover, this study will consider British En-
glish, Hong Kong English, and Kenyan English data, and is thus situated at the interface of metapragmatics and
World Englishes. A total of 5400 meta-illocutionary items were extracted from the GloWbE corpus and coded
for their communicative function(s) in context, and the results were compared across (a) the two speech act
classes (i.e., directives and expressives), (b) individual illocutions within each class, and (c) the selected varieties
of English. The main findings include that talk about all directive illocutions is dominated by the DESCRIPTIVE
function, whereas talk about expressive illocutions is much more diverse. In addition, cross-varietal differences
are minimal overall. These and other results are discussed against the background of second-order speech act
classifications and taxonomies. It is argued, among other things, that the second-order feature of expressives as
being a conceptually more diverse category (due to its variable sincerity condition) is reflected in the first-order
feature that expressives are talked about much more diversely by ordinary language users, irrespective of the
variety of English.
References
Hübler, A. (2011). Metapragmatics. In W. Bublitz & N. R. Norrick (Eds.), Foundations of pragmatics (pp. 107–136).
Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Schneider, K. P. (2017). Is that a threat? Forms and functions of metapragmatic terms in English discourse.
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 42(2), 225–242.
Verschueren, J. (2021). Reflexivity and meta-awareness. In M. Haugh, D. Z. Kádár, & M. Terkourafi (Eds.), The
Cambridge handbook of sociopragmatics (pp. 117–139). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

421
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“This apology doesn’t seem sincere at all”: a cross-cultural


analysis of online (meta)discourses around Will Smith’s
apology

Panel contribution

Ms. Eugenia Diegoli 1


1. University of Bologna

This study looks at Will Smith’s apology for slapping Chris Rock and how it has been metadiscoursively con-
structed in Japanese and (American) English online communication. In particular, I am interested in comparing
users’ first-order conceptualisations about what makes an (in/effective) apology and how Will Smith’s apology
and his supposed violation of social and moral norms are interpreted by the two audiences.
Will Smith’s apology was initially posted on his social media on 29 July 2022 and then reported on YouTube by the
ABC7 channel. First, the apology was transcribed and the uses and functions of meta-illocutionary expressions
(MIEs; e.g., Schneider 2022) and apology strategies (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) employed therein were coded. Using
a Python script, I then downloaded two sets of comments: the comments (in English) to the YouTube video
aforementioned and the comments (in Japanese) of a second YouTube video, which is addressed to a Japanese
audience and reports, translates and briefly discusses the apology. Finally, I uploaded each data set (collectively
amounting to 310,998 tokens) onto AntConc (Anthony 2022) and, using MIEs (i.e., apolog* for English; shazai
‘apology’/ayama* ‘apologise’ for Japanese) as nodes, I analysed their collocates and the extended concordance
lines they occur in. The questions addressed are: (1) Which functions do MIEs serve in the data? (2) How do the
two communities metadiscursively discuss, evaluate and eventually challenge the apology? (3) What are the
moral orders such metadiscourses appeal to?
The results indicate that the MIEs are used in the comments with two main functions: to report that an apology
was performed and to challenge/problematise the apology. However, important differences were also observed.
The close reading of 50 concordance lines for each dataset suggests that Will Smith’s apology is often negatively
judged by the English audience. This negative evaluation, however, seems to be less prominent in the Japanese
comments. A closer look at the collocates also revealed that apolog* typically co-occurs with sincere, usually
to challenge the sincerity of the act (e.g., This apology doesn’t seem sincere at all). Conversely, shazai/ayama*
is commonly associated with (o-)tagai (ni) ‘reciprocal(ly)’ to suggest that a reciprocal apology from Chris Rock
would be appropriate (e.g, Uiru dake o semezu ni o-tagai ni shazai shite hoshii ‘without blaming only Will, I wish
they both [lit. reciprocally] apologised’). Culture-specific moral orders seem to play a role in the negotiation
of what is (in)appropriate/(im)polite: while in the English-speaking community sincerity is the single most im-
portant factor when evaluating the apology, Japanese speakers prioritise reciprocity. Importantly, however,
considerable intra-cultural variation amongst members of each group was also observed.
The analysis opens a window on first-order conceptualisations of apologies, revealing an extended negotiation
over the pragmatic meanings of MIEs and what an apology is (or should be). Such negotiation is motivated by
cultural perceptions of (im)politeness but also by individual preferences. The findings have also methodological
implications for the ways in which corpus and pragmatic approaches can be merged.

422
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Well, there’s an understatement, yes”: Meta-rhetorical uses


of understatement

Panel contribution

Prof. Claudia Claridge 1


1. University of Augsburg

While instances similar to “to say I am not happy is an understatement” have been called explicit uses (e.g.
explicit irony or hyperbole by Barbe 1995 and Claridge 2011, respectively), they are here called ‘meta-rhetorical’,
as they are in fact metapragmatic expressions and similar to meta-illocutions (e.g. Schneider 2021).
This study investigates meta-rhetorical understatement (all N, V, ADJ forms) in modern British (BNC) and Amer-
ican corpora (COCA, SOAP). The choice of these corpora is due to the fact that some interesting distributions
can be followed up with them. Ethnic terms collocating prominently with understatement are English and
British (pointing to the well-known national stereotype, e.g. Fox 2004), but meta-rhetorical use is more common
in American than in British English. A variational perspective is thus of interest. Regarding register, meta-
rhetorical understatement is not found in informal conversation (BNC), but only in context-governed and public
speech (BNC, COCA) as well as more commonly in writing. Interestingly, it is rather frequent in the ‘spoken’
soap operas, which points to specific dramatic functions.
In contrast to meta-illocutions like apologize the nominal form predominates here, with verbal forms fairly rare
and adjectival forms usually found in a non-relevant sense as in understated elegance. Adapting Schneider’s
(2021: 15) functions for meta-illocutions, the performative one does not exist with meta-rhetoricals (*I (do)
understate), and (very rare) pure reporting as in (1) seems to usually merge with the commenting function, as
(2) not only reports previous understatement, but mainly evaluates it.
(1) “I’ve heard that a few times already,” Eric understated. (COCA FIC)
(2) Robert Leyton told me you were attractive but he understated. (BNC FRS)
In commenting we find the presence of a (presumed) understatement (underlined in (2-3), also not happy above),
which is either licenced as literally appropriate (3) or called too weak (2), in both cases leading to an overall more
emphatic statement (cf. Claridge 2011 for similar explicit hyperbole cases). It is of interest whether the speaker
comments on their own (3) or on others’ usage (2) and which of the two is more common.
(3) It’s no understatement to say the entire flower industry depends on that number. (COCA MAG)
(4) Understating it a bit, aren’t we? (SOAP, OLTL)
(5) Amber: I know you don’t like me very much. - Aggie: Understatement of the century. (SOAP, BB)
The problematizing function is mostly found in interactive uses like (4-5), with one speaker criticizing another
speaker’s utterance. The challenge is made stronger by modifications like ‘of the LONG PERIOD’ (cf. (5)) or
rather common premodifying adjectives, e.g. gross, huge, massive, vast, major. Interrogative cases like (4) are
uncommon, even in the problematizing function, as most instances are found in declaratives, e.g. (3), or as
phrasal chunks as in (5).
References
Barbe, Katharina. 1995. Irony in Context. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Claridge, Claudia. 2011. Hyperbole in English. Cambridge: CUP.
Fox, Kate. 2004. Watching the English. London: Hodder.
Schneider, Klaus P. 2021. “Notes on variational metapragmatics.“ Journal of Pragmatics 179, 12-18.

423
Gesture in spoken and
signed-to-spoken
language interpreting
(organized by Sílvia
Gabarró-López, Alan
Cienki)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Co-speech gestures in interpreting sign to speech

Panel contribution

Dr. Liona Paulus 1 , Dr. Jana Hosemann 1


1. University of Cologne

Interpretation settings between a sign language and a spoken language are very specific communicative con-
texts that target mutual understanding across language modalities (Stone 2012, Turner et al. 2016). Coming from
a “machine”-like interpretation model in the 1980ies, in which interpreters were supposed to produce speech
without co-speech gestures and only little facial expressions, the interpretation style has changed in the last
decades. Nowadays, sign language interpreters are allowed to use co-speech gestures while interpreting into
the spoken language. We hypothesize that the use of co-speech gestures advances the overall communication
situation between a deaf and a hearing person.
In our current study, we pilot the hypotheses that an interpreting context, in which the interpreter does use co-
speech gestures during speech, promotes a clearer communication between the deaf and the hearing person,
compared to an interpreting context, in which the interpreter does not use co-speech gestures during speech.
We address the following questions: Do deaf participants benefit from seeing co-speech gestures during inter-
preting from sign language to spoken language? In what way does the sign language interpreter as well as the
hearing participant also benefit from their use of co-speech gestures?
We collect video recordings of interpretation settings (German Sign Language (DGS) and German) with deaf and
hearing participants and interpreters. We analyze the co-speech gestures used by the interpreter into lexical
gestures (emblematic, pointing and illustrative gestures), as well as communicative control gestures (recur-
rent, regulators and beat gestures) (Matsumoto & Hwang 2013, Pfau 2011, Ekman & Friesen 1969, Müller 2004,
Ladewig 2014). Lexical gestures will then be compared to DGS signs in a post analysis, and a questionnaire with
the participants asks about the communicative benefit for deaf and hearing participant in an interpretation
context with frequent use of co-speech gestures.
References
Ekman P. & W. Friesen (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavioral categories. Semiotica 1, 49–98.
Matsumoto, D. & H. Hwang (2013). Emblematic gestures (Emblems). Encyclopedia Cross-Cultural Psychology 2,
464–466. doi: 10.1002/9781118339893.wbeccp188.
Müller, C. (2004). Forms and uses of the Palm Up Open Hand. A case of a gesture family? In C. Müller & R. Posner
(Eds.),Semantics and Pragmatics of everyday gestures. Berlin: Weidler, 234–256.
Ladewig, S.H. (2014). Recurrent gestures. In Müller, C. et al. (Eds.). Body – language – communication: An
international handbook on multimodality in human interaction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1558–1575.
Pfau, R. (2011). A point well taken: On the typology and diachrony of pointing. In Napoli, D.J. & G. Mathur (Eds.),
Deaf around the world. The impact of language. Oxford: OUP, 144–163.
Stone, C. (2012). 40. Interpreting. In Pfau, R.; Steinbach, M. & B. Woll (eds.), Sign Language: An International
Handbook, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 980–998. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325.980
Turner, Graham H. & Andrew J. Merrison (2016). Doing ‘understanding’ in dialogue interpreting. Advancing
theory and method. Interpreting, 18(2), 137-171. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.18.2.01tur

425
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring the semiotic complexity of interpreter-mediated


discourse: Insights from a multimodal analysis of information
provision strategies in medical consultations

Panel contribution

Dr. Inez Beukeleers 1 , Dr. Laura Theys 1 , Prof. Heidi Salaets 1 , Dr. Demi Krystallidou 2 , Prof. Peter Pype
3
, Mr. Geert Brône 1
1. KU Leuven, 2. University of Surrey, 3. University of Ghent

One key factor in the achievement of successful patient-centered communication and shared decision making
in medical consultations considers information provision, i.e., strategies used by healthcare providers and pa-
tients to convey information about symptoms, diagnosis and treatment plan (De Haes & Bensing, 2009). When
reviewing the literature, it appears that healthcare providers use cognitive aid strategies when providing medi-
cal information. They repeat or rephrase information, provide simplifications and/or make use of drawings and
pictures in order to provide clear and viable information (Menichetti et al., 2021). However, existing studies
have mainly studied this phenomenon in experimental set-ups, rather than in authentic medical consultations.
Moreover, it has also not yet been studied in authentic interpreter-mediated medical consultations. Finally,
existing studies do not consider the role of gesture in face-to-face interaction.
The current study therefore provides a first systematic account of multimodal information provision strategies
used in 5 authentic interpreter-mediated medical consultations. We adopt a semiotic point of view in which lan-
guage is signaled through the methods of describing, indicating and depicting (Clark, 1996; Shaw, to appear). In
doing so, we will investigate the semiotic complexity of informative utterances produced by the primary partic-
ipant and identify possible shifts in the interpretation process. We thus investigate whether/how interpreters
relay the healthcare providers’ and patients’ visible bodily behavior used to describe, indicate and depict the
medical problem or treatment.
Preliminary results show that the primary participants use a variety of semiotic strategies to exchange medical
information. Healthcare providers, for instance, do not only use descriptive strategies like repetitions or re-
formulations, but also use iconic and indexical gestures to indicate and depict information about the patients’
medical condition. Moreover, patients do not only describe their symptoms, but they also use pointing gestures
and eye gaze to indicate the exact location of their pain. Finally, we found substantial shifts in the interpreter’s
rendition of the participants’ utterances. Repetitions or reformulations are often not relayed and interpreters
often do not see and integrate the participants’ pointing and iconic gestures in their interpretation. These find-
ings point out that interpreters would benefit from an enhanced knowledge about healthcare communication.
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language: Herbert H. Clark. Cambridge University Press.
de Haes, H., & Bensing, J. (2009). Endpoints in medical communication research, proposing a framework of func-
tions and outcomes. Patient Education and Counseling, 74(3), 287–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2008.12.006
Menichetti, J., Lie, H. C., Mellblom, A. V., Brembo, E. A., Eide, H., Gulbrandsen, P., Heyn, L., Saltveit, K. H., Strømme,
H., Sundling, V., Turk, E., & Juvet, L. K. (2021). Tested communication strategies for providing information to
patients in medical consultations: A scoping review and quality assessment of the literature. Patient Education
and Counseling, 104(8), 1891–1903. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2021.01.019
Shaw, E. (to appear). Gesture at the crossroads. Interpreting semiotic fields in a task-based exchange. In. A.
Lepeut, Beukeleers, I. (Eds.). The Semiotic Diversity of Language. Belgian Journal of Linguistics.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Functions of gestures during disfluencies in simultaneous


interpreting of speech

Panel contribution

Prof. Alan Cienki 1


1. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Simultaneous interpreting is known to be an extreme language task, involving a high cognitive load (Seeber
2011, 2013). Gesture has long been claimed to play a role in facilitating lexical retrieval (Krauss et al. 2000) and
speech production (de Ruiter 2000). Different functions of gestures have been studied in this regard, including
those of representation/depiction, pragmatic uses, and self-adapting (self-touching) functions.
There are reasons to hypothesize that each of these gesture functions might play a role as interpreters try to
resolve moments of disfluency. Representational: because gestures depicting elements of the concepts from the
source text might facilitate lexical retrieval in the target language. Pragmatic: specifically, cyclic gestures are
known to play a prominent role during word retrieval (Ladewig 2011). Self-adapters: because these movements
may help with maintaining mental focus and controlling stress (Ekman & Friesen 1969).
This exploratory study aimed to see which gesture functions were employed most frequently, and in what ways,
during moments of interpreting disfluency. Fifty native speakers of Russian (L1) were involved, ranging from
less (student-level) to more experienced interpreters. Interpreting was done both to and from an L2 with each
participant, with English and German as the L2s, depending on the interpreter’s expertise. Each time, the par-
ticipant heard a ten-minute audio clip from a popular science lecture about biodiversity and the extinction of
species; the videos were purposely not shown to prevent potential influence from gestures by the original lec-
turers. We counted as disfluencies in speech moments involving truncations, restarts, mumbling, use of filler
words, dragging out of words, and long (for the given speaker) pauses.
The results show that the most frequent uses of gestures with disfluencies involved pragmatic functions and
self-adapters. The pragmatic gestures, however, were not primarily cyclic ones, but rather presentation ges-
tures (palm-up open hands [Müller 2004] and variants of them [Cienki 2021]) and gestures marking emphasis
(beats). Self-adapters were those of a sustained nature (e.g. rubbing the fingers of one hand with the other). Ges-
ture use sometimes alternated between these two, with pragmatic gestures ‘popping out’ (with brief outward
movements) during otherwise sustained self-adapter movements. Representational gestures were used far less
during disfluencies. These results did not vary significantly according to the level of experience of the inter-
preters, the direction of interpreting, or the source or target language of the interpreting. However, individual
differences between interpreters were great, considering the variance in their reliance on the use of particular
gesture functions (Galvão 2020) (their ‘idiogest’ [Brannigan 2011]).
The two predominant functions of gestures seen here highlight the role of interpreters as ‘presenters’ to an au-
dience (with outwardly-oriented pragmatic presentation gestures) while simultaneously negotiating the heavy
cognitive load that is part of their work (with inwardly-oriented sustained self-adapters). The implicitly interac-
tive nature of their discourse (even if interpreting only for imagined listeners) reflects not only the inherently
dialogic nature of talk (à la Bakhtin) but also the blending of viewpoints (Cienki & Iriskhanova 2020) that inter-
preters engage in—essentially embodying the speaker of the source text.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gestural alignment in spoken simultaneous interpreting: A


mixed-method approach

Panel contribution

Dr. Inés Olza 1


1. University of Navarra

Background, objectives and research questions


This paper aims to offer empirical evidence on the role and multimodal display of cognitive alignment in spoken
simultaneous interpreting. Until now, the body of research on alignment in interaction (see Rasenberg, Özyürek
& Dingemanse 2020) has focused mainly (1) on verbal forms of aligned behavior, with still limited attention paid
to the multimodal channelings of alignment in gestures and prosody (Kimbara 2006; Olza 2022a); and (2) on
regular genre of interpersonal dialogue, with scarce attention to other forms of collaborative linguistic activity
where the speaker’s behavior crucially relies on another individual’s communicative action.
In parallel, the architecture of cognitive abilities that intervene in simultaneous interpreting is still to be fully
described, and the place of gesture in the interpreters’ practice has been neglected until very recently, with
contributions that have advanced in qualitative analyses of data drawn both from (quasi)naturalistic and ex-
perimental settings (Zagar Galvão 2009, 2020; Iriskhanova 2020).
Against this general background, and relying on a previous pilot study (Olza 2022b), this paper presents a case-
study that addresses the following research questions:
Do simultaneous interpreters (spoken-to-spoken discourse) gesturally align with the interpreted speaker? If so,
which types of gestures tend to prompt a higher degree of alignment by the interpreters, and why?
What does all this tell us about the cognitive processes involved in spoken simultaneous interpretation?
Data and methodology
A 30-minute training session for novice legal interpreters at the European Court of Justice (Interpretation Di-
rectorate) was recorded. This consisted of a live interpreting exercise carried out in a real courtroom, where
the speaker stood in the main of orator’s position (central front) and the trainees occupied individual booths in
both sides of the room. The speaker delivered a speech in Spanish on non-legal issues related to the history of
technology. Two interpreters were recorded: interpreter 1, from Spanish into spoken English; and interpreter
2, from Spanish into spoken French.
A mixed-method approach is used to analyze the data. Four 2-minute excerpts of the recording are randomly
selected to carry out the analysis. First, a qualitative analysis of the excerpts serves to identify the presence
and type of gestures (beat, deictic, iconic, metaphoric, pragmatic) performed by both the speaker (baseline)
and the interpreters, along with the correspondent speech sequences uttered by all of them.

Second, statistical analyses are run to define the degree of convergence between the speaker’s and the inter-
preters’ gestural behavior, also looking at the type of gesture originally carried out by the speaker.
Expected results
The quantitative analysis of the interpreters’ behavior will provide a general picture of the degree of gestu-
ral alignment they exhibit towards the speaker. Moreover, the integration of gesture types in the analysis will
determine the kind of body movements that are more likely to prompt alignment by the interpreters, thus feed-
ing the general theory of alignment with new data and helping to describe how it is modulated in interpreting
practices.
Complete references: https://bit.ly/3zXxAhZ

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gesture and cognitive load in simultaneous and consecutive


interpreting: A pilot study

Panel contribution

Dr. Yuetao Ren 1 , Prof. Jianhua Wang 1


1. Renmin University of China

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) and consecutive interpreting (CI), both frequently used in conference settings,
are mostly carried out under high cognitive pressure (Gile, 1995; Lv & Liang, 2019). Studies on language and
gesture show that speech and gesture form an integrated system during language comprehension and produc-
tion (McNeill, 1992; Kelly et al., 2008). Gesture plays a facilitative role in language production by lightening the
cognitive load, especially when working memory is taxed (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2001; Ping & Goldin-Meadow,
2010; Gillespie et al., 2014; Lewis et al., 2015), and studies on conference interpreting find that interpreters do
gesture in both SI (Martín de León & Fernández Santana, 2021; Stachowiak-Szymczak, 2019; Zagar Galvão, 2015)
and CI mode (Stachowiak-Szymczak, 2019). However, gestures in interpreting, especially their relationship with
the underlying cognitive process, remain understudied.
This study aims at exploring the relationship between gesture and cognitive load in conference interpreting. To
this end, we set up a remote interpreting setting via the Tencent Meeting app, a Chinese equivalent of ZOOM, for
data collection. Fourteen student interpreters participated in three kinds of speech production tasks, namely: a
monologic spontaneous speech (free talk), four interpreting tasks (both SI and CI in video and audio conditions,
order counterbalanced) and a dialogic spontaneous speech (interview). A cued retrospective session, using
interpreting task videos as stimuli, was conducted afterward, in which participants made spoken commentaries
on their interpreting process.
Our first hypothesis is that there will be differences in gestural behavior between these three kinds of speech
production tasks as well as the four interpreting conditions as a result of differences in cognitive load. Our
second hypothesis is that gestural behavior will be different between SI and CI, due to different interpreting
strategies. Cognitive load is measured using disfluencies as problem indicators.
Both gestures and disfluencies were analyzed using ELAN software. Gestures were annotated according to their
main functions: referential and pragmatic (Martín de León & Fernández Santana, 2021). For disfluencies, the
following sub-types were included for annotation: silent pauses longer than 0.5s, filled pauses, filler words,
truncation, restarts, repetitions and prolonged sounds (Bóna & Bakti, 2020; Cienki & Iriskhanova, 2020; Han &
An, 2020).
Preliminary results show that the frequency and amplitude of gestures are significantly greater in the dialog
task. Most gestures are adjacent to disfluencies, which provide evidence for gestures’ facilitative role in cogni-
tion and language production. It is argued that there exits a functional difference in the gestures used in fluent
and disfluent speech. That is, gestures accompanying (quasi-)fluent speech serve to propel spatio-motoric and
abstract thinking and those that go with disfluent speech, however, facilitate lexical retrieval and short-term
memory. In this way, gestures lighten the cognitive load in the interpreting process and “lend a hand” to inter-
preters in achieving fluency.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How does physical separation affect the interpreter’s use of


gestures in distance interpreting?

Panel contribution

Dr. Jelena Vranjes 1


1. Ghent University

Although research has shown that speakers’ use of manual gestures is strongly linked with speech in many
ways (McNeill 1992), gestures have received little attention in dialogue interpreting research. Previous studies
on spoken interpreting have investigated, for instance, the function of body-oriented gestures in healthcare
interpreting (Gerwing & Li 2019) and interactive gestures that serve the purpose of pointing out the ‘principal’
of the talk (Vranjes & Brône 2021). Yet there is much more to be learned about the use and function of gestures
in the process of dialogue interpreting.
This paper will investigate gestures in a technology-mediated form of interpreting, namely video remote in-
terpreting (VRI). VRI refers to the use of a video link to connect the interpreter, who is at a distant location,
with the primary participants, who are together at one site. Especially since the beginning of the Covid-19
pandemic, the importance of video remote interpreting for providing interpreting services has drastically in-
creased and is likely to continue growing in the future. Although video technology enables “co-presence at a
distance” (Hutchby 2000), research has indicated that embodied resources do not function in the same way as
in face-to-face settings (e.g. Heath & Luff 1991).
Drawing on insights from gestures studies and Interpreting Studies, the study addresses the following question:
How does physical separation affect the interpreter’s use of gestures in distance interpreting? The study is based
on data drawn from experiments that aimed at comparing onsite interpreting and VRI in terms of interaction
management. The study will focus on the interpreters’ pragmatic or interactive gestures (Bavelas et al. 1992,
Kendon 2004) during the exchange and the constraints placed on the use of those gestures in VRI. The paper will
show how dialogue interpreters’ use of gestures relates to the complexity of the interactional setting and how
adopting a multimodal approach to the analysis of VRI yields novel insights into the intricacies of technology-
mediated forms of interpreting.
Bavelas, J. B., Chovil, N. D., Lawrie, A. & A. Wade (1992) Interactive Gestures, Discourse processes, 15, p. 469-489.
Gerwing, J., & Li, S. (2019). Body-oriented gestures as a practitioner’s window into interpreted communication.
Social Science & Medicine, 233, 171-180.
Hutchby, I. (2001). Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kendon, A. (2004) Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vranjes, J., & Brône, G. (2021). Interpreters as laminated speakers : gaze and gesture as interpersonal deixis in
consecutive dialogue interpreting. JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS, 180, 83–99.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Making gestures inside and outside the booth ― A


comparative study

Panel contribution

Dr. Celia Martín de León 1 , Dr. Elena Galvão 2


1. Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2. Universidade do Porto

Although co-speech gestures show great variability across individuals, context and communicative situation
may also influence their production. Simultaneous interpreting is a very cognitively demanding activity as well
as a complex form of cross-linguistically mediated communication. All of this can influence the production
of interpreters’ co-speech gestures. Given the idiosyncratic nature of gestures, comparing the gestures of the
same interpreter while interpreting and in face-to-face communication may shed some light on the specific
characteristics of gestures in simultaneous interpreting. This exploratory study focuses on the gestures of five
professional conference interpreters working from their L2 (English) into their L1 (Portuguese in four cases,
Italian in one case), and aims to compare the co-speech gestures of each interpreter in the two settings.
Previous research not only shows that speakers gesture at a higher rate when addressing a visible interlocu-
tor, but also that gestures made in face-to-face interaction are significantly larger than those made when the
interlocutor is not seen or does not exist [1]. Furthermore, Cienki and Iriskhanova [2] found some similarities
across the gestures of simultaneous interpreters, such as the prevalence of adaptors and beats as opposed to
representational gestures. Taking all this into account, our initial hypotheses are as follows:
(1) The rate of gestures will be higher in face-to-face communication than during interpreting.
(2) Gestures will be larger in face-to-face communication than during interpreting.
(3) The rate of adaptors will be higher during interpreting than in face-to-face communication.
To test our hypotheses, we analysed data collected in two situations: an interview with the researcher and a
simultaneous interpreting task. We based our analysis on the concept of “interpreters’ gestural style” devel-
oped by Zagar Galvão [3] to describe the individual gestural profile of interpreters, and focused on two of the
dimensions proposed to characterise it plus an additional one:
(1) Gesture rate (number of gestures per minute).
(2) Classification of the amplitude of the gestures (small, medium, large) according to their location and trajec-
tory in the gesture space [4].
(3) Adaptor rate (number of adaptors per minute).
The preliminary results on the gesture rate of four interpreters in the simultaneous interpreting task show
moderate differences across subjects (from a minimum of 22.72; to a maximum of 31.12 gestures per minute).
Abbreviated references
[1] Bavelas, Janet; Gerwing, Jennifer; Sutton, Chantelle, & Prevost, Danielle. 2008. Gesturing on the telephone:
independent effects of dialogue and visibility.
[2] Cienki, Alan, & Iriskhanova, Olga. K. 2020. Patterns of multimodal behavior under cognitive load: An analysis
of simultaneous interpretation from L2 to L1.
[3] Zagar Galvão, Elena. 2020. Gesture functions and gestural style in simultaneous interpreting.
[4] McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought.

431
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reformulation structures in French Belgian Sign Language


(LSFB) > French interpreting: A pilot study

Panel contribution

Dr. Sílvia Gabarró-López 1


1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Reformulation structures (RS) are defined as two segments of discourse (X and Y) in which X says something
and Y says it in a different way in order to narrow, expand, adjust, specify, clarify, define, correct or modify
different aspects of X [1]. RS are the foundations of interpreting, and they can be found at different levels of this
linguistic activity [2]. By analysing RS used in French > Polish interpreting, Woroch [2] differentiated between
interlinguistic RS (i.e. the information of the source language is reformulated into the target language) and
intralinguistic RS (i.e., RS only occur within the target text). In signed-to-spoken and spoken-to-signed language
interpreting, RS remain almost unresearched to date [3].
This paper aims to describe intralinguistic and interlinguistic RS in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)-to-
French interpreting. The form of RS, their semiotic composition and distribution across LSFB source and French
target discourses is studied adopting a multimodal approach without any a priori distinction between ‘linguis-
tic’ and ‘non-linguistic’ articulators. In other words, the starting point is that signers and interpreters use vari-
ous semiotic repertoires including description (i.e., conventional structures of a language such as lexical items,
morphology and syntax), depiction (i.e., iconicity of sounds, intonation, gestures and body movements) and
indication (i.e., pointing with the hand or with the gaze) [4].
Two language datasets are annotated and analysed using ELAN: dialogues of two LSFB signers [5] for the source
data (totalling 10 minutes) and their interpretation into French by two experienced bimodal interpreters [6] as
the target data (totalling 20 minutes). Preliminary results show that both interpreters produce interlinguistic
and intralinguistic RS in French target productions, but to a lesser extent than in source LSFB productions.
Interpreters do not seem to be influenced in their gesturing by the signs produced in the LSFB source dialogues
and seem to control their amount of gesturing by placing their hands on their lap. Nevertheless, they combine
the semiotic repertoires mentioned above while reformulating. Interpreters also engage their voice (not only to
interpret the messages given by the signers but also to imitate how signers express them) as well as their hands
(e.g., producing palm-up gestures), body (e.g., moving their heads and their shoulders) and face (e.g., depicting
the signers’ attitudes or feelings using facial expressions).
Abbreviated references

• Murillo, S. 2016. “Sobre la reformulación y sus marcadores”.


• Woroch, J. 2010. La reformulation comme fondement de l’interprétation de conference.
• Meurant L,; Sinte, A. & Gabarró-López, S. 2022. “A multimodal approach to reformulation. Contrastive
study of French and French Belgian Sign Language through the productions of speakers, signers and
interpreters”.
• Ferrara, L. and Hodge, G. 2018. “Language as Description, Indication, and Depiction”.
• Meurant, L. 2015. Corpus LSFB. Un corpus informatisé en libre accès de vidéos et d’annotations de la langue
des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB).
• Gabarró-López, S. 2018. CorMILS: pilot multimodal corpus of French – French Belgian Sign Language
(LSFB) interpreters.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Self- and other-oriented gestures in consecutive dialogue


interpreting: impact on the cognitive load and performance
appraisal in interpreter-mediated interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Monika Chwalczuk 1 , Dr. Robert Balas 1


1. Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences

To date, the multimodal approaches applied to interpreting studies focused mainly on two stages of the In-
terpreting Communicative Event1 : processing of the source message2 and production of the target speech3,4
both examined in simultaneous mode. To contribute to the as yet understudied research avenue that analyses
consecutive dialogue interpreting through the lens of multimodal corpora5,6,7 , we propose to examine gesture
production, perception and the underlying cognitive processes in interpreter-mediated interactions in spoken
languages (English, French, Spanish, Polish).
Previous research shows that simultaneous and consecutive interpreters produce co-speech gestures encom-
passing spontaneous productions and visible actions induced by gestural alignment with the speaker6,8 . To
what extent are these bodily semiotic resources recruited to unburden the interpreter? Does their presence
additionally benefit the receivers of the target message? The paper’s contribution to the panel is twofold: ex-
amining the interpreter’s gesture (re)production along with its correlations with physiological indicators of the
cognitive load and analyzing if target speech production is evaluated differently when delivered with or with-
out gestures. Onsite experiments involving 30 graduate students of interpreting consist of mock public service
interactions meant to recreate medical, police, and administrative settings. Three types of data are collected,
spanning: 1) video recordings annotated in ELAN – to account for gesture production; 2) physiological mea-
sures, i.e., EEG and HRV – to investigate underlying cerebral and heartrate activity; 3) self- and peer-reports –
to verify if the presence of gestures has an impact on the performance appraisal.
The paper presents findings from the first part of an ongoing research project. Combining an embodied
cognition framework with sociolinguistic measures, we hope to contribute to the limited body of literature that
sheds light on how a multimodal approach can improve performance in consecutive dialogue interpreting – a
foundation of communication access services indispensable to vulnerable populations.

Abbreviated references

1. Angelelli, C., V., (2004). Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role: A Study of Conference, Court, and Medical Inter-
preters in Canada, Mexico and United States.
2. Seeber, K. (2017). Multimodal processing in simultaneous interpreting.
3. Galhano-Rodrigues, I., & Zagar Galvão, E. (2010). The importance of listening with one’s eyes: A case study
of multimodality in simultaneous interpreting.
4. Cienki, A., & Iriskhanova, O. K. (2020). Patterns of multimodal behavior under cognitive load: an analysis
of simultaneous interpretation from L2 to L1.
5. Davitti, E., & Pasquandrea, S. (2017). Embodied participation: What multimodal analysis can tell us about
interpreter-mediated encounters in pedagogical settings.
6. Chwalczuk, M. (2021). Co-speech gestures in public service interpreting: contextualised analysis of multi-
modal corpora.
7. Vranjes, J., & Brône, G. (2021). Interpreters as laminated speakers: Gaze and gesture as interpersonal deixis
in consecutive dialogue interpreting.
8. Martín de León, C., & Fernández Santana, A. (2021). Embodied cognition in the booth: Referential and
pragmatic gestures in simultaneous interpreting.

433
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Simultaneous interpreters’ gestures as a window on


conceptual alignment

Panel contribution

Dr. Terry Janzen 1 , Dr. Barbara Shaffer 2 , Dr. Lorraine Leeson 3


1. University of Manitoba, 2. University of New Mexico, 3. Trinity College Dublin

Taking our cue from Sweetser’s (to appear) claim that the body in space is fundamental to embodied cognition,
we examine the meaning of interpreters’ gestures when interpreting from spoken English to another spoken
language. Simulation of the speaker’s narrative sequences is evident in interpreters’ gesturing, and the main
question we ask is whether the gestures show evidence of conceptual alignment or non-alignment with the
source speaker’s viewpointed portrayal of scenes and events.
In the present qualitative study, we report on data from a larger study where fourteen interpreters participated,
interpreting two spoken English texts into the other language in their language pair: French, Spanish, Navajo,
Ukrainian, American Sign Language, or Irish Sign Language. All interpreters had at least five years of profes-
sional interpreting experience. Each interpreter first watched a video of two spoken English texts and then
were video recorded interpreting them into their target language. This was followed by a video recorded Think
Aloud Protocol (TAP) (Russell and Winston 2014) where they discussed how they made lexical and grammatical
choices in the target language, and whether their visualizations of the source text aided in how they understood
the text and subsequently made these target language choices. Both source text speakers gestured throughout
their texts, and all interpreters gestured frequently as they interpreted. In this study we focus on the spoken to
spoken language data.
In analyzing the resulting interpretations, supported by the TAP results, we find evidence of the interpreters’
simulation (Barsalou et al. 2008; Kok and Cienki 2017) of the speakers’ narrative sequences, based on their
gestures, especially when viewed within the context of viewpointed gesture space. This reflects a multi-level
cognitive blend, where the interpreter’s own past (subjective) experiences blend with their assessment of the
speaker’s viewpoint, rather than the interpreter fully assuming the speaker’s viewpoint. Critically, interpreters’
alignments and misalignments with the speaker’s intended message, observed when comparing the speakers’
and interpreters’ co-speech gestures, reveal degrees of both gestural (often spatial) alignment and conceptual
alignment. Here we examine elements of the interpreters’ conceptualization blends, and propose a typology of
gestural and conceptualization alignment/non-alignment in the interpreters’ target texts.
References:
Barsalou, Lawrence W., Ava Santos, W. Kyle Simmons and Christine D. Wilson. 2008. Language simulation in
conceptual processing. In Manuel de Vega, Arthur Glenberg and Arthur Graesser (eds.), Symbols and Embodi-
ment: Debates on Meaning and Cognition. 245-283. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kok, Kasper, and Alan Cienki. 2017. Taking simulation semantics out of the laboratory: Towards an interactive
and multimodal reappraisal of embodied language comprehension. Language and Cognition 9, 1-23.
Russell, Debora and Betsy Winston. 2014. Tapping into the interpreting process: Using participant reports to
inform the interpreting process in educational settings. Translation and Interpreting 6(1). 102-121.
Sweetser, Eve. To appear. Gestural meaning is in the body(-space) as much as in the hands. In Terry Janzen
and Barbara Shaffer (eds.), Signed Language and Gesture Research in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin/Boston: de
Gruyter Mouton.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The embodiment of renditions in signed-to-spoken language


interpreting: Recontextualizing constructed dialogue

Panel contribution

Mrs. Vibeke Bø 1
1. OsloMet

The complex and interactional character of interpreting is now well established by interpreting scholars (e.g.,
Wadensjö, 1998a; Roy, 2000; Hale, 2004; Mason, 2006; Llewellyn-Jones and Lee, 2014; Kluuskeri, 2019; Gallai,
2017; Blakemore and Gallai, 2014; Farinde et al., 2020). However, the nature of this complexity remains unclear,
specifically the research on the multimodal pragmatic processes in interpreted discourse is scarce. This paper
seeks to explore some of these processes by aligning new insights on the embodiment and multimodality of
language from linguistic research and gesture studies with interpreting studies. Moreover, the study seeks to
fill a gap of knowledge about interpreters´ visual bodily signals when rendering from a signed to a spoken
language.
Interpreting from a signed to a spoken language entails situating utterances that used to belong to a visual
language ecology into a language ecology with both visual and auditive resources, or a unified speech gesture-
system (Holler, 2022). This paper qualitatively explores how two interpreters recontextualize the depictive re-
source of constructed dialogue. Drawing on Goodwin´s (2000) notion of contextual configuration, with the tools
of multimodal conversation analysis (Davitti and Pasquandrea, 2017; Deppermann and Streeck, 2018), I demon-
strate and discuss the observations of embodied pragmatic processes, including gestural resources, deployed to
properly recontextualize constructed dialogue in its new ecological surroundings. The empirical material con-
sists of two informal interpreter-mediated lunch conversations. Each conversation is approximately one hour.
The data set analyzed for this paper consists of four extracts, two examples from each conversation. These ex-
tracts are annotated in ELAN (Crasborn and Sloetjes, 2008). As this study represents open data, the analyzed
video extracts will be included as part of the presentation.
The in-depth multimodal analysis of interpreters´ renditions provides a glance into the characteristics of the
important pragmatic choices made in simultaneous interpreting. This explorative study thus contributes to
the acknowledgement of pragmatic competence as an essential part of interpreters´ competence (Gallai, 2017),
and argues the extended reflections on naturally occurring data are important contributions to the field of
interpreting.
Selection of References
Blakemore, Diane, and Fabrizio Gallai. 2014. ‘Discourse Markers in Free Indirect Style and Interpreting’. Journal
of Pragmatics 60 (January): 106–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.003.
Davitti, Elena, and Sergio Pasquandrea. 2017. ‘Embodied Participation: What Multimodal Analysis Can Tell Us
about Interpreter-Mediated Encounters in Pedagogical Settings’. Journal of Pragmatics 107 (January): 105–28.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2016.04.008.
Deppermann, Arnulf, and Jürgen Streeck. 2018. Time in Embodied Interaction: Synchronicity and Sequential-
ity of Multimodal Resources. Vol. 293. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Farinde, Raifu Olanrewaju, Oyedokun Alli, and Wasiu Ademola. 2020. ‘Interpreting and Markers in Nigerian
Courtroom Discourse’, 24–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.11n.3p.24.
Gallai, Fabrizio. 2017. ‘Pragmatic Competence and Interpreter-Mediated Police Investigative Interviews’. Trans-
lator (Manchester, England) 23 (2): 177–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2017.1327317.
Goodwin, Charles. 2000. ‘Action and Embodiment within Situated Human Interaction’. Journal of Pragmatics
32 (10): 1489–1522. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00096-X.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hale, Sandra. 2004. Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse Practices of the Law, the Witness and the Inter-
preter. Benjamins Translation Library (V. 52). Philadelphia: Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

436
Getting close in a ‘formal
context’: Ideologies and
styling practice in
Japanese (organized by
Haruko Cook, Momoko
Nakamura)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Construction of shared affect in a Japanese research


interview: changes in participation framework

Panel contribution

Dr. Haruko Cook 1


1. Univery of Hawaii at Manoa

In studies of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, it is assumed that distinctive types of talk are produced in formal
and informal contexts (cf. Irvine 1979). Typically, institutional talks including interviews are considered as a
type of formal context. This study explores how informal context is created in a multi-party research interview
in Japanese.
In Japanese, which is rich in honorifics, formality and informality are linked to the addressee honorific,
desu/masu form and the non-honorific counterpart, the plain form, respectively. So far, scholars have exten-
sively investigated how the plain form is occasionally used in what is considered as the desu/masu-form dom-
inant formal context (cf. Jones and Ono 2008). It was found that in institutional talks, official activities are
normally conducted in the desu/masu form while activities not of an official nature such as small talk within
institutional talk are often conducted in the plain form (e.g., Cook 1996; Geyer 2008, 2013). In interviews, the
interviewer momentarily shifts to the plain form without an affect key in a summary/evaluation turn for the
purpose of extending the interviewee’s response (Cook 2002, 2008; Ikuta 2008; Nazikian 2007). The desu/masu
and plain forms, however, are not the only resources for constructing formality and informality in social con-
text. This paper investigates how a shift of participation framework in a multi-party interview (Goffman 1981)
contributes to a shift to an informal context within the formal context of an interview. Goffman (1981) ob-
serves two types of participation framework that may occur in multi-party talk. One is that the speaker treats
all the official participants as a group of addressed recipients. The other is that the speaker selects one partic-
ipant as the addressed recipient, creating a distinction between the addressed and unaddressed recipients in
the speech context. The paper asks the following questions: i) How do the interview participants change par-
ticipation framework in a multi-party interview?; ii) What co-occurring linguistic and non-linguistic features
are deployed to mark a change in participation framework?; iii) What effects does a change in participation
framework have on the interview?
The data come from a research interview in Japanese, in which the interviewer interviews three Japanese
women concerning differences in workplace culture between Japan and Hawaii.
The qualitative analysis of the data shows that Goffman’s first type of participation framework in a mulit-party
talk contributes to the interviewees’ display of heightened emotions. The interviewer treats the interviewees as
a group of addressed recipients when she asks a question. This move creates a footing shift within an interview.
The interviewees, who are collectively treated as the addressed recipients, respond to the interviewer’s question
by engaging in an informal talk among themselves by using the plain form, repetition, laughter, among others.
This paper demonstrates that this is an effective way to produce vivid descriptions and display strong emotions
in the interview. It contributes to the study of participation roles, an important issue, in the study of pragmatics
(cf. Levinson 1988; Verschueren 1999).

438
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Formality and Intimacy in Japanese Variety Shows

Panel contribution

Prof. Naomi Geyer 1


1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

In Japanese, the use and non-use of addressee honorifics constitute stylistic variations. While their use and
non-use are traditionally considered to indicate formality and intimacy respectively, recent studies claim that
honorific usage is related to speakers’ linguistic identity, ideology, and self-presentation.
In the fields of pragmatics and linguistic anthropology, researchers who take the indexical approach to prag-
matic phenomena have called for a re-examination of honorifics usages, viewing the relationship between lan-
guage and social categories as mediated by language ideology (Johnstone, 2013; Okamoto & Shibamoto-Smith,
2016). With such a view, researchers demonstrate that honorifics index multiple social meanings, and the use
and non-use of honorifics cannot simply be linked to the distinction between formal and informal contexts. As
the panel organizers stated in their proposal, the simple ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ dichotomy is “a static ideological
construct.”
The formal and informal contexts are especially intertwined in media discourse where multiple layers of rela-
tionships between interlocutors and audiences coexist. The discourse participants’ language use including their
multimodal enactments constructs and is constructed by the interlocutors’ and audience’s varying footings and
participation framework (Goffman 1981). For instance, in case of Japanese variety shows, participants talk in
front of audience who are in the studio with the participants, and the program is televised for a larger audience
who watches the show. In such a case, the program itself might be considered public and somewhat formal,
but it may include instances of informality and enactment of closeness. Moreover, sometimes the dynamics
between regular participants and a guest can create different layers of formalities.
Using qualitative discourse analysis, this study examines the participants’ use and non-use of honorifics along
with other linguistic and multimodal elements in 5 variety shows. It also examines 18 online discussion board
entries which discuss the participants’ language use in these programs. Showing the range of language use,
footings, and participation framework displayed in these programs and ensuing metapragmatic discourse, this
study aims to reexamine the notion of “formality” as something discursively constructed and displayed in on-
going interaction.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Johnstone, B. (2013). Indexing the local. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization (pp.
386–405). Oxford: Blackwell.
Okamoto, S., & Shibamoto-Smith, J. S. (2016). The Social Life of the Japanese Language: Cultural Discourse and
Situated Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

439
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Invoking rapport and feelings of usualness: Effects of


quotidian reframing in a formal context

Panel contribution

Prof. Yoshiko Matsumoto 1


1. Stanford University

While engaging in interactions that normally call for some degree of formality in linguistic choice and de-
meanor, some speakers depart from such general expectations and use linguistic (and non-linguistic) expres-
sions that are more closely associated with informal or intimate interactions. Such departures may be more
noticeable in Japanese than in some other languages, as formality can be morphologically specified in Japanese,
notably in predicate forms. For example, the verb ikimasu ‘go’ is a formal counterpart to the informal iku ‘go’,
while both forms convey the same propositional content.
This paper argues that such departures from expectations in formal contexts do not occur randomly but are
aligned with reframing or change in footing (Goffman 1981) of what is being talked about in the interaction. Im-
portantly, the general nature and the content of the interaction are not altered by such contextually unexpected
choices of expression. However, the speaker takes the perspective of the familiar and quotidian (Matsumoto
2011) as the footing for the conversational topic. The resulting quotidian framing is accompanied with contex-
ualization cues (Gumperz 1982), i.e. linguistic and non-linguistic means consonant with familiar and informal
situations. Adopting a quotidian footing reduces the formality of the interaction by invoking rapport among the
participants (the speaker, the ratified listener and audience) and putting them at ease as if they were engaging
in conversations about regular matters of daily life.
Instances from three different interactionally formal settings are examined: (1) a retelling of a doctor’s instruc-
tions to a first-time acquaintance, (2) a TV talk show and (3) Twitter postings by a political party. While each
interaction targets different listeners/audience through different media, all employ quotidian framing, forg-
ing intimacy expected in familiar and ordinary contexts. In (1), a discussion between a speaker with a severe
cardiac condition and a doctor about an emergency was reframed as if it were a daily chat between two old
friends. It was accompanied by familiar forms and laughter, suggesting regained emotional normality. In (2),
the talk-show host, describing a videotaped scene in which the guest, a recovering cancer patient, walked into
an operation room, overlaid a scene of a leisurely daily stroll with mimetics, casual linguistic forms and light
laughter. This reframing also achieved an emotional balance and a light atmosphere. Twitter posts by a politi-
cal party office in (3) were made during an election campaign. Amid official political messages issued in formal
language, online postings about political gatherings were framed as quotidian matters and included emoji and
friendly expressions that conveyed rapport (real or imagined) between the party and the supporters. These
instances, which align with familiar linguistic styles, demonstrate the value of quotidian reframing – segments
that change the footing of participants in a formal context to that of conversations on quotidian matters to
invoke rapport among the participants of the interaction along with feelings of being normal and usual.

440
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Making connections: Reported speech, repetition, and


eccentric metaphor in research interview discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Satoko Suzuki 1


1. Macalester College

Conventionally, a research interview would be considered a formal occasion. Because the goal of research
interviews is to find answers to academic questions, the atmosphere tends to be subdued and not particularly
conducive to heightened emotion. Moreover, if an interview is conducted in Japanese, the interlocutors are
expected to use the honorific language, which is usually associated with formality.
However, in many research interview contexts, researchers strive to engage with participants emotionally in
order to solicit compelling stories, and they sometimes succeed in making emotional connections with their
participants. I experienced this when conducting interviews on the topics of identity and belonging with fe-
male professors from Japan. We spoke in Japanese, and, because the interviewees and I knew each other only
professionally, we used polite/honorific language. Yet they generously opened their hearts and told me some
things about their inner selves.
I observed some recurrent linguistic elements in such moments of connection, including (1) reported speech
and thought, (2) repetition, and (3) eccentric metaphors, as shown below in English translation:

• One time I was in a small committee meeting and somebody said, “Are you following?” I thought,
“What?” When he said, “Are you understanding?” I thought, “Are you kidding?” […] So that person
who belittled me was an old white professor, who probably thought that whites are the best of all races.
So, I am this small Asian woman being quiet, so he wondered if I understood what was going on at the
meeting.

• In general, people have an easier time expressing opinions when they get older. Their own voice comes
out. I felt that way as I got older. […] At my age, everybody, including high powered individuals, has
become the same to me. Even if somebody is the President of the United States, things like that do not
matter. [laughs]. And I gradually came to have my own voice. I told you I was introverted, right? As I
got older, I was able to bring out my voice.

• [Talking about teaching Japanese language] Yeah, so I feel like I am selling my body [laughs heartily], so
I am sad, you know? [Researcher: You feel like you are selling your body? What do you mean by that?]
Well, I would not go as far as saying I am a prostitute, but I am using what I already have as a business
tool, you know?

These examples referring to painful experiences or inner thoughts demonstrate that the researcher was able to
make connections with the participants. Linguistically, the examples illustrate how speakers’ styling practices
construct contexts. Example (1) shows the use of reported speech and thought. Example (2) illustrates how
the repetition of the word “voice” emphasizes the speaker’s message. Finally, example (3) includes the use of
an unusual metaphor. This study will explore how the interviewees used these linguistic elements to make
stories come alive, to engage the other speaker more fully, and to elicit laughter and curiosity and thus bring
the speakers closer together.

441
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sounding like a skateboarder at the Tokyo Olympics:


Vernacular honorific speech style and innovative speaker
identity construction in Japanese

Panel contribution

Ms. Sara King 1


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

The research presented in this paper investigated a sports commentator’s use of a vernacular honorific speech
style at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics skateboarding event. Many studies have examined speakers’ style
shifting between the addressee honorific desu/masu and the non-honorific plain style (Cook 2002, 2018; Geyer
2008; Okamoto 2011, Enyo 2015), but few have investigated style shifting with relatively new vernacular hon-
orific speech style marked by su (cf. Nakamura 2021). The above studies on style shifting look at the ways in
which desu/masu style functioned as an index of the speakers’ on-stage self (Cook 1996, 1998, 2008) while the
non-honorific plain style indexed one’s innate persona or the spontaneous expression of self (Cook 1996). This
paper will show how the use of su style along with honorific desu/masu style worked to create a third space
for the presentation of an on-stage, innate persona and locally situated identity during the broadcast of the
skateboarding event at the 2020 Olympics.
A previous metapragmatic analysis of online discourse regarding su style found that, when discussing the use su
style in formal settings such as the workplace, commenters used a variety of derogatory terms to assess speakers
who use su (Nakamura 2021). While these findings suggest some speakers are skeptical of the appropriateness of
su style in formal settings, the focal speaker of the present study who appeared as one of two sportscasters in the
broadcast of the Olympic sporting event, drew positive attention to himself as a result of his frequent use of su
style. Drawing on Ferguson’s (1983) work on SAT (sports announcer talk) and the roles of sports announcers and
sports commentators, this study examines how the skateboarder sportscaster’s shifting speech styles (desu/masu
and su) worked to index shifts in the role he was engaged in at the moment during the broadcast.
The analysis found that the skateboarder sportscaster frequently used desu/masu style when engaged in sports
announcer activities such as providing statistics or other background information about the skaters and skate-
boarding techniques or giving play-by-plays. In contrast to this, when he provided his affective assessments
of the skateboarding performances or he engaged in talk related to skateboarders’ lifestyle, the skateboarder
sportscaster utilized the vernacular su style and his speech style indexed his role as a sports commentator.
While the speaker’s roles of announcer and commentator are both relevant to his professional capacity as a
sportscaster and therefore would prompt the performance of the on-stage self (Cook 1996), the distinct usage
the vernacular su style worked to index the speaker’s unique position as a sportscaster who is also a skate-
boarder. In this way, the unique setting of the skateboarding event at the Olympics made it so that the honorific
style shifting could constitute the relevant the contextual identity of skateboarder sports commentator.

442
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Style-shifting between Standard and Kansai Japanese at a


business manners training camp

Panel contribution

Dr. Junko Saito 1


1. Temple University, Japan Campus

This study explores Japanese style-shifting among desu/masu (honorific) forms in Standard Japanese (SJ), plain
(non-honorific) forms in SJ, and Kansai dialect forms by an instructor at a Japanese business manners training
camp.
Speech styles in Japanese have drawn extensive attention in the fields of sociolinguistics and pragmatics. While
several of these studies have investigated speech style-shifting in workplace discourse, they tend to focus on SJ
desu/masu and plain forms (e.g., Cook, 2011), although a handful have focused on the use of regional dialects
(e.g., Barke, 2018). Building on this prior research, this paper addresses the following research questions: How
does a male instructor at a Japanese business manners training camp use speech styles? And what stances does
he display through his style-shifting during the training sessions? Utilizing Kiesling’s (2009) notion of stance, the
study describes how the instructor takes epistemic and interpersonal stances through his style shifts to construct
his relationship with the trainees. Such strategic stance-taking ultimately helps the instructor accomplish his
teaching objectives.
The data are approximately 27 hours of video-recordings from one company’s four-day-three-night business
training camp. The participants are one male instructor and 22 of the company’s new employees. Attention is
given to style-shifting by the instructor with particular focus on his use of SJ plain forms, including masculine
linguistic features, and of the Kansai dialect, both in juxtaposition to SJ desu/masu forms. The analysis demon-
strates that while the instructor is likely to use the SJ desu/masu and plain forms in lectures during the training
sessions, he tends to switch almost entirely to the Kansai dialect for non-lecture situations during the training
sessions. In the lectures, the instructor’s mixed use of SJ desu/masu and plain forms indexes epistemic and in-
terpersonal stances of casualness, authority, and knowledge, constructing a greater social distance from the
trainees; in non-lecture contexts, his use of the Kansai dialect indexes interpersonal stances of humor, solidar-
ity, and friendliness, creating less social distance between him and the trainees. The study explores how the
introduction of the regional dialect vis-à-vis the standard language (the desu/masu and the plain forms in this
case) restructures the indexical fields of the standard language by deactivating some indexical values based on
mainstream ideologies and activating a different set of indexical values.
This study suggests the importance of paying attention to regional dialects in relation to the standard language
for our further understanding of the complexities of style-shifting in Japanese and other languages.
References
Barke, A. (2018). Constructing identity in the Japanese workplace through dialectal and honorific shifts. In H.
M. Cook & J. S. Shibamoto-Smith (Eds.), Japanese at work: Politeness, power, and personae in Japanese workplace
discourse (pp. 123–149). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cook, H. M. (2011). Are honorifics polite? Uses of referent honorifics in a Japanese committee meeting. Journal
of Pragmatics, 43, 3655–3672.
Kiesling, S. F. (2009). Style as stance: Stance as the explanation for patterns. In A. Jaffe (Ed.), Stance: Sociolin-
guistic perspectives (pp. 171–194). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

443
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Vernacularizing the Japanese TV live sport broadcast: A frame


analysis of a youth vernacular in the Tokyo Olympic
skateboard telecast

Panel contribution

Dr. Momoko Nakamura 1


1. Kanto Gakuin University

This paper examines how a commentator uses a youth vernacular during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics TV live
broadcast of the skateboarding event and demonstrates that the conformity with a normative interactional
frame increases the acceptability of the vernacularization of the formal interaction of Japanese sport broad-
casts. While many studies recognized the conversationalization (Fairclough 19959), vernacularization (Coup-
land 2014), and personalization (Thornborrow & Montgomery 2010) of mediatized language, it has not been
extensively explored how a vernacular can be used in formal, institutional interaction of Japanese live sport
broadcasts and what effect the vernacular usage makes on the viewers’ assessment of the broadcasts. Com-
pared to plentiful studies on the style shift between the addressee honorific desu/masu and the non-honorific
plain styles (Cook 2002, 2018; Geyer 2008; Okamoto 2011), no study has included the vernacular su style. Locat-
ing the interaction between the announcer and the commentator within three major interactional sequences
of the normative frame of Japanese live sport broadcasts, the paper intends to reveal their systematically dis-
tinctive usages of the three styles.
The Japanese live sport broadcasts constitute highly structured interactions between an announcer and a
commentator(s), who play the distinctive interactional roles (Miyake 1997; Tatara 2015). The announcer-
commentator interaction is required to follow the normative interactional frame (Goffman 1981; Okada 2002),
and the deviation from the normative frame may evoke complaints from the viewers (Miyake 2004; Okamoto
1999). During the live broadcast of the skateboarding event at the Tokyo Olympics, despite the commentator
amply utilizing the vernacular, many viewers praised him.
The paper examines the ways the announcer (A) and the commentator (C) use the desu/masu, plain, and vernac-
ular ssu forms within the following three major interactional sequences that previous studies demonstrated to
constitute the normative frame of the Japanese TV live sport broadcasts:
(1) I-(Initiation; A’s question) R-(Response; C’s professional information) F-(A’s Follow-up) E-(C’s evaluation);
(2) RC-(C’s response cries) D-(C’s description) E-(C’s evaluation); and
(3) LD (Live Description: A and C give play-by-play of the action in turn).
The analysis found that A and C collaborate to maintain the normative frame by following the speaking rights
pre-allocated by the sequences and by distinguishing the different elements of the sequences by distinctively
utilizing the desu/masu form for giving professional information, the naked plain form for descriptions, and the
vernacular ssu form for evaluation.
The commentator’s usage of the desu/masu and plain forms in giving professional information and descriptions
respectively are congruent with the social meanings of these forms: enacting on-stage talk in the desu/masu style
and foregrounding the content in the naked plain form (Cook 2018). In contrast, his use of the vernacular in
delivering evaluation works to add the meanings of personal excitement and private feelings to the broadcast.
The differentiated usage of the vernacular serves to personalize the context of the broadcast while preserving
the normative frame of live sport broadcasts. The findings imply that the success of the vernacularization of
mediatized language, especially in the highly formal interaction, depends on the conformity with the normative
interactional frame.

444
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘Hey! What are you doing now!’: Negotiating closeness and


workplace relationships on Japanese TikTok

Panel contribution

Dr. Gavin Furukawa 1


1. Sophia University

In typical discussions about Japan and Japanese culture, phrases like status-oriented or hierarchical are often
used to describe the ways in which company relationships influence interaction in the office. Such messages
abound in classrooms where new employees who have just passed through the dreaded shūkatsu (‘job hunting’)
process in their last years of university struggle to learn the rules of their new workplaces as well as in pop-
ular and often highly conservative books on manners. Such traditional hierarchies and their associated ways
of speaking are common tropes also used in manga, television programs, and movies. At the same time, our
understanding of these hierarchies and their associated linguistic forms goes far beyond the rigid prescriptivist
rules of the manners classroom and textbook. This presentation examines how the traditional workplace rela-
tionship of jōshi and buka (‘boss’ and ‘subordinate’) is navigated through social media in the form of short video
segments. In particular, this research project analyzes how the relationship of co-workers is negotiated with
specific work situations where subordinates must interact with superiors through the complex use of contextu-
alization cues drawing on participants understandings of framing, entextualization, style shifting and the use
of editing features in social media including sound and screen text.
Using the social media platform TikTok, which allows companies, groups, and individuals to create short video
clips typically ranging from fifteen seconds to three minutes in length, I have assembled a collection of over
200 videos using a hashtag aimed at interactions between supervisors and subordinates. After detailed analy-
sis it became clear that these examples often did not follow what is typically prescribed in terms of language
use between higher and lower positioned individuals. While there was occasional evidence of shifting between
the addressee honorific and the plain form, the suprasegmental features of the interaction and the use of prag-
malinguistic features such as imperatives and interjections did a large share of the work. Furthermore, the
specific uses of impoliteness, which I suggest that through entextualization have become conventionalized, and
the frame-bounded range of consequentiality for the interactants shows how the contexts of workplace rela-
tionships, the social media platform, and the semiotic interpretations added through the editing process serve
to create a specific way of communicating with both other participants in the videos and with the wider viewing
audience. This presentation thus shows how the subtle negotiation between solidarity and formality contributes
to art, mediatized society, and our perceptions of prescriptivist social rules that are often perpetuated within
the conservative discourse of Japan.

445
Going viral, cinematic
and media perspectives:
New studies on iconic
communication and
fictional discourse in a
shared world (organized
by Monica Cantero-Exojo,
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Demystifying Dementia: A Corpus Linguistic Study of the


Construction of Alzheimer’s in Film

Panel contribution

Dr. Monica Cantero-Exojo 1


1. Drew University

The question I plan to explore in this presentation is: how do films alter our understanding of dementia? In
particular, this analysis focuses on the discourses of the illness as depicted in recent films. Using corpus lin-
guistics to analyze data from filmic narratives centered on characters facing a terminal diagnosis, these films
depict the family mechanisms and biomedical implications of an illness discourse in which dementia is encoded
within family parameters and framed in contextual metaphors of love, anticipatory mourning and suicide, and,
making sense of events in a tangled memory.
The data obtained from using corpus linguistics software (Bednarek 2021; Bednarek 2018) is analyzed applying
the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and conceptual metaphors
in filmic discourse (Fahlenbrach, 2016; Eggerstson & Forceville 2009; Forceville 2006; Coëgnarts and Kravanja,
2012; Carroll 1990). This analysis addresses the following research questions, with a focus on language use and
visual representation:
• How frequent are mentions of Alzheimer’s, dementia, forgetful, etc.in the films?
• How are people with Alzheimer’s depicted (multimodal representation -visual and narrative) ?
• How are people with Alzheimer’s referred to?
The filmic discourse of Alzheimer’s and its images are ultimately indicative of a society that prefers to deal
with the patient living with dementia in the microcosm of the home/nursing home, and that may or may not
choose to committee suicide as the ultimate alternative to their situation. Thus, beneath the films’ fictional
plots, there is a societal and medical correlative: a society that may or may not accept suicide as an ending
to dementia’s detrimental consequences, and the strong desire among filmmakers and artists to portray the
struggle of cognitive brain decline within a discourse that is centered in the patient.
Bibliography
Coëgnarts, Maarten, and Peter Kravanja. “From Thought to Modality: A Theoretical Framework for Analysing
Structural- Conceptual Metaphors and Image Metaphors in Film.” Image & Narrative 13:1 (2012): 96-113.
“Corpus approaches to telecinematic language.” Edited by Monika Bednarek, Valentin Werner and Marcia
Veirano Pinto. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 26:1, 2021.
Fahlenbrach, Kathrin. Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television and Video Games. New York: Routlege, 2016.
Forceville, Charles. “The Source-Path-Goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: Mc Elwee,
Van der Keuken, Cole. New Review of Film and Television Studies 4 (2006): 241-261.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lakoff, George. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

447
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emblems as Rhemes: Authenticity, Innocence, and Otherness


in a Lahu Film

Panel contribution

Dr. Judith Pine 1


1. Western Washington University

In this paper I explore the use of variations of traditional costume as semiotic emblem in Lahu language films
made in Southeast Asia, using as my examples the deployment of costumes at particular points in the Lahu-
language film “Akawve” (2013). The use of variations on traditional costume in Lahu language media is a com-
mon occurrence, playing an important role in indexing Lahu identity alongside other elements of Lahu material
culture. In the film “Aklawve”, however, and in other Lahu-language digital media, Lahu traditional costume
moves beyond an indexical sign. I argue that the use of distinctive costumes in this film engage a complex bun-
dle of rhematized indexical signs – an emblem.

The group Lahu, creators of Lahu language media circulated throughout the Greater Mekong subregion and,
via YouTube, across the globe, is notoriously internally diverse.
Walker, foremost ethnographer of the Lahu, describes them as “a collectivity of human beings who, despite their
lack of common social, political or economic institutions, share a feeling of ‘Lahu-ness” (2003: 52-3). The di-
versity within the category “Lahu” includes considerable difference in traditional clothing. The film “Akawve”,
intended as a cautionary tale about human trafficking in the region, includes several distinct recognizable tra-
ditional costumes and variations on those costumes, yet these differences are not used to make internal distinc-
tions. Rather, the variety appears to be incorporated into a single category which might be called “Lahu dress”.
The film, a cautionary anti-human trafficking tale with both English and Thai subtitles, includes visual elements
which would occur as icons for wide audience which would include non-Lahu readers and perhaps non-Lahu
speakers as well as several “breaking the 4th wall” moments when the audience is addressed and encouraged
to fight trafficking, a message clearly intended for Lahu from all sub-groups throughout the Greater Mekong
subregion.
The use of costume in the film does not simply index Lahu identity and Lahu history however. I argue that vari-
ations on traditional costume are deployed throughout the film to index distance from the urban, innocence,
ignorance, authenticity, and Other-ness. Entextualized in the film, costume becomes an emblem incorporating
these disparate elements into a complexly immediate whole. Rhematization of the indexical (Irvine and Gal
2000; Gal 2005) takes place, drawing upon complex habitual indexical relationships to create a sense of the nat-
ural, the inevitable rather than contingent, indicating a shared semiotic ideology which spans national borders
and religious and sub-ethnic difference. Analysis of this process provides insights into being complexly Lahu
in a 21st century world.
References cited
Akawve. YouTube, 2013. https://youtu.be/BCAtrCou_3c.
Gal, Susan. “Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/Private.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
15, no. 1 (2005): 23–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43104036.
Irvine, Judith, and Susan Gal. “Language Ideology and Language Differentiation.” Essay. In Regimes of Lan-
guage: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2000.
Walker, A.R. (2003) Merit and the millennium, routine and crisis in the ritual lives of the Lahu People. New Delhi:
Hindustan Pub. Corp.

448
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Experiencing Water and Swimming: Figurative Meaning and


World Creation in Cinema

Panel contribution

Dr. Eduardo Urios-Aparisi 1


1. University of Connecticut

In this presentation, I discuss how film style constituents provide viewers with affordances to access additional
meanings while creating worlds that are apparently naturalistic. Films create environments viewers can in-
teract by accessing their own previous experiences and knowledges. Studies from philosophy, semiotics and
neuroscience applied to cinema show how affects, empathy or the activation of mirror neurons participate in
the viewing experience (see Sobchack 1992 and 2004, Gallese and Guerra 2019, Richmond, Müller & Kapplehoff
2018).
I analyze swimming in public swimming pool scenes in three films that connect water and memory: Kieślowski
(1994); Subirana (2008) and Markovich (2011). Coëgnarts (2020) proposes a methodology that limits film
metaphor to those metaphors motivated by image schematic structures identified in the framing of a film but
sidesteps other important constituents of cinematic discourse.
I show that important constituents such as the mise-en-scène create an environment that allows viewers to
experience the film world as an external projection of emotions among other meanings. Those meanings emerge
via multimodal repetition and variation. In particular, swimming pool scenes are clusters of meanings of bodies
in which bodies, swimming styles and movements, and symbolic meanings of water interact. While viewers can
focus on any of those items at a time, as a whole the water environments allow viewers’ body and mind connect
to the film and also access emotions such as danger, fear or peace and happiness (cf. Nichols 2014).
Gallese, V., & Guerra, M. (2019). The empathic screen: Cinema and neuroscience. Oxford University Press.
Kieślowski, K. (1994) Three Colors: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu), France.
Markovich, K. (2011) Breathing (Atmen), Austria.
Müller, C., & Kappelhoff, H. (2018). Cinematic metaphor: experience–affectivity–temporality (Vol. 4). Walter de
Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Nichols, W. J. (2014). Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, Or Under Water
Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do. United States: Little, Brown.
Richmond, S.C. (2016). Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Sobchack, V. (1992) The Address of the Eye: The Phenomenology of Experience, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Sobchack, V. (2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Subirana, C. (2008) Swimming (Nedar), Spain.

449
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Telecinematic culture and memetic recycling in pandemic


times: Spanning the fictional - non-fictional divide

Panel contribution

Prof. Jan Chovanec 1


1. Masaryk University

The presentation explores the interface between fictional and non-fictional discourses in humorous memes, as
a distinct genre of modern digital communication. It concentrates on how aspects of the non-fictional world,
represented by visual and textual references to telecinematic art, are recontextualized by online users and
meme creators to comment – in humorous ways – on the current situation, i.e. their everyday lived and non-
fictional experience. The focus is on how individuals draw on their shared socio-cultural background and apply
such intertextual knowledge in the virtual digital space, thus linking the fictional and the non-fictional worlds.
The analysis is based on a set of humorous data, such as memes and digitally circulated short video clips, which
were collected from various social media in the Czech Republic and internationally (cf. the database of covid-
related humour; Kuipers 2021) at the time of the covid pandemic in 2020-21. The material deals exclusively
with intertextual references to classic and popular films, aiming to identify how cinematic art is employed in
humorous creations. The analysis describes two kinds of inter-semiotic relations: between the verbal and the
visual components, and between the original movies and the current situation indexed by the modern memes
and video clips.
The findings indicate that memes, clips and other instances of humour based on telecinematic art manifest a
specific kind of intertextuality, where the prior humorous texts (comedies and humorous scenes from films) are
‘echoed’ (Hale 2018), i.e. the earlier texts are ‘revisited’ and the original humour is sustained or reactivated in
the new creation that need not, by itself and without the recipients’ access to the shared cultural knowledge,
appear as humorous or at all meaningful. One way of looking at this intertextuality is to see it as humorous
recycling (humorous texts being turned into subsequent humorous texts) and intertextual play that, at the era
of the digital media, involves frequent mash-ups and hybridity (Yus 2019), and creativity of forms (Vásquez
2019), while often having a critical stance (Tsakona and Chovanec 2020: 4) and providing a social commentary.
In addition, the study identifies a highly culture-specific aspect of shared humorous repertoire, namely verbal
quotes from films which are instantly recognizable by members of a particular cultural or linguistic community.
Such cinematic one-liners, as snippets of fictional discourses, appear to have a much more ‘local’ character than
visual elements that are more universal and ‘global’.
References
Hale, Adrian (2018) There is an after-life (for jokes, anyway): The potential for, and appeal of, ‘immortality’ in
humor. HUMOR 31 (3), 507–538.
Tsakona, Villy and Jan Chovanec (2020) Revisiting intertextuality and humour: fresh perspectives on a classic
topic. The European Journal of Humour Research 8 (3) 1–15.
Vásquez, Camilla (2019) Language, Creativity and Humour Online. Abingdon: Routledge.
Yus Francisco (2019) Multimodality in Memes: A Cyberpragmatic Approach. In: Bou-Franch, Patricia and
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar (eds,) Analyzing Digital Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

450
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Pragmatics of Horror: Vertical Despair, Waste, and


Wealth Inequality in The Platform (2019)

Panel contribution

Dr. Ruth Yuste-Alonso 1


1. Hendrix College

Once a niche genre for the few, horror has become today a globally celebrated expressive mode by the public
and a generative critical framework for scholars to examine primal configurations of social dynamics. From the
haunting legacy of slavery in Get Out (Peele 2017), the traumatic monstrosity of motherhood in The Babadook
(Kent 2014), or the abjection of the ageing female body in The Visit (Shyamalan 2015), horror offers a compelling
visual imaginary to conjure our inner fears and collective woes, to summon difference and the uncanny on
the silver screen. Drawing on works on multimodal metaphor and discourse (Forceville & Urios-Aparisi 2009;
Kress and Van Leuween 2001) and the pragmatics of fiction (Locher & Jucker 2021), this paper examines visual
representations of isolation, waste, and class inequality in the Spanish horror thriller movie The Platform (2019).
In particular, I argue that the dystopian scenario portrayed in The Platform not only provides an escapist source
of entertainment in the early stages of the global pandemic, but also serves as a valuable fictional text to reflect
on society’s status quo and spark stimulating political conversations across geographical boundaries to rethink
social power structures amidst an atypical event such a global pandemic complicated by epistemic uncertainty.
Released on Netflix at the start of the Covid-19 global pandemic, The Platform (2019) [El hoyo by its Spanish
title] became a major commercial success, its premise resonating with viewers worldwide confined at home
under lockdown orders and competing over material resources on their occasional shopping incursions. In
his debut film, Basque-Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia concocts a dystopia set inside the Vertical Self-
Management Center, informally known as The Pit, a colossal, concrete tower-style structure where ‘residents’
are forced to compete —and even murder— for limited food supplies, delivered through a descending platform,
to survive within a merciless distribution system. While civility and self-management are expected, social con-
flict is inevitable, as individuals at the top take more than they require, leaving for those at the bottom the left-
overs smeared in bodily waste, a vicious cycle exacerbated with each month’s floor relocation and the haunting
memories of scarcity and human consumption. Through its vertical, stratified design and hollow interior, The
Pit materializes the horrors of class inequalities and injustice, exposing the fraudulent logic behind late cap-
italism that trumps the social contract, class mobility and class solidarity, leading individuals to predate and
cannibalize one another for survival. Yet it is thanks to the horror conventions and the epistemic uncertainty
surrounding characters’ fate that the film’s radical pragmatic communicative potential resides, for it is in the
unknown where other forms of resistance and political change can emerge in an atypical scenario.
References
Forceville, Charles and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (2009). Multimodal Metaphor, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kress, Gunther R., and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary
communication. London: Arnold.
Locher, Miriam A., & Jucker, Andreas H. (2021). The Pragmatics of Fiction. Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

451
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Um David e muitos Golias: hyperbolization of fiction in


Portuguese sports news

Panel contribution

Dr. MariaClotilde Almeida 1


1. University of Lisbon - Portugal

Sequencing the investigation on the blending of football media with fiction, which proved that films titles, bib-
lical texts, historical episodes, or myths are involved in the metaphorical conceptualizations in sports media
(Almeida, 2006, 2016; Almeida & Sousa 2010; Almeida et al. 2013, Almeida & Sousa 2015; Almeida 2022-in
print), this paper builds on the hyberbole as a rhetoric tool (Nustrand & Duffy 2003), in the conceptualization
of headlines from the sports newspaper A Bola. More concretely, it focuses on the hyperbolicall bible-inspired
representation “Um David e muitos Golias”, headline of the cover of A Bola in 15.9.2022, from a multimodal socio-
cognitive perspective (van Dijk 2010). Hence, it aims at uncovering the hyperbolization technique through the
usage of nouns in the plural in reference to the Juventus football team in the written mode, as in “muitos Golias”
(transl. “many Golias”), contrasting with the pictorial representation of groups or pairs of Portuguese players
in the visual mode, clearly linked to the headline “Um David (entre muitos) contra Golias) (transl. “One David
(among many others) against Golias”)), with the communicative purpose of emphasizing Benfica’s glorious de-
feat over the powerful Juventus football team. Moreover, it highlights the hyperbolized storyline in the inner
pages of this edition of A Bola is relevantly sustained by a web of metaphorical representations. This is the case
of “A velha senhora sem pernas” (lit. transl.” the old lady without legs”), the metonymically-metaphorically
representation of an unfit team, versus the metaphorically represented “swift-moving eagle” (Benfica’s club
symbol), as in the complete headline “Velha Senhora sem pernas para o baile desta águia” (transl. The weak old
lady versus the dancing eagle).
References
Almeida, M.C. (2006). “Blending the Pheno-world with Fiction: The Cognitive Semiotics View” In Lima, J.P.,
Almeida, M.C. & Sieber, B. (eds.), Questions on the Linguistic Sign, Lisboa: Colibri, 49-64.
Almeida, M.C. (2016). “Going Political: multimodal metaphor framings on a cover of the sports newspaper A
Bola, Scripta, v. 20, nº40, Belo Horizonte, 84-98.
Almeida, M.C. (2022-forthcoming). “Back to the Future. Narrating Cristiano Ronaldo’s comeback to Manchester
United: a multimodal approach” In Almeida, M.C. et al., The Rhetorical Mind. Current Issues (forthcoming).
Almeida, M.C. & Sousa., B. de (2010). “Helden-Metaphern in der deutschen und portugiesischen Sportpresse”,
Estudios Filologicos Alemanes, volume 20, Fénix Editora: Sevilha, 243-256.
Almeida, M.C. et al. (2013). Jogar Futebol com as Palavras: imagens metafóricas no jornal “A Bola”, Colibri:
Lisboa.
Almeida, M. C.& Sousa, B. de (2015). “From Monomodal to Multimodal Metaphors in the Sports Newspaper A
Bola”, Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, Special Issue Metaphor and Metonymy in Social Practices (L.
Ferreira/R.W. Gibbs, eds.), 403-420.
Nystrand, M. & Duffy, J. (eds.) (2003). Towards a Rhetoric of everyday life. New Directions in Research on Writing,
Text, and Discourse, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Van Dijk (2010). “Discurso, Conocimiento, Poder y Política. Hacia un análisis crítico epistémico del Discurso”.
Revista de Investigación Lingüistica, nº13 (2010), Murcia,167-251.

452
Health and atypical life
events. Modalities and
challenges to interaction
(organized by Stef
Slembrouck, Melissa
Moyer)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“進診室前，�������,謝謝! Please take a picture of your tongue


before you enter the consultation room, thank you!”:
Strategic uses of alternative modalities in Traditional Chinese
Medicine consultations

Panel contribution

Dr. Anne Schluter 1


1. Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

Medical diagnosis typically draws on a mix of verbal and non-verbal clues, constituting an essential aspect of
patient-practitioner communication. Given the emphasis on the whole body in Traditional Chinese Medicine
(TCM), this setting provides a rich site to deepen the field’s understanding of embodied forms of communica-
tion. Consisting of 1.) smelling the patient’s odor and listening to the patient’s voice, 2.) feeling the strength
of the pulse and palpating selected body parts, 3.) speaking i.e. asking questions, and 4.) inspecting physical
features such as the skin and nails, the four core tenets of observation practices of TCM directly align with
recent calls to consider the entirety of human senses to understand human communication more fully (Pen-
nycook, 2017). The on-going use of masks since the start of the pandemic, coupled with periods of TCM clinic
closures in Hong Kong during case surges, has compromised TCM practitioners’ capacity to tap into some es-
sential communicative resources. The resulting limited access to patients’ embodied forms of communication
raises questions about practitioners’ strategies for attaining clear pictures of their patients’ symptoms during
the atypical circumstances of the pandemic.
As part of a larger study that analyzes observation and interview data from a Hong Kong TCM clinic to identify
the linguistic and extra-linguistic details of patient-practitioner alignment, this paper addresses the approaches
employed by one of the practitioners and ten of her patients to discuss their health concerns during telehealth
and in-person consultations. This focus has generated a corpus of key communicative resources, including ges-
tures, haptics, micro and discursive-level linguistic strategies, and humor. As a means of circumventing the
constraints imposed by mask wearing at face-to-face consultations and bad connections during telehealth con-
sultations, the practitioner exploits social media tools by requiring all patients to send her photographs of their
tongues via WhatsApp prior to consultation. Special attention to these tongue photos in addition to the pitch
and intensity of patients’ voices suggests that, with the restricted access to patients’ embodied communication
during the atypical circumstances of the pandemic, a heightened role for “alternative modalities” (Kress 2009)
has emerged.
Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2016). Embodied sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical
Debates (pp. 173-197). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Kress, G. (2009). Multimodality. A Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge.
Pennycook, A. (2017). Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. Routledge, Abington, New York.

454
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Communicating Uncertainty about COVID-19 to the Public:


Variations of Speaker Identity and COVID-19 Development

Panel contribution

Dr. Yi An 1 , Dr. Mian Jia 2


1. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 2. The University of Texas at Austin

Effectively communicating COVID-19 information to the public depends on strategic presentation of the health
message (Harrington, 2020; Jia & Zhao, in press). In China, such communication often happens when public
health experts or government officials are interviewed on national television programs such as News 1+1. Al-
though many scholars have explored the communication of uncertainty during the pandemic (see Ratcliff et
al., 2022 for a recent review), few studies have developed typologies of communicated uncertainty in COVID-19
contexts. Developing a typology would help researchers to better understand how health communicators use
language to address different communicative purposes and at different stages of the pandemic. Specifically,
scientists and government officials tend to discuss different kinds of uncertainties in that the former have ex-
pertise in the scientific nature of COVID-19 whereas the latter attend more to the policies and regulations related
to the pandemic. Moreover, speakers are also likely to communicate uncertainty differently as new variants
emerged and new vaccines developed. The present study, therefore, proposes two research questions. First,
how do interviewees in Chinese national TV programs communicate uncertainties to the public? Second, if and
how do these uncertainty strategies differ by speaker identity (i.e., health scientists vs. government officials)
and COVID-19 development (e.g., inception, new variant, new vaccine). The data consists of 90 transcribed in-
terviews from News 1+1, which is a popular Chinese TV news program. These interviews span from January
2020 to June 2022. Strategies for communicating uncertainty were identified, illustrated, and calculated based
on a corpus analysis of the data. Preliminary results include eight linguistic strategies: Using subjectivisers
(e.g., 我想; I think), Reducing reliability, Reducing precision, Acknowledging inadequate knowledge, Indicating
low predictability, Referring to complexity of the situation, Making provisional statements, and Using hypothet-
ical conditionals. Comparative analysis shows that health scientists expressed uncertainty significantly more
frequently and employed more uncertainty strategies than government officials. These differences can be ex-
plained by the different topics they addressed in the interviews which could be ascribed to speaker identities
and their work in responding to COVID-19. This study also reveals differences in both the frequency and real-
ization of uncertainty across stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Our findings contribute to the research on
uncertainty communication by developing a linguistic typology that can be used to analyze the strategic use of
language across different contexts. In practice, the eight uncertainty strategies identified in our study would
offer pragmatic suggestions for health and government spokespersons to communicate their message more
effectively.
References
Harrington, N. G. (2020). On changing beliefs in the closed human mind. Health Communication, 35(14), 1715-
1717.
Jia, M. & Zhao, Y. (in press). Fear appeals in public signs of COVID-19 prevention in Chinese local communities.
Pragmatics and Society.
Ratcliff, C. L., Wicke, R., & Harvill, B. (2022). Communicating uncertainty to the public during the COVID-19
pandemic: A scoping review of the literature. Annals of the International Communication Association, Online
First Publication.

455
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Healthcare practitioner discussions with people with epilepsy


warning people about risk: The exam question.

Lecture

Dr. Cordet Smart 1 , Ms. Samantha Finlay 2 , Ms. Samantha Ashby 3 , Prof. Rohit Shankar 4 , Dr. Louise
Gates 1 , Mr. Wayne Flanagan 1 , Ms. Chelsea Hill 1 , Dr. Craig Newman 5
1. Exeter University, 2. Ulster university/Exeter University, 3. SUDEP Action, 4. Plymouth University, 5. UXClinician Ltd

Topic:
This study examined typical interactions between practitioners and people with epilepsy (PWE), to understand
how they discuss the risks of epilepsy in a manner that might empower people to change their behaviours.
Background:
This National Institute of Health funded UK study ran for 2 years. Data is currently being analysed to be written
up. The study was based on the WHO international recommendations that there needs to be greater discussion
with people with epilepsy (PWE) about risks to their health to reduce what is considered preventable mortality.
Mortality rates for PWE are up to 10 times higher than the normal population, including in young, otherwise
healthy people. Yet communication about epilepsy mortality and SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy)
risks is known to vary historically and geographically in frequency and quality. How to hold these discussions
has not yet been widely researched.
Aim:
To understand how risk is typically introduced by epilepsy experts in clinical encounters with people recently
diagnosed with epilepsy.
Method:
Data were: Clinical discussions between practitioners and PWE (n=24), clinician Reflections (n=25), and inter-
views with PWE or supporters also attending (n=25). Interactions were analysed using Conversation Analysis
(CA) to identify the practices used to introduce risk. Patient interviews and clinician reflections guided the an-
alytic foci. After initial CA, analysis included Joint-Analysis where researchers, PWE, clinicians, and patient
representatives analysed extracts together.
Findings:
We identified a question-answer pattern that was used to introduce risk to patients, where PWE were asked
‘what do you know’, ‘what do you understand’ or ‘what have you been told’, about risk. The responses were
either that people asked what was meant by risk or listed some risks; often focusing on household safety eg:
bathing or driving. Clinicians then give risk advice, such as don’t stand too close to the edge of a platform. This
was the ‘typical’ practice. Practitioners emphasized the sensitivity of the question design, to ensure that they
were able to provide advice relevant to the PWE’s knowledge. However, discussion with PWE suggested that
these questions were like an ‘exam question’. We evidence with our data how this question appeared ‘atypical’
to PWE.
Discussion and Conclusion:
We discuss how, although the practice of introducing risk through asking about it is typical institutionally in
these forms of interactions, it may appear atypical to PWE’s expectations of clinician-patient interactions, and
for empowering conversations. The use of these questions may signify the uncertainty discussed in the litera-
ture that clinicians hold in discussing mortality risks with patients.
We argue that attention to the CA detail and the complex levels of meaning generated by both practitioner and
the PWE are important considerations to design what might be useful forms of interaction. We discuss how
we addressed the methodological challenges of mixing interviews with CA, and including non CA specialists in
analysis. We raise questions about the next steps for this research.

456
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Identity and Meaning Making in Persons with Dysarthria from


an Acquired Brain Injury. Arguments for More Inclusive
Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks

Panel contribution

Prof. Melissa Moyer 1


1. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Identity in sociocultural linguistics relies heavily on language for understanding ways individuals construct
multiple subjectivities, but for persons with dysarthria and a limited ability to use language, this notion requires
a wider understanding of how meaning can be communicated. The World Health Organization’s report on
disability (2011) notes that approximately fifteen per cent of the world population has a speech impairment
such as dysarthria, hence the need to gain an improved understanding of the ways they communicate, construct
and contest identities that get imposed on them.
Data from an ethnographic study carried out in the city of Barcelona between 2017-2019 by the Voiceitt[i] team
led by Moyer (2017) over a period of eighteen months with seven persons with an acquired brain injury, their
families, and caretakers serve to illustrate the theoretical and methodological limitations of the notion of iden-
tity. The examples presented illustrate multiple modalities for expressing meaning that are used to gain agency
and represent identity both on an interpersonal and a societal scale.
Four considerations about identity in persons with ABI are presented and which seek to contribute to devel-
oping a more inclusive conceptual and methodological framework. First, is the need to better understand the
experience and complex process of identity change ensuing a neurological impairment; second, is the multiple
modalities of exercising agency and communicating about identity without language; third, is the embodiment
of identity and its implication with language, and the final consideration examines imposed identity and forms
of resistance.
[i] The Voiceitt team worked with the Israeli company Voiceitt in the project for developing technology for voice
recognition and production of persons with unintelligible speech. The members of the team include Melissa
Moyer, Gema Rubio, Ignasi Clemente, and Marta Gimeno. Funding for the project was obtained through the Eu-
ropean Commission, Horizon 2020 H2020-SMEInst-2016-2017 (H2020-SMEINST-2-2016-2017), Proposal: 779105
— Talkitt Social Inclusion and the Impact of Voiceitt on Identity and Talk in Persons with Acquired Brain Injury.

457
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Occupational Hazards and Challenged Bodies:


Physiotherapists Interacting with Covid-19 Patients during
Respiratory Failure Treatment.

Panel contribution

Prof. Stef Slembrouck 1


1. Linguistics, Ghent University

The Covid-19 pandemic brought to the forefront various ways in which the interactional dynamics of commu-
nication was being challenged in situations permeated by actual sickness and lives-at-risk. Not only was it the
case that prevention measures such as wearing mouth masks fundamentally interfered with taken-for-granted
modalities of spoken interaction (e.g., facial expression remaining partly invisible). The conditions of lockdown
and the risks attached to physical nearness also resulted in a widespread shift from in presence face-to-face
to online video-mediated interaction across many domains of social activity. Mapping the impact of such a
shift inevitably begs the question of particular affordances and constraints which are “dictated” by available
technologies, their limitations, and their impact on interactional behaviour and meaning making (e.g., in video-
mediated interaction, “eye contact” is in a fork between the eye’s receptive attention to what’s on the screen,
while its gaze dimension depends on a relative position towards the PC’s camera). At the same time, the practices
which we observed soon resulted in relatively conventionalized participation formats which were motivated
by specific considerations though not necessarily dictated by the technology as such (e.g., many slipped into the
habit of switching off camera and microphone while at the receiving end of an online seminar; congratulatory
speech acts were typically done via popup icons or comments in the chat; meetings started and ended on time
but involved less socializing).
In my paper, I’m concentrating on the interactional conditions and compensatory practices which mask and
face-shield wearing physiotherapists resorted to when interacting in hospital wards with Covid-19 patients who
were suffering from respiratory failure. I will examine both the condition of (i) “non-invasive ventilation” (in
which case the sound is muffled) and (ii) and that of “intubation” (in the latter case, patients can no longer
use their vocal cords). I will particularly concentrate on the availability and purposeful use of alternative com-
municative strategies and modalities (e.g., letterboards, touch, lip-reading, forms of signing), while raising the
question of how particular areas of meaning making were affected and/or relatively prioritised (e.g., treatment
efficiency, the patient’s physical comfort, affect and emotional well-being, etc.). The data for this paper consists
of fieldwork observations and interviews with patients and practitioners. It was not possible to access recorded
interactions.

458
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Remediation of narratives in podcasts on mental health and


eating disorders

Lecture

Dr. Małgorzata Sokół 1


1. University of Szczecin

This paper addresses the challenges of talking about health in digital media by focusing on storytelling practices
in healthcare and well-being podcasts. Being convenient both to produce and experience, and linked with social
media, podcasts have gained popularity as an asynchronous medium to share information with diverse audi-
ences (Rime et al 2022). Podcasts are also viewed as a hybrid cultural form between old and new media (Bonini
2022). In the context of healthcare and well-being, podcasting has been recognized as an effective medium
to propagate health-related information to the general public, and to bridge the gap between evidence-based
research and students or practitioners (Willis 2020).
This paper takes a narrative-pragmatic approach to explore how narratives, which are central to medical prac-
tice, have evolved to accomplish the communicative tasks of the podcasts users: healthcare professionals who
aim to educate their audience and engage in experience sharing, and laypeople interested in the given topic and
aiming to get informed. The discussion will be based on the study of the corpus of 40 episodes from 6 podcasting
channels on the topics of mental health, diet and eating disorders run in Polish by healthcare professionals of
such specializations as dieticians, nutritional psychologists and psychiatrists.
The qualitative analysis of the transcribed research data reveals the structural complexity of the narratives and
their multiple functions related to knowledge exchange, self-expression and commercial objectives in three
podcasting formats: the monologue, interview and co-hosted conversation. The three formats differ in how the
healthcare professionals remediate narratives and interdiscursively mix them with other basic text types such
as argumentation, exposition and instruction (Werlich 1976). The narratives also merge with self-disclosure,
technical and colloquial expression, social and self-promotional discourses. The healthcare professionals ex-
ploit the affordances of the medium to educate and potentially empower their lay audience outside the ‘tradi-
tional’ forms of specialist-patient communication. For example, through self-disclosure and personal narratives,
the podcasts become sites of experience sharing. Patient empowerment may thus be accomplished through the
transformation of the professionals’ private experience into public discourse that the listeners can find rele-
vant. Podcasting may also be beneficial to other healthcare professionals as it can be used to expand their
evidence-based practice in a flexible and accessible way.
Rime, Jemily, Chris Pike & Tom Collins. 2022. What is a podcast? Considering innovations in podcasting through
the six-tensions framework. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies,
1–23. DOI: 10.1177/13548565221104444.
Bonini, Tiziano 2022. Podcasting as a hybrid cultural form between old and new media. In: Mia Lindgren &
Jason Loviglio (Eds.) The Routledge companion to radio and podcast studies. London & New York: Routledge, pp.
19–29.
Willis, Cheryl D. 2020. Using mental health podcasts for public education. Academic Psychiatry 44: 621–623.
Werlich, Egon. 1976. A text grammar of English. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.

459
Hierarchies of knowledge
in online health
communities (organized
by Barbara De Cock,
Carolina Figueras Bates)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourses of infertility on Instagram: constructing


knowledge and (shared) identities through online narratives

Panel contribution

Ms. Sofie van der Meij 1 , Dr. Jana Declercq 1


1. University of Groningen

This paper study the discourses of Instagram communities of involuntarily childless women undergoing fertility
treatment. One in ten people remain involuntarily childless throughout their lifetime, and more are involun-
tarily childless at some point in their life. While personal circumstances such as relational situations can play
a role, for a significant group of these people, there is a medical issue that can be addressed with medical treat-
ment. In this paper, we focus on those that identify as women in the group undergoing medical treatment, and
examine their discursive identity and narrative work as members of this online health community. We do so
because online contexts, and Instagram specifically, are known to be a context for sharing knowledge as well
as peer support, and building communities around a particular health issue. Infertility is an interesting case
as it used to be a primarily social issue that has become increasingly medicalized, as treatment options became
available in the past fifty years.
We analysed wall posts and users’ biographies, using the small stories framework as outlined by Bamberg
(2006) and Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008). In this framework, narratives not just include fully-fledged
full tellings, but also ‘tellings of ongoing, future and hypothetical events, and shared known events’ and ‘allu-
sions to (previous) tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell’ (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008: 381).
This framework is productive for our approach as narratives are mainly investigated from a more functional
approach, in terms of the social actions they perform in everyday interactions. They are seen as both reflecting
and constructing both individual and collective identities, and thus as instrumental in community building.
Our analysis uncovered that users constructed narratives, and within those, identities, to make sense of their
infertility experience. They discuss both the purely medical and the personal experience. By using specific tech-
nical medical language, they construct themselves as well as their audience as medically literate and knowledge-
able in the domain of fertility medicine, and as members of the in-group of those undergoing fertility treatments.
However, they also share experiential knowledge, both in the medical domain as well as on the social dimen-
sions and identity challenges in daily life. They also structure their posts as interactional, by using hashtags,
referring to followers/readers as community members or as being supportive, and asking questions that can be
answered in the comments. In conclusion, not only a patient-like identity and medical narrative is constructed
by sharing medical knowledge. The users also extensively (re)tell the lived experience of undergoing fertility
treatment, with a complex intertwining of an identity of an involuntarily childless person with the identity of a
future parent.

REFERENCES
Bamberg, M. (2006). Stories: Big or small: Why do we care?. Narrative inquiry, 16(1), 139-147.
Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analy-
sis. Text & Talk 28(3), 377–396.

461
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Fellow sufferers have mutual sympathy: Comforting discourse


among Chinese cancer patients in online health community

Panel contribution

Ms. Yue Zhao 1


1. Harbin Engineering University

As a speech act of emotional support by the comforters in response to the negative events (e.g., cancer, etc.) or
emotions (e.g., pain, sadness, etc.) experienced by the comfortee (Applegate, 1980; Burleson, 1994, 2008), com-
forting becomes a key issue in the field of health communication (MacGeorge & Zhou, 2021). Most of the previous
studies focused on comforts from family, friends, and healthcare providers (e.g., Arora et al., 2007), dropping a
hint that the comfort from peer patients of the same disease as insiders have been given scant attention. In other
words, how are such comforts constructed linguistically and emotionally still remains uncovered. Especially,
in cultures where there is a strong popular belief that the patients are reluctant to disclose their problems and
suffering like in Chinese, peer disclosure and comforting shelter parents from ‘emotional overinvolvement’,
relieving them from intensive pressure and anxiety (Hong et al., 2012).
In these regards, to meet patient-centered care and get more references for health communication from the
perspective of oriental patients, this paper is intended to address a neglected aspect of health communication
by portraying the forms and the distribution of comforting strategies based on the comforting turns among
cancer patients in Chinese online health community. Additionally, taking an interactional perspective, this
study aims to demonstrate the discursive interaction among patients, especially peer patients’ responses to re-
cipients’ worries in the Chinese context. The findings suggest that the comforting strategies among Chinese
cancer patients can be categorized into three strategies, followed by six emotion-and information-centered sub-
strategies, among which Chinese cancer patients prefer moderate patient-centered (MPAC) comforting to low
patient-centered (LPAC) and high patient-centered (HPAC) ones in online anonymous context. We believe that
the above findings would enrich and extend the line of research on health communication from a patient-to-
patient perspective while highlighting the insights into doctor-patient communication in the oriental context.
Reference
Applegate, J. L. (1980). Person- and position-centered teacher communication in a day care center: A case study
triangulating interview and naturalistic methods. Studies in Symbolic Interactionism, 3, 59-96.
Arora, N. K., Finney Rutten, L. J., Gustafson, D. H., Moser, R., & Hawkins, R. P. (2007). Perceived helpfulness and
impact of social support provided by family, friends, and health care providers to women newly diagnosed with
breast cancer. Psycho-Oncology, 16(5), 474-486. doi:10.1002/pon.1084
Burleson, B. R. (1994). Comforting messages: features, functions, and outcomes. In J. A. Daly, & J. M. Wiemann
(Eds.), Strategic Interpersonal Communication (pp. 135-161). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Burleson, B. R. (2008). What counts as effective emotional support? Explorations of individual and situational
differences. In M. T. Motley (Ed.), Studies in Applied Interpersonal Communication (pp. 551-594). LosAngeles,
LA: Sage Publications.
Hong, Y., Peña-Purcell, N. C., & Ory, M. G. (2012). Outcomes of online support and resources for cancer survivors:
A systematic literature review. Patient Education and Counseling, 86(3), 288-296. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2011.06.014
MacGeorge, E. L., & Zhou, Y. (2021). Social Support, Supportive Communication, and Health. In T.L. Thompson,
& N. G. Harrington (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication (pp. 136-148). New York, NY:
Routledge.

462
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hierarchies of Knowledge in Responses to Messages of


Newbies in Online Health Support Groups

Panel contribution

Prof. Barbara De Cock 1 , Prof. Carolina Figueras Bates 2


1. UC Louvain, 2. Universitat de Barcelona

Experiential knowledge, understood as the epistemic competence that comes from the lived experience, repre-
sents, together with emotional assistance, one of the defining features of peer online health support forums. The
nature of this knowledge, and its potential to improve the outcomes of traditional treatments (Mazanderani, Lo-
cock, & Powell 2012), has been the focus of investigation in recent years in the areas of social science and mental
health (e.g., Blume 2017; Noorani et al. 2019). The growing interest for experiential knowledge stems from the
increasing importance of the role of patients’ experiences as the grounds for decision-making in the medical
arena.
According to Herrero et al. (2021), discussion threads in online health forums represent a form of interactive
communication within a group of individuals who share a similar lived experience. In relation to the nature
of the information traded off in those discussion threads, several studies have concluded that online support
groups for mental health conditions (depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders) present a high number of
emotional posts. Instead, online support forums for individuals suffering from diabetes largely focused on pro-
viding informational aid to recognize and understand the symptoms, with a focus on managing the condition,
rather than curing it (Deetjen & Powell 2016).
Within this framework, in the present study we focus our attention on the first message of new members and its
responses in two different Spanish online forums: a support group for diabetes and a support group for eating
disorders. These first messages are particularly important since they are often posted by recently diagnosed
persons or individuals who are still awaiting diagnosis and who have a lot of questions. The specific aims of the
present study are the following: a) to pinpoint the concrete kinds of knowledge displayed in the responses to the
first post; b) to examine how the role of expertise and knowledge is linguistically construed in those responses;
c) to determine whether hierarchies of epistemic and emotional knowledge can be identified and established in
both forums; d) if so, what are the linguistic resources mobilized by groups members to assert and claim their
knowledge.
References
Blume, S. (2017). In search of experiential knowledge. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Re-
search, 30(1), 91-103.
Deetjen, U., & Powell, J.A. (2016). Informational and emotional elements in online support groups: a Bayesian
approach to large-scale content analysis. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 23(3), 508–
513.
Herrero, N., Guerrero-Solé, F., & Mas-Manchón, Ll. (2021). Participation of patients with type 2 diabetes in
online support groups is correlated to lower levels of diabetes self-management. Journal of Diabetes Science and
Technology, 15(1) 121–126.
Mazanderani, F., Locock, L. & Powell, J. (2012). Being Differently the Same. The Mediation of Identity Tensions
in the Sharing of Illness Experiences. Social Science & Medicine, 74 (4), 546–553.
Noorani, T., Karlsson, M., & Borkman, T. (2019). Deep experiential knowledge: reflections from mutual aid
groups for evidence-based practice. Evidence Policy: A Journal of Research, Debate and Practice, 15(2), 217-234.

463
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How Multimodal Affordances of Platforms Shape the


Epistemic Engine of Health Communities Online: A Case Study

Panel contribution

Dr. Heike Ortner 1


1. University of Innsbruck

Health communities that form online develop conventions of how to share knowledge. Additionally, the ques-
tion of who is deemed “knowledgable” in terms of epistemic status (Heritage 2012) may become a subject of ne-
gotiation. This is, however, not only a result of the Interactive history shared or of acquired of the participants’
acquired privileges (‘seniority’, ‘authority’). It is also entrenched by the ‘affordances’ of the online platforms, i.e.
the options they offer for interaction (Bateman, Wildfeuer & Hiippala 2017:90). This talk takes a closer look at
the preconditions of sharing knowledge and negotiating accountability for shared knowledge. It combines two
rather distinct concepts of multimodality that intertwine in online health communities: multimodal affordances
(e.g., options of commenting on a posting) and multimodal interaction analysis of online discourse. This will
be examined by discussing the example of a German health community that is dedicated to the chronic disease
Multiple Sclerosis (MS): The “Deutsche Multiple Sklerose Gesellschaft Bundesverband e.V.” (roughly translated
‘German Incorporated Federal Association for Multiple Sclerosis’) provides a rather professionalized network
of information. This includes profiles on current Social Media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook, and a discussion forum. All of these profiles allow for mediated, primarily written multimodal in-
teraction. The main hypothesis is that the platforms differ with regard to: 1) their multimodal affordances, 2)
the types of knowledge shared, and 3) the negotiation of the epistemic status and epistemic stance of the social
actors who share their knowledge of MS.
The research questions are as follows: 1) Is there a difference in the types of knowledge that are shared on
the different platforms? 2) Who shares what kind of knowledge? 3) What are the multimodal affordances and
constraints of the platforms (both technical and social) and how do they influence the sharing of knowledge?
4) Can hierarchies of knowledge and knowledgeability be reconstructed with a linguistic look at the discourse?
5) How do the actors support of each other’s shared knowledge, and how does this relate to the platforms’
affordances?
Both a quantitative and qualitative approach are applied: First, a systematic review of the types of shared
knowledge and its ‘carriers’ of one year’s postings on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram will provide
a broad overview. Second, there will be a detailed look at the hierarchies of knowledge on these platforms and
the discussion forums, following the discourse about one common topic of expertise.
References
Aplevich, Noelle (2011): Discourse communities and communicative genres. In Stephan Habscheid (ed.),
Textsorten, Handlungsmuster, Oberflächen, 98–122. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.
Bateman, John, Janina Wildfeuer & Tuomo Hiippala (2017): Multimodality. Foundations, research and analysis.
A problem-oriented introduction. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Heritage, John (2012): The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on
Language and Social Interaction 45(1). 30–52.
Utz, Sonja (2008): Social identification with virtual communities. In Elly A. Konijn, Sonja Utz, Martin Tanis &
Susan B. Barnes (eds.), Mediated interpersonal communication, 252–270. New York: Routledge.

464
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Knowledge formation and patient expertise in Polish health


communities on Facebook

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna Tereszkiewicz 1 , Dr. Magdalena Szczyrbak 2


1. Jagiellonian University in Krakow, 2. Jagiellonian University in Krakow, University of Pardubice

The paper discusses the processes of knowledge formation and membership categorisation in a Polish online
health community gathered around the problem of endometriosis. It explores the ways in which the partici-
pants’ experiences and perspectives are constructed, focusing in particular on the main themes and strategies
used to communicate the unfulfilled needs and frustrations which prompt information gathering and support
seeking. The study builds on existing understandings of epistemic community (Haas 1992; Miller and Fox 2001),
health knowledge sharing (Bellander and Landqvist 2018) and recontextualization (Sarangi 1998), and it sheds
light on how Polish Facebook users communicate their own experiences (experiential knowledge) and how they
establish intertextual links with external sources (professional knowledge). Using data from an open-access
Facebook support group for endometriosis sufferers, the analysis examines the factual, social and temporal
dimensions of knowledge formation (Kimmerle et al. 2012), subsuming, accordingly, forms of knowledge, ex-
pectations and treatments; types of users (help-seekers and helpers); and the time frames of illnesses and ther-
apies. At the same time, it reveals which linguistic strategies are relevant to information seeking, advice giving,
evaluation and consolation in a setting in which role differentiation is blurred and hierarchies of expertise are
flattened. The study provides insights into how health knowledge is shared, recontextualized and transformed
into expertise within online health communities, in addition to showing the strategies that members of such
communities pursue in order to gain psychological support, seek self-management advice, and show empathy.
It also highlights a gap between the patients’ expectations and the level of medical care they receive, thus rais-
ing awareness of their unmet health needs and explaining how these are articulated in an open-access support
group.
References
Bellander, T., & Landqvist, M. (2018). Becoming the expert constructing health knowledge in epistemic commu-
nities online, Information, Communication & Society, doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1518474.
Haas, P. M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination, International
Organization, 46(1), 1–35. doi:10.1017/S0020818300001442.
Kimmerle, J., Gerbing, K.-K., Thiel, A., & Cress, U. (2012). Exchange of complementary and alternative medical
knowledge in sport-related internet fora. Sociology of Sport Journal, 29, 348–364.

Miller, H. T., & Fox, C. J. (2001). The epistemic community. Administration & Society, 32(6), 668–685.
Sarangi, S. (1998). Rethinking recontextualization in professional discourse studies: An epilogue. Text-
Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 18(2), 301–318.

465
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sharing and reshaping specialized knowledge in online health


communities: A quali-quantitative analysis

Panel contribution

Dr. Sarah Bigi 1 , Dr. Vittorio Ganfi 2 , Dr. Sibilla Parlato 1 , Prof. Valentina Piunno 3 , Dr. Maria Grazia
Rossi 4
1. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2. Università Roma 3, 3. Università degli Studi di Bergamo, 4. Universidade Nova de
Lisboa

In recent years, the debate on shared decision-making (SDM) in clinical contexts has been revived, especially af-
ter repeated acknowledgment of frequent suboptimal realizations of SDM (Epstein - Gramling, 2013; Kaldjian,
2017; Duffin - Sarangi, 2018). Recent studies have rediscussed the definition of SDM and its implementation
(Gerwing - Gulbrandsen, 2019; Dingwall - Pilnick, 2020; van der Horst et al. 2022; Politi & Neuman 2022). In
this paper, we tackle the issue from the point of view of the conceptual and practical steps that make up a SDM
process. Referring to the description of the deliberation model proposed by Walton et al (2014), we consider the
information sharing phase highly relevant for appropriate SDM. More specifically, with regard to increasingly
frequent cases of seemingly ‘unreasonable’ decisions by citizens about health-related behaviors (e.g., vaccines),
we aim to explore the co-creation of information in online communities. We choose to analyze online commu-
nities as paradigmatic of how knowledge is shared and often reshaped in debates among participants who do
not necessarily have specific expertise about the topics at issue, but may have experience about them.
We analyze and compare two corpora that collect online interactions pertaining to different clinical fields; lin-
guistic data are annotated and processed through Sketch Engine software (Kilgarriff et al. 2004). We focus in
particular on the expression of doubt and uncertainty through linguistic elements such as opinion verbs, un-
certainty adverbs and question markers. We perform a qualitative and quantitative analysis, expecting to be
able to account for some of the dialogical mechanisms that lead to the creation of ‘chunks’ of knowledge which
may then be used as the grounds for decisions.
Dingwall, R., & Pilnick, A. (2020). Shared decision making: doctors have expertise that patients want or need.
BMJ, 368
Duffin, D., & Sarangi, S. (2017). Shared decision or decision shared? Interactional trajectories in Huntington’s
disease management clinics. Communication and Medicine, 14(3), 201-216.
Epstein, R. M., & Gramling, R. E. (2013). What is shared in shared decision making? Complex decisions when
the evidence is unclear. Medical Care Research and Review, 70(1_suppl), 94S-112S.
Gerwing, J., & Gulbrandsen, P. (2019). Contextualizing decisions: stepping out of the SDM track. Patient education
and counseling, 102(5), 815-816.
Kaldjian, L. C. (2017). Concepts of health, ethics, and communication in shared decision making. Communication
and Medicine, 14(1), 83-95.
Kilgarriff, A., Rychlý P., Smrž P., & & Tugwell, D. (2004) The sketch engine. Information Technol, 105-116.
Politi, M. C., & Neuman, M. D. (2022). Understanding When, Why and How Shared Decision Making Is Used in
Routine Care. Patient Education and Counseling. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2022.10.352
van der Horst, D. E., Garvelink, M. M., Bos, W. J. W., Stiggelbout, A. M., & Pieterse, A. H. (2022). For which decisions
is Shared Decision Making considered appropriate? – A systematic review. Patient Education and Counseling.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2022.09.015
Walton, D., Toniolo, A. , Norman, T.J. (2014). Missing Phases of Deliberation Dialogue for Real Applications.
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems. Springer, Berlin,
pp. 1–20.

466
If you see what I mean:
Comparative-contrastive
analyses of implied
meanings across
populations, contexts and
texts (organized by Sara
Gesuato, Emanuela
Sanfelici, Elena
Pagliarini, Vespignani)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Children’s linguistic abilities at 5-6 years of age can be


predicted by expressive pragmatic skills at 3-4 years of age

Panel contribution

Dr. Núria Esteve-Gibert 1 , Dr. Nadia Ahufinger 1 , Ms. Julia Florit-Pons 2 , Dr. Mariia Pronina 2 , Prof.
Pilar Prieto 3
1. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 3. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are rarely diagnosed before age 5-6 (Bishop et al., 2017)
because (a) earlier predictable signs are hard to identify, and (b) most standardized tests can only be used from
these ages onwards. One of the clearest signs of DLD is the children’s impaired structural language at the mor-
phosyntactic and semantic levels (Van der Lely, 2005). We know that children’s structural linguistic abilities at
a certain age are related to pragmatic skills at that same age, and that this relation holds in typically developing
(TD) children as well as children with DLD (Matthews et al., 2018). Because little is known about the direction of
this association and its longitudinal nature, in the present study we investigate (a) whether children’s expres-
sive pragmatic skills and structural linguistic abilities are longitudinally related, and (2) whether expressive
pragmatics at age 3-4 can predict structural language at age 5-6.
A total of 73 Catalan/Spanish-speaking TD children were first assessed at ages 3-4 for their expressive pragmatic
skills using the Audiovisual Pragmatic Test (APT, Pronina et al., 2019). The APT contains 35 items accompanied
by illustrations that represent different contexts that might plausibly occur in a child’s everyday life and that tap
into (a) basic expressive acts, (b) complex expressive acts, (c) unbiased requests, (d) biased requests, (e) unbi-
ased assertions, and (f) biased assertions. Children were presented with these situations as a discourse prompt
and they were asked a spoken reaction, which were then evaluated for pragmatic appropriateness (0: prag-
matically inappropriate; 1: expressing target meaning but lacking social adjustment; 2: highly pragmatically
appropriate). Additionally, their vocabulary and syntactic skills were also assessed at age 3-4 through the ELI
expressive vocabulary subtest (Saborit Mallol & Julián Marzá, 2006) and a test for expressive syntactic abilities
based on CASL-2 (Carrow-Woolfolk, 2017). The same children were then assessed for their linguistic abilities
at ages 5-6 using the CELF Preschool 2 (Wiig et al., 2004), as well as for non-verbal intelligence quotient (K-BIT;
Kaufman & Kaufman, 2000).
A full multiple linear regression model was run with all predictors (age at Time 2, Vocabulary, Syntax and Prag-
matics at Time 1; age and K-BIT at Time 2) and for each CELF language score. Then a stepwise model selection
was used to select the best predictors of each language score. Results showed that Pragmatics at Time 1 was a
significant predictor of Core Language (t=2.913, p<.01), Expressive Language (t=2.355, p<.05), Language Content
(t=2.813, p<.01), and Language Structure (t=2.511, p<.05) at Time 2. We thus found that children with better
expressive pragmatic skills at a young age have better expressive and structural linguistic abilities two years
later. These results show that individual linguistic abilities are longitudinally related to, and can be predicted
by, earlier expressive pragmatic skills, and thus suggest that early pragmatic skills could be a reliable early sign
of language impairment in children.

468
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Disfluency Use as a Window to Pragmatic Language


Competence in Bilingual Children with and without Autistic
Spectrum Disorders (ASD)

Panel contribution

Mrs. Marianna Beradze 1


1. Bar-Ilan University

Background: Speech disfluencies - such as filled pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, silent pauses, and prolon-
gations - can serve pragmatic purposes, such as signaling upcoming delays, holding the floor, emphasizing an
idea, marking boundaries, or signaling upcoming delays to the listener. There is a tendency for individuals with
neurodevelopmental disorders, especially autism spectrum disorders (ASD), to have pragmatic language diffi-
culties (Reindal et al., 2021), therefore studying disfluency use in individuals with ASD is of both theoretical and
applied importance. Recent studies showed that monolingual children with ASD produce fewer filled pauses
than their non-autistic peers (Hallin et al., 2016; Parish-Morris et al., 2017). Although bilingualism has been
reported to be beneficial with regard to pragmatic abilities, little research has been conducted on disfluencies
in bilingual autistic and non-autistic children.
Aims: This current study aimed to investigate how bilingual autistic children (BI-ASD) and their non-autistic
peers (BI-TLD) use disfluencies within Lake et al.’s (2011) pragmatic-based division to listener-oriented versus
speaker-oriented disfluencies in both languages spoken by the children: Heritage (HL-Russian) and Societal (SL-
Hebrew). The second aim was to determine whether children’s usage of disfluencies differed across their two
languages.
Methods: Participants included bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking autistic children (BI-ASD, n=21) and their
bilingual non-autistic peers (BI-TLD, n=30) aged 5-9 years. Picture-based narratives from the LITMUS-MAIN
battery (Gagarina et al., 2012), told in both languages by participants, were transcribed and coded for eleven
disfluency types using CHAT conventions in the CLAN program (MacWhinney,2000). Between-group (BI-ASD vs.
BI-TLD) and within-group (HL-Russian vs. SL-Hebrew) comparisons of eleven disfluency types were conducted.
Results: A comparison of dysfluency use in both languages demonstrated that HL-Russian posed additional
processing costs for both groups, which resulted in higher rates of disfluencies and errors in HL-Russian than
in SL-Hebrew. This study confirmed fewer listener-oriented filled pauses production by autistic children, as
previously reported for English-speaking monolingual autistic children, but only in HL-Russian. No significant
differences in disfluency types were observed between the two groups in SL-Hebrew. Cross-language compar-
isons of disfluency types demonstrated consistent patterns in the BI-ASD group, but varied patterns in the BI-TLD
group, which probably utilized them depending on each language’s constraints and pragmatic benefits.
Discussion and Conclusions: A higher total disfluency rate produced by both groups in weaker HL-Russian
confirms the negative relationship between disfluencies and proficiency level. Following previous findings for
monolingual autistic children, filled pauses may function as markers to differentiate BI-ASD and BI-TLD, yet
only when the linguistic and cognitive load is high. Comparisons of disfluency types across the two languages
showed consistent patterns in both languages in the BI-ASD group, while children in the BI-TLD group varied
their disfluencies in accordance with the language-specific constraints of each language, probably reflecting a
higher degree of pragmatic ability to adapt to a listener‘s language.
Clinical implications: The use of listener-oriented filled pauses may further benefit speaking ability by helping
bilingual and monolingual autistic children to hold their conversational turns and to improve their pragmatic
skills.

469
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How does the Degree of Intimacy Affect the Expressions of


Suggesting Ideas?: A Comparative Analysis in
Japanese/American Task-based Interaction

Panel contribution

Mrs. Lisa Shinke 1


1. Japan Women’s University

This study investigates the relationship between the degree of intimacy and the choice of verbal expressions
for suggestions in task-based interaction. Suggestion is the speech act in which the speaker put forward
his/her idea for the hearer. However, at the same time, it holds the possibility of offending the listener
by imposing the speaker’s idea, categorized as one of the face-threatening acts in Brown & Levinson’s
politeness theory. This indicates how the speaker perceives the listener has a certain influence on the usage
of verbal expressions for suggestions. The degree of intimacy, which can be one of the significant factors
for the speaker’s perception of the listener, has not come up in the study of suggestions. Especially, its in-
fluence in task-based interaction, which highly requires participants to build cooperation, has not been studied.

To clarify this relationship, the results shown in Shinke (2020, 2022), analyzing interactions of two
Japanese/American English speakers of different ages and positions, teacher and student, were compared with
those shown in Fujii (2016), analyzing student-student interactions. Both studies used the data of Tasks from
the same source called Mister O Corpus, the corpus data which are collected to be able to compare six differ-
ent languages in terms of language, culture, and social practice. In Tasks, a pair of participants were given 15
pictures and asked to arrange them to make a coherent story. The scene suggesting ideas for the storyline with
verbal expressions was only extracted and analyzed based on the categorizations mentioned in Fujii’s study ((1)
declarative statements, (2) declarative statements with mitigating expressions, (3) declarative questions, and
(4) question forms). The following three features could be seen through analysis:
1. In both teacher-student and student-student interactions, a higher total percentage of question forms includ-
ing declarative forms ((3) declarative questions and (4) question forms) could be seen for Japanese, while a
higher total percentage of non-question forms for American-English.
2. In Japanese teacher-student interactions, teachers had a higher total percentage of question forms includ-
ing declarative forms (74.6%) than students in both teacher-student (44.4%) and student-student interactions
(49.2%).
3. In American- English teacher-student interactions, students had a higher percentage of (2) declarative state-
ments with mitigating expressions (47.6%) than teachers (23.2%) and students in student-student interactions
(26.4%).
These features indicate that the degree of intimacy does not affect in terms of the general tendency of Japanese
and American-English speakers’ usage of verbal expressions, as mentioned in 1. However, when comparing the
results within the same language data, we can see its influence on participants’ building cooperation in teacher-
student task-based interactions. By teachers using question forms, which induce the partner’s response, more
frequently, Japanese teacher-student pairs build a relationship with teachers as idea-building facilitators and
students as idea originators. On the contrary, American-English students’ frequent usage of declarative sen-
tences with mitigating expressions rather than declarative sentences themselves implies their intention of mak-
ing concessions toward teachers. This can also signify a different relationship from the Japanese one: teachers
as idea originators and students as idea-building facilitators.

470
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Inferential skills in children with Developmental Language


Disorder: insights from a narrative comprehension task

Panel contribution

Dr. Elena Pagliarini 1 , Ms. Caterina Scilla 2


1. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2. Azienda AULSS 2 Marca Trevigiana

Different developmental trajectories across type of inferences have been shown in previous studies: presuppo-
sitions are readily derived from the age of 3 years (Berger & Höhle 2012); relation and quality implicatures are
derived from the age of 4 years and quantity and manner implicatures start to be derived during school years
(Okanda et al. 2015). Limited evidence is present on children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD):
they face difficulties with the maxim of quantity, as well as with the logical meaning of quantifiers (Katsos et al.
2011); however, to date, their acquisition of presupposition has not been investigated.
Our project aimed at comparing the acquisition of different types of inferences (presuppositions, manner and
quantity implicatures) in children with typical development (TD) and at comparing the development of their in-
ferential skills to that of DLD children. We expected TD children to derive presuppositions earlier than manner
and quantity implicatures, and DLD children not to perform as well as TD children.
Eight children with language delay (mean age: 4;10; age range 4;4-5;2) tested during their first clinical assess-
ment (which confirmed a diagnosis of DLD) were compared to eight age-matched TD children (mean age: 4;11;
age range 4;5-5;5). In order to define their linguistic and cognitive abilities, we administered a series of tests
assessing phonology, phonetics, receptive and expressive vocabulary, morphosyntactic comprehension, narra-
tive comprehension, content expression and cognitive level. Inferential skills were investigated by adding 6 new
questions to the narrative comprehension test TOR 3-8 [4]: 2 tested presuppositions, 2 quantity implicatures, 2
manner implicatures.
For all linguistic levels, DLD children showed a poorer performance compared to TD peers. As for inferential
skills, TD children derived presuppositions 78% of the time, quantity implicatures 50% of the time and manner
implicatures 41% of the time. Children with DLD derived presupposition 50% of the time, quantity implicatures
41% of the time and manner implicatures 25% of the time. In line with previous findings, our results showed that
TD preschoolers were able to derive inferences based on presupposition, whereas they still had difficulties with
quantity and manner implicatures. Furthermore, our innovative results provide evidence that DLD children
encounter difficulties in deriving various types inferences.
References
Berger, F., & Höhle, B. (2012). Restrictions on addition: Children’s interpretation of the focus particles auch ‘also’
and nur ‘only’ in German. Journal of Child Language, 39(2), 383–410.
Katsos, N., Roqueta, C. A., Estevan, R. A. C., & Cummins, C. (2011). Are children with Specific Language Impair-
ment competent with the pragmatics and logic of quantification? Cognition, 119(1), 43–57.
Levorato, M.C., & Roch, M. (2007). TOR. Test di comprensione del testo orale 3-8 anni. Giunti O.S. Organizzazioni
Speciali, Firenze.
Okanda, M., Asada, K., Moriguchi, Y., & Itakura, S. (2015). Understanding violations of Gricean maxims in
preschoolers and adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 2;6:901, 1-7.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Investigating the effect of discourse structure in the


derivation of implicature in autism

Panel contribution

Dr. Elena Castroviejo 1 , Ms. Isabel Martín-González 1 , Prof. Agustin Vicente 2


1. University of the Basque Country, 2. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque Country

Difficulties with social communication are pervasive throughout the autism spectrum. In a series of papers, Wil-
son & Bishop (2019, 2021, 2022) develop a 7-task battery of tests to investigate whether core language skills and
pragmatic abilities can be teased apart and, thus, they can be said to be the result of different cognitive underpin-
nings. In their 2020 paper, Wilson & Bishop (WB) report a study that compares the outcome of neurotypical (NT)
and autistic adults. Focusing on their Implicature Comprehension Test, featuring particularized conversational
implicature, they observe that autistic individuals are twice as likely to choose a “non-normative” interpreta-
tion of an implied meaning, and five times as likely to select an “I don’t know answer” when asked about the
presence of an implicated meaning.
Inspired by WB’s Implicature Comprehension Test, the goal of the present research was to find out whether we
could replicate their results, and check whether the different behavior in the autistic population might really
be due to the non-generation of an implicature, or rather the result of a local processing of discourse, an idea
suggested by WB. To achieve these goals, we slightly modified WB’s design to allow for the comparison between
two conditions: one that informs about the generation of an implicature (IMPLICATURE), and one that informs
us about the local/global interpretation of discourse (CONTEXT).
Our study was a forced-choice task where participants had to decide the best possible continuation of a conver-
sation given three answer types (A, B, C). Importantly, a type A answer revealed the generation of the implicature
or the observation of global context depending on the condition. The design consisted of 16 items in the IMPLI-
CATURE condition, 16 items in the CONTEXT (no-implicature) condition (32 critical items in total), and 16 fillers.
Participants in our study were NT adults (N = 19) and verbal adults with an autism diagnostic (N = 19), all of
them Spanish speaking.
The data we collected show that the autistic group is less prone to choose type A answers than the NT group (63%
vs. 92%). We fitted a mixed effects model with a binary dependent variable (A vs. non-A answer), condition
(IMPLICATURE, CONTEXT) and group (autistic, NT) as predictors, and item and participant as random effects.
We found a main effect of group, with choosing an A answer being more likely in the NT group than in the
autistic group (β = 2.25, SE = 0.27, Z(1216) = 8.27, p<0.0001), but no effect of condition (β = 0.22, SE = 0.43, Z(1216)
= 0.52, p = 0.6).
Our evidence, coupled up with WB’s results, do indicate difficulties in the derivation of implicatures in the
autistic population, and our data seem to point to local processing as being responsible for it.
Wilson, A., & Bishop, D. (2021). “Second guessing yourself all the time about what they really mean…”: Cognitive
differences between autistic and non�autistic adults in understanding implied meaning. Autism Research, 14(1),
93-101.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metaphor comprehension in developmental dyslexia: an


eye-tracking study.

Panel contribution

Ms. Rita Cersosimo 1 , Prof. Paul Engelhardt 2 , Prof. Filippo Domaneschi 1


1. University of Genoa, 2. University of East Anglia

The ability to understand metaphors has often been investigated in neurodevelopmental disorders, but stud-
ies devoted to dyslexic adults are few and present inconsistent results: in Cappelli et al. (2018) and Griffith
(2007) dyslexic participants show difficulties in metaphor comprehension tasks, while in Kasirer and Mashal
(2017) the dyslexic group does not differ from controls. New models of dyslexia emphasize the need for a mul-
tifactorial approach, suggesting that each individual has a distinct cognitive and linguistic profile. However,
while maintaining an individual difference approach, some common traits can be identified. On the one hand,
dyslexic adults tend to show weaknesses in decoding and executive functions; on the other, their vocabulary
seems comparable to that of non-dyslexic people, and their creative abilities appear to be particularly strong.
These are all features that may play a role in metaphor comprehension, enhancing or inhibiting the process.
The proposed contribution aims to present a research study that sought to investigate how dyslexic univer-
sity students process novel metaphors. 39 undergraduate students with developmental dyslexia (F=31) and 41
typically-developing controls (F=32) matched on age, education, and vocabulary, were administered a series
of standardized tests to assess cognitive abilities (RAN, working memory, vocabulary, theory of mind). An on-
line metaphor comprehension task based on the Visual World Paradigm was then carried out with eye-tracking.
Metaphors and corresponding literal sentences were aurally presented in isolation, and participants were asked
to select the picture that best corresponded to what they heard. Findings indicated that dyslexic students are
as accurate as controls in interpreting metaphors, but need significantly more time to process metaphorical
meanings (i.e., have a longer reaction time). Other than being a strong pedagogical device, metaphor is also
present – according to recent studies – in 18.8% of academic texts: shedding light to strengths and weaknesses
of dyslexic students in this area can be useful to inform both easy-to-read guidelines and teaching practices.

473
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Retrieving implied meanings in a native vs a foreign language


– inferencing skills among young adults

Panel contribution

Prof. Emanuela Sanfelici 1 , Dr. Elena Pagliarini 1 , Prof. Sara Gesuato 1


1. University of Padua

The ability to understand a text involves decoding its overt content, and retrieving what it conveys implicitly,
e.g., through presuppositions and entailments. The sender assumes the addressee can recover implied mean-
ings because of their expertise as communication participants and shared background knowledge. While chil-
dren, elders or people with atypical development may encounter difficulties “reading between the lines”, adults
with typical development usually face no such challenges [1,2]. Yet, studies have reported that even the latter
population have difficulties dealing with phenomena at the interface between syntax and discourse as well as
semantics and pragmatics in their non-native language [3,4,5].
This study investigates how often and how easily L1-Italian young adults with typical development engage in
inferential reading in their native language (NL, Italian) vs. a foreign language (FL, English).
We designed an online questionnaire which included: a reading passage; 19 multiple-choice comprehension
questions focused on the retrieval of presuppositions, entailments, and the recognition of unstated content;
19 items for rating the difficulty of the comprehension questions on a 4-point scale. Adopting a between-
participants design, it was administered online to volunteer B2-level EFL university students in an Italian (49)
and an English version (49).
The overall accuracy in retrieving information was fairly high (68% of the answers): 1272 responses were cor-
rect, while 590 were not. More correct responses were found in the English version (N=658) than in the Italian
one (N=614) . Participants accurately retrieved entailments in 84% of the items: 161/196 correct responses in
the Italian version and170/196 in the English version. Retrieval of presuppositions was successful in 65% of
the items: 344/539 correct answers in Italian and 355/539 in English. Finally, unstated content was accurately
recognized in 62% of the items: 109/196 correct responses in Italian and 133/196 in English. The comprehension
questions were mainly rated as either somewhat easy or very easy. Yet, participants’ ratings did not uniformly
correlate with their accuracy in the comprehension questions. In most erroneous answers, participants judged
the respective questions to be somewhat or very easy.
The findings show that the retrieval of implied meanings was not hampered in the FL, which was apparently
more challenging in the NL, and that the perceived difficulty of the questions was not always matched by
comprehension accuracy. The participants’ somewhat unexpected better performance in the FL might be
attributed to greater concentration efforts put into decoding the FL text.

References
[1] Domaneschi F., Di Paola S. (2019) “The aging factor in presupposition processing”, Journal of Pragmatics, 140:
70-87.
[2] Bill C., Romoli J., Schwarz F. & S. Crain (2016). Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from
Acquisition. Topoi, 35: 57-71.
[3] Sorace A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilin-
gualism, 1(1): 1-33.
[4] Feng. S. (2022) “The computation and suspension of presuppositions by L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English
speakers”, Second Language Research 38(4): 737-763.
[5] Prior A. et al. (2014) “Lexical inference in L2: predictive roles of vocabulary knowledge and reading skill
beyond reading comprehension”, Reading & Writing, 27: 1467-1484.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sentence processing at the syntax-pragmatics interface:


Interindividual variation and ASD-related psychological traits

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna Czypionka 1


1. University of Konstanz

The processing of pragmatics has been studied extensively for autistic and nonautistic speakers. Research out-
comes are mixed, with studies finding both evidence for differences (e.g., Deliens et al. 2018) and similarities (e.g.
Kissine et al. 2015) between both groups. A few studies go beyond a binary distinction of autistic/nonautistic
speakers, investigating the predictive power of fine-grained psychological assessment measures (Autism Quo-
tient (AQ) (sub)scores, Baron-Cohen et al. 2001) for language processing. These tools allow independently assess-
ing different autism-associated traits that vary considerably across the general population. AQ-scores have been
linked to the processing of some types of implicatures (van Tiel et al. 2018). At the syntax-pragmatics interface,
a single study suggests a link between the AQ ‘communication skills’-subscore and participants’ propensity to
experience linguistic illusions (for NPI licensing, see below); speakers with more autism-like traits were shown
to perform better at spotting ungrammaticalities than ‘less autistic’ speakers (Xiang et al. 2013).
The current contribution presents research on the processing of the syntax-pragmatics interface in German
from > 80 speakers with and without autism diagnosis. Stimuli include two interface phenomena: (A) illusory
licensing of negative polarity items (NPIs) and (B) pragmatic licensing of question-sensitive discourse parti-
cles (QDiPs). Both involve complex licensing at the syntax-pragmatics interface. (A) reflects a processing error
stemming from an overapplication of pragmatics (Parker & Phillips 2016); (B) represents legitimate pragmatic
licensing ‘rescueing’ the interpretation of syntactically non-ideal structures (Czypionka et al. 2021). We present
acceptance rates from speeded acceptability ratings, linking the findings to participants’ (sub)scores for AQ and
Systemizing/Empathizing Quotients (SQ-R/EQ; Weelwright et al. 2006).
Participants with high ‘attention to detail’ AQ-subscores and high SQ-scores perform significantly better at spot-
ting violations for both interface phenomena than those with low scores. In addition, these participants are
particularly likely to ‘appreciate’ syntactic well-formedness in QDiP licensing, their acceptability rates resolv-
ing subtle differences in processing quality between syntactic and pragmatic QDiP licensing. This suggests an
increased sensitivity to syntactic well-formedness, both in the rejection of ill-formed structures and in a prefer-
ence for syntactic over pragmatic QDiP licensing, without actual difficulties in pragmatic licensing.
In line with earlier findings, high AQ ‘communication’-subscores are descriptively linked to a reduced likelihood
for NPI illusions, i.e., errors resulting from an overapplication of pragmatics. There is no evidence for a link to
difficulties with legitimate pragmatic QDiP licensing.
Taken together, the findings suggest that for the two interface phenomena at hand, autism-related measures are
linked not to difficulties in pragmatic licensing, but rather to interindividual differences in the relative reliance
on pragmatic and structural cues. This variation is not visible in a categorical distinction between autistic and
non-autistic speakers, but across the full range of high and low amounts of autism-related traits in individual
speakers. Our results showcase the high degree of variability in interface processing in the general population.

475
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What inferences do people actually make on encountering


informationally-redundant utterances? An individual
differences study

Panel contribution

Ms. Margarita Ryzhova 1 , Ms. Alexandra Mayn 1 , Prof. Vera Demberg 1


1. Saarland University

In previous research, it was shown that upon hearing an utterance mentioning a highly predictable activity
in a given context, subjects tend to rate the probability that this activity usually occurs lower than if it was not
explicitly mentioned. For example, if the utterance mentions the actor paying the cashier in the context of going
grocery shopping, subjects tend to infer that the actor does not usually pay the cashier [1].
Previous work assumed that subjects make sense of informationally redundant (IR) utterances by computing
atypicality inferences, that is, by coming up with an alternative informative explanation of why the utterance
was said (beyond stating the obvious fact of paying the cashier in the example above). Thus, the addition of
the redundant mention of the typical everyday behavior results in the interpretation that it is actually \tex-
tit{atypical} for the referent, for example, because they are a shoplifter and therefore do not usually pay.
In the following study, we show this experimentally by asking subjects to explain their judgments about the
activity typicality. Additionally, we investigate whether individual variability in the rate of deriving atypicality
inferences is modulated by cognitive or personality traits. We hypothesize that pragmatic responding might be
modulated by working memory capacity (RSpan), linguistic experience (ART), socio-pragmatic traits (AQ), and
general reasoning ability and reflexivity (non-verbal IQ and Cognitive Reflection).
Each subject participated in two experimental sessions. Each session contained 10 stories about everyday sit-
uations (such as going shopping), based on materials from [1]. In each session, in the 3 target items, the story
contained an IR utterance (paying the cashier), while there was no utterance in the 3 control items. Each story
was accompanied by 2 questions: 1) a slider question ranging from 0 to 100 about how typical this activity was
for the actor; 2) an open-answer question to explain the provided typicality rating. In addition, subjects saw 4
fillers with no IR manipulation. Since the critical items involved highly typical activities, filler questions were
about atypical activities (e.g., adding avocado to pasta sauce). At the end of the second experimental session,
subjects completed 5 cognitive and personality tests. Data from 193 subjects were used in the analysis.
For the analysis, participants’ responses to the second question were annotated as either containing an atypi-
cality inference or not. We confirm the assumption made in previous work that when confronted with an IR
utterance, subjects tend to infer that the described behavior is atypical for the actor, and additionally come up
with rich explanations for such behavior.
We also find that, just like for other pragmatic phenomena, people differ in whether they derive atypicality in-
ferences: there are subjects who are consistently literal, consistently pragmatic, and those who are inconsistent
in their explanations. Finally, we show that the degree of pragmatic responding is predicted by participants’
reasoning ability and reflexivity, and discuss how it might be linked to pragmatic inferencing.
1. Kravtchenko, E., & Demberg, V. (2022). Informationally redundant utterances elicit pragmatic inferences.
Cognition, 225, 105159.

476
Imitation and simulation
for instructing and
learning Kata: A
multimodal analysis of
Japan-style transmission
of practical skills
(organized by Seiji
Nashio, Ikuyo Morimoto,
Yasuharu Den)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analysis of Dynamic Structure in Multimodal Information in


Manzai: Forming and Unforming the Patterns

Panel contribution

Dr. Mamiko Sakata 1 , Ms. Natsuho Miyagi 1


1. Doshisha University

Analysis of Dynamic Structure in Multimodal Information in Manzai:


Forming and Unforming the Patterns
One typical category of Japanese comedy is “manzai”, written as 漫才 in Japanese. It originated from traditional
performance art. A manzai has a set pattern: A pair, one called “boke” and the other “tsukkomi”, engage in
conversations and gradually unleash a comic story.
Although some research has focused on the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of manzai patterns and also on
their audience, they all looked at single factors of manzai, e.g., the language, timing, or the audience. Their char-
acteristics have been analyzed independently, without paying attention to the time-series changes that occur
with the manzai talk. Considering that manzai talks progress through interactions between the performing duo,
and also between the performers and the audience, it is necessary to analyze how they share with each other
the rhythm and/or timing that both sides feel comfortable with. This study, therefore, aims to clarify how the
different time and space are characterized through the performer-audience interactions. It looks at the time-
series changes in multimodal information, including both linguistic and non-linguistic features. In this way, this
study will show the “kata” (like the style, pattern, and form) of the manzai, viewing them through multimodal
interactions between the on-stage performers and their audience. How about defining this word “kata” if you
want to add it?
The study analyzed the video images of the 15 finalist pairs in the 2001-2019 M-1 Grand Prix, the most prestigious
manzai contest. We used video-recordings of the 15 manzai pairs and extracted these factors: The switching
pause (time lapse between the end of the last speech and the beginning of the next speech) between different
topics/themes, the intensity of the audience’s reaction (how much they laughed), and the number of orientation
changes (of the face/body) of the performers. Using this data, we extracted representative values at 30-second
intervals. We then used them as indices to show time-series changes.
As the result of above analysis, by defining the constant rhythm that the performers’ faces and bodies made
and by defining the speed of the rhythmic patterns of the performers’ talks and the audience’s laughter, it was
clear that there was a multi-layer dynamic structure of rhythms that characterize the manzai style. Our study
especially showed the secondary curve depicting the relationship between the switching pause and the intensity
of laughter. It showed that when forming a dynamic structure, the audio/sound information from both the
manzai performers and the audience were organically integrated.
This study visualized how manzai has transformed into new styles, by repeating pattern forming and unforming,
even though the older form mansai, written as 万歳 in Japanese, originated from traditional performing art.
As more widely-varied manzai forms and styles are sure to develop in the future, the researchers expect that
this study, showing the existence of a “dynamic structure built together by the performers and audience”, will
contribute to the future research into manzai and other intangible culture.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How are knowledge, skills and emotions handed down to


apprentices in pottery class where the master is a person with
aphasia?

Panel contribution

Prof. Hiro Yuki Nisisawa 1 , Prof. Rui Sakaida 2


1. Tokiwa University, 2. Future University Hakodate

Similar to other cases of “GEIDOO”, in other words, accomplishments, performing arts or traditional crafts,
discussed in this panel, knowledge and skills are transmitted in the activities in the pottery class. In addition to
this, some emotions are also transmitted, such as pleasure, enjoyment, and inspiration etc. At the pottery class
discussed in this presentation, the teacher is a person with aphasia. Using videotaped data, the activities of this
class are analysed and described from the perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, as well
as multimodality and multisensoriality. As a result, the following findings are made. A double asymmetry exists
here between master and apprentices. In addition to the asymmetry of knowledge and skills that exists between
the teacher and the students, which is also found in other GEIDOO, there is an asymmetry of communicative
repertoires. This asymmetry gives rise to several interesting features. For example, the students formulate
their questions in the way that is easier for the teacher to understand or answer. Alternatively, the students
adopt the strategy of repeating what the teacher says, complementing both the form and the content, to obtain
confirmation. The above forms of interaction between the teachers as a person with aphasia and students
as able-bodied persons confirm what Charles Goodwin discovered. In addition, the teacher often focuses his
teaching not only on words, but rather on demonstrations with his hands. The title of this presentation, “handed
down”, also has this nuance. In this case, the teacher makes extensive use of onomatopoeia. Our presentation
will also examine how imitation and simulation, the topic of the panel, are achieved in the interaction between
the teacher and the students in this activity. Moreover, we want to consider, as far as possible, how some kind of
emotion, such as the kind of pleasure, enjoyment and inspiration etc. mentioned at the beginning of this paper,
is understood, is handed down and reproduced intersubjectively.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Imitation and simulation in Jiu-jitsu practice: Participants’


orientation toward the organization of the class

Panel contribution

Dr. Yasuharu Den 1


1. Chiba University

This study investigates how a Jiu-jitsu class in Japan is organized such that the teacher and students are
oriented to the overall structure of the class in which imitation and simulation of physical skills play important
roles. I discuss how these two aspects of physical-skill practice enable the students to not only acquire correct
bodily movements but also understand their implications when performed in real-life situations. These points
are illustrated through a multimodal analysis of video-recordings of my Jiu-jitsu class.

Instruction on and learning of physical skills have been garnering increased attention, and numerous studies
have been conducted based on the video recordings of lessons and classes in various settings (Keevallik, 2013,
2014, 2018, 2020). Japanese martial arts have become one of the emerging topics in this line of research (Råman
and Haddington, 2018; Råman, 2019). In our previous IPrA panels (2019, 2021), I described how the teacher in
a Jiu-jitsu class skillfully uses his words and bodily movements to give the students an explanation and demon-
stration of physical skills while simultaneously providing his partner hints on how to move for a collaborative
demonstration. Furthermore , I explained how the teacher segments a complex bodily action into smaller in-
stallments, thereby enabling him to interactively (re)organize the instructing process by checking the students’
achievement after every installment.
In contrast to my previous studies which primarily focused on the teacher’s conduct, the current study exam-
ines the other components of the class, in which the students actively practice their skills, that is, the repeated
practice of demonstrated bodily actions and sparring between the students. The class comprises the technique
session and sparring (free-form fighting with another student). In the technique session, the students repeat-
edly practice the bodily actions demonstrated by the teacher, where the imitation of the teacher’s skills is the
students’ primary goal. The teacher’s orientation to this goal is manifested as positive evaluation (“You are
OK.”), dependence on experience (“You may do slowly if unused to this technique.”), correction (“You must not
place your right arm on the opponent’s back.”), and interruption followed by individual coaching for a specific
student. Meanwhile , practicing the demonstrated actions in the technique session is considered as a simulation
of real fighting, which is experienced in the sparring between the students. In sparring, they are expected to
attempt to use any technique that they have learned in the technique sessions. The teacher demonstrates his
orientation to this expectation by making the students aware of the situation in which they can utilize the tactics
that they have learned (“You can try what you learned today/the other day.”). Additionally, when the teacher is
the opponent, he guides the students in a situation similar to the one they have experienced in the technique
session.
In this manner, the organization of the class inherently involves the imitation and simulation of physical skills,
and this format of instructing/learning serves as an effective way of transmitting physical skills in the Japanese
context.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Instructing and Learning Kata in Unison: A Multimodal


Analysis of a Taido Lesson.

Panel contribution

Dr. Ikuyo Morimoto 1


1. Kwansei Gakuin University

This study investigates what the imitation of practical skills achieves in instructing/learning interaction in a
Budo lesson. In recent years, a growing body of literature has examined the multimodal practices used in or-
ganizing instructing and/or learning activities. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, the present
study aims to contribute to this research trend by exploring an instructing and leaning activity in which Budo
students practice kata in response to commands from a master.
Data for this study come from two hours of a video-recorded lesson of a type of Budo called Taido. Taido is a type
of Japanese mixed martial art, which originated from various kinds of martial arts, such as judo, karate, and
boxing. The lessons are normally structured following several steps. First, the master demonstrates in front
of all students the correct movements of kata, which are ‘forms’ of specific patterns of movement. Second, the
students each imitate the movement on their own. And third, the master gives a command and all the students
imitate the movement in unison following this. This study focuses on the third step and analyzes the embodied
ways in which either the master or the students synchronize their movements.
The analysis demonstrates the following three points. First, both the master and the students are all oriented
to synchronizing their movements of practicing the kata in the third step. Second, the multimodal practices
used to organize the transition to the third step are recognizably ritual. The students’ response “sei” and their
arm movements are symbolic acts in Taido. These practices show that the students are oriented to the last step
as being more real and official than the previous steps. Third, while the transition is initiated by the master,
it is achieved in a collaborative way. For example, the master’s announcements are usually prolonged, such
as “ikima:::s” and “kamaete:::,” which provides the students with time to perform the movement before the
prolonged sound ends, and enables them to start the next action in unison. Råman (2018) found that teachers’
management of the transition in judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu lessons is largely dependent on the students and
their embodied conduct. His observation also aligns with the findings of this study.
This analysis suggests that the multimodal practices employed for organizing the transition to the last step, as
well as for synchronizing movements, exhibit the following orientation of the participants: the rituality and
formality of kata in Taido and the membership of the community of practice of Taido. Practicing kata in a syn-
chronized way suggests that kata are treated as being learned and transmitted in a disciplined way that has been
established over the years. It also suggests that kata are regarded as being learned by all participants together,
which nurtures the membership of the community of practice of Taido and the spirit of their community.
Råman, Joonas and Haddington, Pentti. (2018) Demonstrations in Sports Training: Communicating a Technique
through Parsing and the Return-Practice in the Budo Class, Multimodal Communication, 1–19.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal Analysis of Kata-based Training in a


Child-oriented Karate Lesson: How to Achieve an Adequate
Imitation of an Expert’s Practice

Panel contribution

Dr. Seiji Nashio 1


1. Hiroshima University

This study focuses on kata-based training, a methodology used in Japanese martial arts to transmit explicit
and implicit essences for the acquisition of practical skills from experts to novices based on their synchronized
bodily practices. This study demonstrates, through a multimodal analysis of an activity in a child-oriented
karate lesson, how instructors operate and support the training while novices’ practices are still developing
into adequate imitations of experts.
Karate is a modern form of Japanese martial arts, and its kata is a methodological tool that consists of stylized
sequential patterns of bodily motions containing experts’ inner sense and intelligence. In this training, trainees
recurrently practice these patterns while imitating an (existent or imaginary) expert’s practice. Through the
training, they obtain key qualities of motions, such as speed, force, and dynamics, along with the inner sense
and intelligence that can be accessed only by bodily practice, and they refine their motions to practical karate
skills. Finally, their practices reach the adequate imitations of experts, and thereafter, they can train and learn
all by themselves. This means that they have become independent practitioners of karate. In contrast, novice
trainees who have not achieved an adequate imitation are required to start learning basic motions, procedures,
and knowledge about kata and need deliberate instructions. This study specifically focuses on these instructions
for novice trainees.
The data analyzed in this study were videotaped segments of karate training in which a shihan, the head of
instructors, teaches various motions and kata to children 15 years of age or younger, with the help of two other
instructors and two adult assistants (adult trainees). All participants speak Japanese. Shihan’s instructions are
mostly provided through words and bodily demonstrations. Meanwhile, the shihan uses the bodily compo-
nent to visually demonstrate problematic points in the trainee’s bodily motions (cf. Keevallik 2010). Otherwise,
the shihan demonstrates bodily interaction by pairing with and directing another instructor or trainee and ad-
dressing his instructions to the trainee in question (cf. Den 2016). The most important issue is that the shihan’s
instructions are somewhat analytical by dividing the sequences of kata into elements irrespective of its essential
feature. According to Ohniwa (2021), kata is for non-analytical comprehension and communication and loses
its value when decomposed into relationships between elements. In this presentation, I specifically analyze Shi-
han’s multimodal instructions for leading and correcting novice trainees’ practices and discuss the significance
of the above inconsistency in the instructions and how the instructions efficiently refine the trainees’ imitations
to adequate ones.
Den, Y. (2016). Instructing by Demonstrating Bodily Interaction: Examples from Coaching of Jiu-jitsu Tech-
niques. The 33rd Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 201–206.
Keevallik, L. (2010). Bodily Quoting in Dance Correction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 43, 401–
426.
Ohniwa, R. L. (2021). Reconsidering “Kata”—From Science to Comprehensive/Integrated Study—. Kyoto Univer-
sity Press.

482
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Shu, Ha, Ri (Obey, Break, Separate)”: Logical Types in Tea


Ceremony Learning

Panel contribution

Dr. Daiji Kimura 1


1. independent

At the last IPrA, I gave a presentation titled “Well-modulated Bodily Movements in the Japanese Tea Ceremony
(Sado)”. In it, I asked, “If the tea ceremony procedure is strictly prescribed, how do we find it interesting and
satisfying?” Through video analysis, I found that although the basic rules are set, there are modulations that
express a sense of tension or the host’s character. By acquiring these modulations, the host moves from a state
of “being bound by kata 型 (procedure)” to “playing with kata”.
In this presentation, I clarify further the learning stages of the tea ceremony, using the theoretical framework
of Bateson’s logical type theory. The materials analyzed are videos of learning scenes, interviews with learners,
and literature on the tea ceremony.
Bateson outlines a ladder of learning, i.e., zero learning, learning I, learning II, learning III, etc. Zero learning
is the state in which the responses to certain stimuli are constant, like a vending machine. In learning I, the
response to the same stimulus changes as the stimulus is repeated. In the tea ceremony, the change from “not
knowing how to prepare tea” to “being able to prepare tea according to the procedure” corresponds to learning
I. In terms of the theme of this session, this stage corresponds to “imitation”. Learning II is “a change in the
process of progression of learning I” or “learning the way of learning I itself”. Modulating one’s manners to
create a sense of tension applies to learning II, and corresponds to “simulation”. In the presentation, I will
analyze these stages using video scenes and interviews.
However, the classical literature on the tea ceremony states that the practice does not end at learning II. There is
a very famous phrase “Shu, Ha, Ri”. “Shu 守” means “protect” or “obey” the rules. This corresponds to learning I.
“Ha 破” means “break” or “detach”, which means do not obey the rules completely, but deviate. This corresponds
to learning II.
The problem is “Ri 離”. This word has the connotation “separate” or “transcendent”, meaning that we should
throw away what we gained in learning I and II. This stage corresponds to learning III. It is difficult to imagine
this stage. Indeed, Bateson writes: “Learning III is likely to be difficult and rare, even in human beings”; “Zen
Buddhists, Occidental mystics, and some psychiatrists assert that these matters are totally beyond the reach of
language”. Thus, learning III might correspond to enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. The tea ceremony has its
origins in Zen, and the goal of learning in the tea ceremony is to reach a state of complete abandonment of the
acquired form. However, not all tea ceremony students can reach such a state. I will consider whether there is
another way to reach learning III.

483
Impoliteness in Chinese
social media (organized
by Yongping Ran)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A corpus-based examination of Chinese impoliteness


metalanguage on Weibo

Panel contribution

Prof. Na Yang 1
1. Zhejiang Gongshang University

This study investigates how Chinese speakers use impoliteness metalanguage to position themselves on Weibo.
By employing the Modern Chinese Dictionary and the NLPIR(9,160,074 words) as a reference, I chose to focus on
four words meaning impoliteness: bùlǐmào (impolite), méilǐmào (uncivilized), màofàn (offend), and cūlǔ (rude).
To achieve the research purpose, I conducted a corpus analysis based on a sub-corpora of BCC comprised of
data from Weibo reviews. With the help of corpus analytic tools, I examined the core meanings of the four
items and compared their functions in the context. The results show that: (1) the Chinese speakers employ cūlǔ
(rude) most frequently while least frequently using màofàn (offend) to evaluate others’ impoliteness; (2) the
speakers relate méilǐmào (uncivilized) more often to a context of describing one’s individual quality, whereas
they tend to refer to bùlǐmào (impolite) in talking about the affective quality of interaction; and in addition,
(3) the Chinese speakers like combining the item cūlǔ (rude) with the verb-phrase shānɡ ɡǎnqínɡ (affection-
threatening), which helps to extend their argument for justifying a comment on impoliteness. The study aims
to contribute to (im)politeness research by examining the metalanguage used in Chinese.

485
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Study of the Moral Order Construction of Collective


Reprimand in Online Comments Aiming at Parent-Child
Conflict

Panel contribution

Dr. Qian Chen 1


1. Northwest Normal University

In online social media, aiming at parent-child conflictive incidents, netizens express their opinion and position
through comments, among which, collective reprimand is a typical impolite behavior. Adopting the method
of “computer mediated discourse analysis”, this study sets in parent-child conflict incidents and examines the
collective reprimand in online comments from the perspective of moral order construction. It is found that
collective reprimand is an impolite discourse practice making evaluation based on moral order, which mainly
constructs the moral order of showing filial piety and respect, being diligent and frugal, and holding gratitude in
return in social interactions by way of criticism, questioning and emotional venting. The study further reveals
the intrinsic connection between impolite speech acts and moral order in cyber public space, and sheds light
on the socio-pragmatic study of public discourse.

486
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring the moral conflicts: Online public denunciations


against children’s noise making on train

Panel contribution

Dr. Rong Lei 1


1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

This sociopragmatic research aims to elucidate the interface between immorality, incivility, and impoliteness
(Horgan 2019, 2020; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Kádár 2021; Haugh, Kádár & Márquez Reiter 2022) by examining
how denunciations of public incivility (i.e., child passengers’ noise making on trains) occur in Chinese online
communities, how the incivility is discursively positioned as publicly denounceable through framing the con-
duct as morally transgressive. Drawing on publicly available comments posted by social media users sent in
response to a video featuring child passengers’ noise making on the Chinese High-speed railway, the findings
indicate that social media users’ moral orientations lead to moral conflicts and impoliteness. The social media
users, who held the moral norm that people ought to be quiet in public places, align with the video poster’s
critical stance and display moral indignations by accusing, blaming, complaining, criticizing (Haugh & Sinkevi-
ciute 2018; Márquez Reiter & Haugh 2019; Drew 1998; Pillet-Shore 2016; Jay 2018). These moral indignations,
however, result in other social media users’ feelings of offense on the part of themselves and on the part of the
offended party (i.e., the noisy child passengers). Other social media users held the moral norms that the adult
should follow the Confucian “宽容”(tolerance), and take a counter-offensive position, resulting in the conflicts
and the escalation of conflicts between these two groups of social media users. These offer a window into con-
flicting behavioral expectations when people are faced with child wrong-doers. This paper aims to contribute
to the research on morality in sociopragmatics, which remains largely embryonic (Haugh, Kádár & Márquez
Reiter 2022). It also attempts to shed new light on the interconnections between immorality, incivility, and
impoliteness by targeting morality and language use in Chinese social media.
References
Gárces-Conejos Blitvich, P., Kádár, D. Z. 2021. Morality in sociopragmatics. In Haugh, M., Kádár, D., Terkourafi,
M. (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 385-407.
Haugh, M. 2022. (Online) public denunciation, public incivilities and offence. Language & Communication. 87,
44-59.
Haugh, M., Kádár, D. Z., Márquez Reiter, R. 2022. Offence and morality: Pragmatic Perspective. Language &
Communication. 87, 117-122.
Horgan, M., 2019. Everyday incivility and the urban interaction order: Theorizing moral affordances in ritual-
ized interaction. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. 7(1), 32-55.
Horgan, M., 2020. Urban interactional ritual: Strangership, civil inattention and everyday incivilities in public
space, Pragmatics. 30(1), 116-141.
Márquez Reiter, R., Kádár, D. Z. 2022. Sociality and moral conflicts: Migrant stories of relational vulnerability.
Pragmatics and Society. 13(1), 1-21.
Márquez Reiter, R., Orthaber, S. 2018. Exploring the moral compass: Denunciations in a Facebook carpool group.
Internet Pragmatics. 1(2), 241-270.
Ran, Yongping. 2022. On the social issues and social features in pragmatic studies. English Studies, Vol. 15,
55-68.

487
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Investigating Chinese Online Impoliteness and Topic


Sensitivity During COVID-19

Panel contribution

Ms. Yuxin Jiang 1 , Prof. Qun Zheng 1


1. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Increasing impolite behaviors have been ubiquitous on the Internet in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic
outbreaks. After the first infected case was reported in China, cyberspace has garnered increasing hate-infused
online debates across the globe. However, the research on Chinese online impoliteness, especially during the
time of the pandemic, is still limited. It is widely agreed that impoliteness is both culture- and context-dependent.
The less discussed cultures such as Chinese and the extent of topic sensitivity on the use of online impoliteness
thus are worth exploring. Hence this study aims to unveil a) the emerging trends of impoliteness on the Chinese
Internet, and b) the pragmatic choices of impoliteness in sensitive (i.e. politics-related) and non-sensitive (i.e.
service-related) topics. Drawing on Culpeper’s (2011) impoliteness model, we analyzed lexical patterns and
impoliteness strategies in two self-compiled corpora containing 15,227 online comments on 8 politics-related
and 8 service-related top-rated videos from Bilibili, a popular Chinese video-sharing platform. We found that in
general Chinese online users prefer implicit impoliteness to explicit impoliteness. Regarding topic sensitivity,
non-sensitive topics beget more explicit impoliteness than sensitive topics do. Non-sensitive topics were often
accompanied by pointed criticism and implicated impoliteness while sensitive topics were frequently followed
by sarcastic comments. These findings indicate that though an implicit strategy of impoliteness seems fit in
Chinese culture, we can still observe an impulsive and anxious online crowd in a pandemic era expressing
their concerns and holding an online carnival.
Reference
[1] Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge University Press

488
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Membership categorization in taking offence in Chinese


WeChat group talk

Panel contribution

Dr. Shuangping Gong 1 , Prof. Chaowei Pang 1 , Dr. Rong Xiao 1


1. National University of Defense Technology

Taking offence refers to a social action initiated by the recipient in which he or she interprets the actions or
conduct of the prior speaker (or some other person or group of persons) as offensive (Haugh 2015). Compared
with giving offence, the investigation of the interactional dynamics of taking offence is much more limited.
Membership categorization is pervasive in taking offence in online conversation. However, little attention
has been paid to how offensive context invokes language users’ choices in membership categorization and how
these choices influence the development of taking offence in online multi-party conversation. This study ex-
plores membership categorization in taking offence in Chinese WeChat group conversation. The data were
collected from the conversation in a property owners’ WeChat group from 2020 to 2022, during which the resi-
dential community went through several controversial issues such as the reselection of the Owners’ Committee
and the installation of elevators. The participants in the property owners’ WeChat group include ordinary prop-
erty owners, members of the Owners’ Committee who are the elected representatives of the property owners,
and several staff members from the property management company.
Detailed analysis of the data revealed four types of membership categorization strategies in taking offence
in online multi-party conversation, namely membership denigrating, membership negating, membership
challenging and membership foregrounding. Due to the multi-layer of participation framework and the
diachronicity of WeChat group talk, offensive or impolite acts may trigger negative emotional responses (e.g. a
feeling of anger, annoyance or displeasure) from one or more recipients in the WeChat group, and may result
in taking offence in an increasingly aggressive manner, which can be observed from the participants’ choices
of membership categorization strategies. However, a shared membership in a community such as “neighbors”
may be foregrounded to mitigate conflicts triggered by offensive acts since in Chinese culture “good neighbors
are much more helpful than far away relatives” and neighbors are supposed to maintain harmony with
each other. The results of the study indicate that membership categorization in impolite context in Chinese
WeChat group talk is a social action which could be employed by offence recipients to manage interpersonal
relationship among community members.

References:
Haugh, M. (2015). Impoliteness in taking offence in initial interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 86: 36-42.

489
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ostensible offence in Chinese live-streaming commerce


interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Ping Liu 1 , Ms. Linlin Yang 1


1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

The notion of “offence” lies at the core of current models of impoliteness (Haugh, 2015). It is suggested that
previous work on causing offence (Culpeper, 2011) and mock impoliteness (Leech, 1983; Culpeper, 2011; Haugh
and Bousfield, 2012) can be complemented by an analysis of ostensible offence in digital business communi-
cation. Ostensible offence is defined as an offensive pragmatic act consisting of impolite forms, whose effects
or perlocutionary effects can be cancelled, neutralised or legitimized by the context; this means the offence
remains on the surface and the speaker with no intention to cause personal as well as public offence (follow-
ing Leech, 1983; Culpeper, 2011, 2022; Haugh and Bousfield, 2012). It is proposed that ostensible offence can
be both productive and rapport enhancing in particular contexts, which means the speakers causing offence
are sanctioned or legitimized for these impolite acts in order to achieve desired interactional goals. This posi-
tion is illustrated by drawing from analyses of the interactions between streamers on Chinese live-streaming
commerce platforms. Based on a self-built corpus comprising 100 h of transcribed texts from live-streaming on
top Chinese social media platforms Taobao Live and Tiktok, three research questions are addressed: (1) How
do streamers cause ostensible offence in live-streaming commerce interactions? (2) How do the targets take
the offence? (3) What functions is ostensible offence intended to accomplish in live-streaming commerce inter-
actions? This research aims to contribute to our understanding of impoliteness, collective intentionality, and
relational work in digital business interactions.

490
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Personality Traits and Mediation Discourse in the


Rapport-challenge Contexts: An Interpersonal Pragmatic
Perspective

Panel contribution

Prof. Ling Zhou 1 , Mr. Jiewen Wu 1


1. Northeast Normal University

This paper aims to explore the moderating effect of different personality traits on conflict discourse from the
perspective of interpersonal pragmatics by examining the data from a modern TV mediation program. The find-
ings show that personality traits greatly influence the effect of meditation. Specifically, the mediated parties are
characterized by dominant personality and mild personality, while the mediator represents rational personal-
ity. The dominant personality inhibits interpersonal bonds by aggravating conflicts, which impedes a successful
mediation; the mild personality establishes closer interpersonal connections and eases conflicts, thereby play-
ing a positive role in the mediation of conflict talk; and the rational personality promotes the mediation by the
way of negotiating interpersonal relations, thus acting as a driving force in conflict resolution. Furthermore,
the results suggest that the mediator’s personality traits facilitate the transition of the mediated parties’ person-
alities to rational personalities, gradually improving the interpersonal relationship, which in turn contributes
to their personality state adjustments through different language use.

491
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Metapragmatics of Impoliteness and Offence on Chinese


Social Networking Sites

Panel contribution

Dr. Xu Huang 1
1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Offence-taking, is generally perceived as an outgrowth of impolite, improper or immoral behaviors. Prior stud-
ies have pointed out that offence lies at the heart of impoliteness evaluations, yet their interrelationship is far
more complicated than what it seemed at first sight. Given the scarce scholarly attention it has received to date,
this study reports an examination of the metapragmatic use of OFFENCE and IMPOLITENESS in Mandarin Chi-
nese by drawing on two datasets of microblogs from Weibo, in an attempt to disentangle their interconnection.
After manually coding all the valid data, we tease out different metapragmatic uses of offence and impoliteness
respectively, and analyze the frequency and percentage of each usage. It is found that whereas offence is more
closely related to morality issues such as disrespect, indecency and immorality, impoliteness is predominantly
connected with less serious, more innocuous formality issues such as disregard (in terms of messages received
and read), unfollowing and message-bombing. Also, the metapragmatic impoliteness evaluation (e.g. It will be
impolite if ***continues) is increasingly seen to convey humorous and jocular implications rather than offensive
or even aggressive evaluations that prevail in the existing impoliteness literature. Therefore, this study will add
to our understanding of the nuanced differences between offence and impoliteness in Chinese culture from a
metapragmatic perspective.

492
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Troubles talk, sanctioned offence and participation order in


online group chat

Panel contribution

Dr. Lili Gong 1


1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Troubles talk is a social practice involving multiple interpersonal concerns, such as dissatisfaction, face, offence,
emotion, im/politeness, or rapport management, etc. Previous studies on troubles talk took it for granted that
it is hearer’s responsibility for providing appropriate response to teller’s negativity. Consequently, failure to
attend teller’s comforting need is considered inappropriate, inducing negative feelings and evaluations, such as
being offended, unsatisfactory or disappointment, etc. This study expands the literature by examining troubles
talk in Chinese online group chat, where participants with similar problems or difficulties are gathered for a
conjoint purpose of mutual support, i.e. pregnant & novice moms group of Chinese for sharing problems and
asking for help. Two research questions are focused: (1) What are the discursive patterns of troubles talk in
online group chat? (2) How are failures to attend trouble teller’s concerns interpreted? Besides the analysis
based on threads of talk collected in group chat, a semi-structured questionnaire survey is conducted based on
the prominent responsive patterns from group members to troubles teller according to the first question. Pilot
study shows that troubles talk in online group chat unfolds diverse discursive patterns apart from face-to-face
interaction, given the participation order featured by mass and anonymity of online group chat. The new order
calls for further considerations on sanctioned offence triggered by failures to meet teller’s comforting needs.
The study has implications for theorizing offence regarding its perceptions in Chinese social media.

493
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“We are extremely worried about him”: Emotion-based


deontic claim in online pediatric medical consultation

Panel contribution

Ms. Minwen Wei 1 , Prof. Yongping Ran 1


1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

A division has been made between expressions of emotion and expressions of deontic right. However, the
delimitation is not clear-cut in actual interaction, which is an aspect that has received scarce attention. Besides,
although previous studies suggest that patients’ expressions of their sufferings in medical consultation can be
more than an action of pursuing affiliation, but an action of soliciting doctors’ diagnosis or treatment, little
research has examined that how a third party’s expressions of their own emotion can serve as a prompt for
a more satisfying recommendation in medical consultation. Drawing on a dataset of Chinese online pediatric
consultation and a discursive approach, this study addresses this gap by exploring how a caregiver’s expressions
of anxiety and worry about the child patient’s condition can be a proximal deontic claim to prompt the doctor to
propose a more adequate or convincing treatment plan. This study finds that caregiver’s emotion-based deontic
claim of the kind signals caregiver’s dissatisfaction with doctor’s previous treatment recommendation. There
are two practices of emotion-based deontic claim. Caregivers either express their worry without an explicit
deontic prompt or adds an explicit prompt right after they display their emotional stance. In either situation
doctors respond with a renewed treatment recommendation. These findings have important implications for
understanding the interrelation between emotion and deontics and show that expressions of emotions should
be carefully recognized in online medical consultation according to sequential context.
Key words: emotion, deontics, online medical consultation

494
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“We are on the air.” Rationalised coercive impoliteness in


complaint handling via helpline

Panel contribution

Prof. Yongping Ran 1 , Ms. Jiabei Hu 1


1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Threatening, whether explicit or implicit, is one of the impoliteness strategies by which the speaker exercises
the power to attack the addressee’s face and restrict his freedom of action. It can pursue not only transactional
goals but social goals (Culpeper, 2011), especially in the institutional and public contexts where impoliteness
is not the only issue of interpersonal pragmatics but also sociopragmatics. However, such impoliteness is not
necessarily associated with specific linguistic forms but is driven and shaped by the context. Thus, whether an
utterance is impolite and has a coercive function needs to be examined in discursive practices.
This study draws on the data from the Chinese helpline in which the host publicly deals with complaints from
migrant workers (i.e., employees) to help them claim their unpaid wages from construction companies or gov-
ernments (i.e., the management). It focuses on the way how the context-dependent statement, “we are on the
air”, functions as a coercive impoliteness strategy (i.e., threatening) by which the host exercises power in in-
teraction and power behind the interaction. Results show that when the complainee (potentially) withdraws
from the interaction (e.g., ringing off, withholding information, or avoiding making a promise, etc.), the host
employs threatening to restrict their instant freedom of action, successfully pushing the management party to
answer questions, provide specific information and make promises (e.g., when and how to pay salaries) in the
live broadcast. After reaching an agreement about paying, the threat is utilized to pose a potential face-threat
on the complainee in case they fail to pay fully and timely as they promised publicly, and thus performs as
pro-active supervision in the real life.
We argue that hosts’ threatening, as a coercive impoliteness strategy, is a rational attempt to seek a realignment
of interests between the complainants and complainees via attacking the complainee’s face and restricting their
freedom of action. Meanwhile, the complainee recognizes its coercive power and is pushed to join in problem
solving. In so doing, it contributes to processing complaints dealing in real-time interaction, supervising the
fulfilment of social obligations of the management in real life, and thus protecting the social rights of employees.
Keywords: threatening; coercive impoliteness; Chinese helpline; complaint handling

495
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“You are talking nonsense!”: Metapragmatic comments in


Chinese academic blog conflictual interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Hui Jiang 1


1. Liaoning Normal University

Engagement in overt conflict is a feature of academic blog interactions (Luzon, 2011), which is likely to cause
impoliteness or offence. It is suggested that the expression of conflict in academic blog is not only genre-related
(Hyland, 2000), but is also influenced by medium factors and social factors (e.g., the social norms of the commu-
nity) (Kleinke, 2008). During conflictual interaction, participants use various linguistic or non-linguistic strate-
gies to perform face-threatening acts, among which metapragmatic comments confirm the salience of impolite-
ness. A metapragmatic comment is an opinion or evaluation about the self or other’s language use, assessments
of the implications, functions and indexicality of utterances (Culpeper 2011: 74; Bublitz and Hübler 2007), ex-
plicitly showing the participant’s reflexive awareness to demonstrate one’s own orientation to a group and the
social norms (Culpeper, 2010).
The purpose of this study is to examine the use of metapragmatic comments in Chinese academic blog con-
flictual interactions, and to analyze how the participants use different types of metapragmatic comments to
maintain or challenge the social norms, construct situated identity and negotiate the interpersonal relation-
ship in the online academic community. The data for the study is taken from a self-built corpus comprising
comments in 100 posts from Chinese scienceblog.com. The corpus of blog comments is analyzed to get data
on the following aspects: 1) the conflictual exchanges in each post; 2) the forms of metapragmatic comments
used in conflictual interactions. The bottom-up analysis of the data relies on previous research on metaprag-
matic comments and impoliteness (Kádár and Haugh 2013; Haugh 2018 ;Verschueren 2000; Culpeper, 2011).
Three research questions are addressed: 1) What types of metapragmatic comments are adopted by the partic-
ipants? 2) What are metapragmatic comments directed at in the blog comments? 3) What are the functions of
metapragmatic comments? This study contributes to our understanding of impoliteness in online academic dis-
course from metaprgmatic perspective, to shed light on the function of metapragmatic comments in managing
interpersonal relations and social norms in academic blog conflictual interactions.

496
Institutional incongruity:
When the practitioner is
doing the right thing at
the wrong time
(organized by Gonen
Dori-Hacohen, Bracha
Nir)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Decomposing a multi-unit question: how interviewers and


respondents overcome institutional constraints

Panel contribution

Dr. Maria Erofeeva 1 , Ms. Vasilina Radkova 2


1. Ulster University, 2. Independent Researcher

In this paper we examine the interaction between a professional interviewer and a respondent in the insti-
tutional setting of standardized telephone interviews on a medical topic. We focus on the use of a multi-unit
question (MUQ) as a locus of interactional struggles over the accomplishment of institutional goals. The format
of a MUQ and its positioning in a questionnaire force both participants to perform sequentially misplaced ac-
tions such as seeking information which was already given. We analyze practices through which participants
account for these sequential incongruities.
We consider telephone interviews as talk-in-interaction in a certain institutional context where participants
orient simultaneously to the interaction order and the ‘rules’ of standardized interviews (Schaeffer, 1991),
especially the obligation of interviewers to deliver all questions by strictly following questionnaire formula-
tions. Respondents, at the same time, usually treat an interview situation similarly to ordinary conversation
(Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2000), which forces an interviewer to balance their professional obligations and the de-
mands of interactional order. The tensions created by the questionnaire are particularly profound when we
look at the use of MUQs.
Interaction scholars connect the structure of MUQ turns with the interactional consequences and contributions
which they allow to make (Linell, Hofvendahl & Lindholm, 2003), for example, inserting opinions in a ‘neutral’
question with a ‘statement+question’ turn structure (Clayman & Heritage, 2002), or particularizing the form
of an answer with a narrowing cascade of questions (Adelswärd, 1988). In our case, the MUQ is designed to
receive information in a form concordant with the questionnaire options. Using the theoretical and method-
ological framework of conversation analysis we examine the collection of 100 interview extracts. Our data
shows that, contrary to the cited studies, the use of MUQs in the setting of standardized interviews requires
further interactional work to formulate it, which impedes the progressivity of conversation.
Our analysis shows that, in the case of the ‘distributed authorship’ of a question turn where interviewer actions
are constrained by institutional requirements, the multi-unit structure is rather a restriction than a resource
for interactants. MUQs systematically produce sequential incongruities in the stream of talk. For instance,
interviewers ask them in places presupposed by the questionnaire despite having already received relevant
responses previously. Respondents, on the other hand, produce relevant answers before the interviewer’s turn
containing a MUQ is completed. We examine two types of practices participants use to overcome these diffi-
culties: 1) decomposing the question at the outset, which thus threatens the normative framework of a stan-
dardized interview, but helps maintain the conversational turn-taking order; 2) jointly constructing a relevant
answer through the insertion of additional narrowing questions.
Our talk opens up a discussion about what is the ‘right’ thing to do for differently positioned parties of institu-
tional interaction.

498
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Everybody gets a wow: miscues on Jeopardy meet the


contestant segment

Panel contribution

Prof. Gonen Dori-hacohen 1


1. University of Amherst

In the U.S. TV game show “Jeopardy,” a segment called “meet the contestant” happens after the first commercial
break. In this segment, “Ordinariness” is created in the dialogue between the host and the contestants by the
latter sharing a story or an experience. This segment has a stable overall structural organization (Robinson,
2012), which starts with the host’s first turn, where he introduces the contestant, their place of residence, and
occupation. Then, in the same turn, the host invites the guest to tell a story in a structure resembling Sacks’ (1974)
discussion of telling a joke. This invitation can have the form of a question or an open invitation. Following the
invitation, the contestant tells their story after a discourse marker or answering the question. Following the
story, the host assesses the story or the experience. This assessment takes a moderate form of “interesting” or
“this is great.” This paper analyzed one segment when the assessment was different. The form of it was over the
top, “wow.” Moreover, the placement of the evaluation was wrong. The guest host used the assessment too early
in the contestant’s story. These misplaced assessments led to various “problems” in telling the story and in the
interactions with the contestants. Thus, this paper explains how an incongruity between the assessment and
its placement can lead to overlapping problems in telling the story and exposes the mechanics of this segment,
which usually runs smoothly.

499
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Incongruent intersubjectivity: Clarification requests and


Corrections in Speech Language Therapy interactions with
Children

Panel contribution

Dr. Bracha Nir 1


1. University of Haifa

Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) is, by definition, an institutional interaction. Like other forms of institu-
tional talk (Heritage, 2005), it differs from mundane face-to-face conversation. Institutional talk is characterized
as having one member of a profession, an SLT therapist, talk with a non-member of that profession, typically
a client, to achieve specific goals via specific practices. These practices are usually limited when compared to
ordinary conversations (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984).
Following Ferguson and Armstrong’s (2004) call to pay attention to the discourse that characterizes these ses-
sions, we explore ways in which SLT practitioners use – and misuse – communicative and linguistic resources
to achieve intersubjectivity when working with language-impaired children. We specifically examine the clar-
ification requests (CRs) that signal a true lack of understanding by the interactant. This is a unique locus of
breakdown in the intersubjective space (Schegloff, 1992; Wilkinson, 1999) as part of the repair system in gen-
eral and other initiations of repair in particular (Schegloff, 2000).
Our main question is: how do practitioners use the CR “displaying lack of understanding and eliciting an expla-
nation” (Corsaro, 1977) within the SLT practitioner-child interaction? We rely on a corpus of 12 such interactions
(six therapists working with eight children in Hebrew) that includes more than 9000 utterances, and analyze the
115 CRs that were produced by the therapists in various instances. Importantly, our study involves interaction
between one competent speaker and one speaker whose competence – especially in terms of the mechanics of
speaking – is in question.
Our analyses show that the therapists and the children made an effort to repair communication breaks by fulfill-
ing the clarification requests presented to them. However, the SLT in fact used clarification requests to initiate
correction sequences. During these sequences, the children’s talk is comprehensible and clearly understood by
the SLT. This incongruent use of the clarification request to initiate correction led one child to overcorrection,
taking a ‘sincere’ clarification request to be a correction initiator.
We conclude that using mundane practices to achieve institutional goals may be detrimental to the children’s
communicative abilities. We address the importance of combining complementary perspectives on discourse in
understanding the interactional work done in SLT interactions, specifically by relying on CA insights on repair
together with current models for the analysis of intersubjectivity and alignment.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Incongruity in institutional complaint recipiency

Panel contribution

Dr. Bethan Benwell 1 , Dr. Maria Erofeeva 2 , Dr. Catrin Rhys 2


1. Stirling University, 2. Ulster University

Complaints calls to the NHS follow a structural organisation oriented to the accomplishment of institutional
actions and processes (Stitt 2021) in which participants normatively orient to their roles as complainant and
complaint handler. Central to these calls are complaint narratives in which callers recount the healthcare ex-
perience that led to their complaint. From the perspective of the institutional order, these narratives provide
the informational content of the complaint and the call handler’s role is to produce an appropriate written
record of the “facts” of the complaint. Viewed from the moment-by-moment perspective of the interaction or-
der, the complaint narratives are typically affect-laden stories that encompass inter alia, negative assessments,
statements of “hurt and blame” (Pino 2022), expressions of distress, and claims to a “reasonable complainant”
identity (Benwell & McCreaddie, 2017). At the sequential level, these actions make relevant some form of affil-
iative uptake (Benwell & Rhys 2017) but our data shows that this is often sequentially displaced by call handler
actions oriented to the institutional task of information gathering, resulting in institutional incongruity.
Our paper focuses on two actions oriented to information gathering that, when mis-timed, lead to incongruity:
information seeking questions and the action of typing. For example, in Extract 1, the caller expresses distress
about their deteriorating health condition. In the interaction order, this makes empathic uptake locally relevant,
but the call handler orients to the requirements of the institutional order with an information check about the
timeline of the complaint which, in turn, leads to misalignment:
Extract 1

1. C: no it’s be- it’s (.) just [over the course of the twelve years
2. CH: no no [I understand
3. C: [it’s just getting worse and worse and [worse
4. CH: [so that’s that was that
5. was maybe mid-May you were saying?
6. (0.5)
7. CH: so then you had to attend a few weeks ago as well you were saying
8. was that maybe two weeks ago?
9. (0.9)
10. C: yeah

Extract 2 shows a sequence of turns where extended typing displaces affiliative uptake:
Extract 2

1. C: why on earth would I make myself sick .hhh I am ~terrified of that


2. hospital~
3. (2.0)((typing))
4. C: I’m absolutely ~ petrified of it~
5. (0.5) ((typing))
6. C: .hhh it’s got to the stage now I’m terrified to go anywhere near them
7. (1.2) ((typing))
8. CH: okay I’m sorry to hear that .hhh if you bear with me wee second I
9. know this is hard to go through but (.) it is important to go

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10. through these experiences cause I need to explain exactly what’s


11. happened to you to the senior staff to get it investigated?

Our analysis documents the sequential outworking of this institutional incongruity, revealing patterns in the
relationship between types of information related activity, the emerging incongruity and the subsequent im-
pact on the interaction but also showing ways that participants sometimes orient to the accountability of the
incongruity (shown in Extract 2).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I will actually respond.” Balancing interactional and


institutional demands in Dutch election debates.

Panel contribution

Dr. Menno Reijven 1


1. University of Amsterdam

One aim during election debates is to grant the candidates for political office equal amounts of time. For a mod-
erator, this requirement becomes a challenge to manage once there are more than two debaters, as happened
during the 2021 Dutch general elections. I study the practices of the participants and the moderator to manage
access to the debate floor. I show that when two politicians are debating each other, the moderator may struggle
to accomplish a fair debate as they do not engage with interactional demands.
Consider an interaction between the moderator, Geert Wilders and Farid Azarkan. Azarkan has just finished his
turn which accused Wilders of continuously spurring hate towards Muslims so he can attract voters. He claims
that he is in politics to fight that discourse, which he labeled as being a “racist ideology.” Up to that point, the
interaction has mostly been between Wilders and Azarkan. Here, the moderator attempts to involve Lillianne
Ploumen, the leader of the Labor Party, in the debate. What can be observed is a clash between the institutional
need to equally divide the time and the interactional need to respond to an accusation. Consequently, Wilders
and the moderator engage in overlapping talk. The moderator first directly addresses Ploumen, while Wilders
also starts by suggesting an alternative course of action (“but maybe could I”). The moderator shows that she
is not willing to grant this to Wilders, and consequently Wilders uses an imperative (“listen”) and stresses a
conversational right which should grant him the conversational floor: after being accused, one is allowed to
respond to this (“I am being called a racist and fascist”). Simultaneously, the moderator still tries to get Ploumen
involved, but weakens her move (moving to Ploumen’s turn is done “quickly” and the turn itself will be done
“briefly” and Wilders will receive a turn “via” her). Wilders then stops requesting the conversational floor
but rather demands it (“I will actually respond”), which is not following standard procedure, and therefore
he defends his move (“because I won’t just allow myself being called fascist”). The moderator acknowledges
Wilders’ position (“I understand”), and grants him a response “soon”. The moderator completely loses control
over this interaction once Azarkan reiterates his point, that Wilders’ being a fascist is something “we need
to dare to mention”. Then, Wilders is able to get the floor, as he switches from addressing the moderator to
addressing Azarkan directly.
What we can observe here is that the moderator was unable to successfully manage the interaction as they did
not acknowledge the need politicians have to respond an accusation. They did the right thing institutionally, of
insisting on equity, but not at the right moment of the interaction.

503
Integration of
conversation analytic and
other linguistic methods
(organized by Yida Cai,
Erika Sandman)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“(Inter)languaging: an integrative approach to language in its


communicative habitat”

Panel contribution

Dr. Charlotte Danino 1 , Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern 1 , Dr. Christophe Parisse 2 , Dr. Marion Blondel 3 , Dr.
Stéphanie Caët 4 , Dr. Camille Debras 5 , Prof. Diane Bedoin 6
1. Sorbonne Nouvelle University, 2. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 3. CNRS, France, 4. Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 -
STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France., 5. Paris Nanterre University, 6. University of Rouen

The paper presents the integration of Conversation Analysis (CA) with usage-based cognitive approaches
(Tomasello 2003) in the DinLang project (Morgenstern 2021). We study family dinners as a communicative
habitat in which children are socialized simultaneously in languaging and dining as co-activities (Haddington
et al. 2014) in French signing and speaking families. Our central claim is that languag(ing) is always one activity
performed along with others - in this case dining - which recruits the same body parts to perform both activities.
The resulting audiovisual corpus captures cultural, social and linguistic dimensions. This triple characteriza-
tion (in line with interactional linguistics, Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018) necessitates methodological (Parisse
et al. 2022) and theoretical integration.
CA provides a rich and tested methodology to produce fine-grained descriptions of the organization of multi-
party interaction in both their social regulation and temporal development. Anthropological approaches (Ochs
& Schieffelin 1984, Duranti et al. 2012, Riley & Paugh 2019, detailed in Kremer-Sadlik & Morgenstern 2022) pro-
vide “cultural breadth” (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001). The “technical” linguistic analysis (ibid.) in DinLang
focuses on multimodality (body as tool) and kinesiology (body as substrate, after Boutet 2018), less represented
in integrative studies.
McIlvenny & Raudaskoski (1996) considered that “ultimately, conversation analysis and linguistics - the investi-
gations of action and structure - are mutually relevant if they are studied in the primary context of real knowl-
edgeable participants in situated, routine human activity”. Family dinners provide such a framework to con-
tribute to the description and analysis of the multimodal, multimedial co-construction of meaning using all
available semiotic resources (Cienki 2012, Morgenstern et al. 2021, Morgenstern 2022).
The underlying notion of dialogue is the common epistemological denominator (Linell 2017, Goffman 1974,
Clark 1996, Pickering & Garrod 2004, with Schegloff’s response): language is viewed as intersubjective coop-
eration and as a multi-semiotic system (Goodwin 2018). However it does not explain how children learn how
to talk and eat at the same time. We argue that the question can be addressed with the broader notion of (in-
ter)languaging (Linell 2009) and the three concepts it presupposes.
1) Participants are involved in languaging as an activity regulated by social norms and constrained by cognitive
processes. The notion of activity mediates the often-stated contradiction between language-as-social-action in
CA, and language-as-mental-product in cognitive approaches (Etelämäki & Visapää 2014, Danino 2014).
2) Languaging only exists in a situation, involving participants, frames, objects, timeframes, ongoing activities,
participation frames and previous shared experiences. Integrative frameworks must develop a more ecological
and symmetrical theory of language and discourse (e.g. Paveau 2009).
3) Languaging occurs in and over time. The centrality of sequentiality in CA meets the importance of flow
in multimodal communication (Boutet 2018, Morgenstern et al. 2021). CA adds a temporal component to the
structural modeling of multimodal linguistic meaning making, thus enriching the toolbox of linguistic analyses
viewing language as a complex adaptive system (e.g. Steels 2000, Raimondi 2014) from which temporality can
no longer be excluded (e.g. Col 2017).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Co-speech pointing as a multimodal practice in grammar and


interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Kurt Feyaerts 1


1. KU Leuven

This contribution is situated at the crossroads of interactional and cognitive linguistics, from where it focuses
on pointing gestures as a crucial resource, enhancing both an interactionally situated as well as a cognitively
grounded interpretation of a usage event. Methodologically and theoretically speaking, our case of pointing
gestures aims to demonstrate the mutual benefit of adopting a combined cognitive and interactional perspec-
tive on the multimodal analysis of both grammatical/conceptual and situated interactional phenomena. The
empirical basis for this qualitative study is a corpus of two plenary debates in the Flemish Parliament.
It is generally accepted that pointing gestures cannot be categorized as mere reference markers (Kita 2003).
Studies have shown that they are used with many formal variations as well as in multimodal co-occurrences
(Bavelas & Chovil 2000; Fricke 2007) or that they are dynamically adapted in function of different socio-material
circumstances and interactional recipients (Mondada 2014; Ishino 2009). We will demonstrate how a pointing
gesture plays a decisive role in the multimodal realization of a ditransitive construction (example_1), an argu-
ment structure underlying an attributive participle (shared in 2), and in the realization of a metonymic structure
as constitutive part of an expression’s situated meaning (as in (3) [note: underlining marks co-occurrence with
pointing gestures]

• … a lot of questions have been asked here…


• … because I think that is a shared concern…
• … resources that go back to Flanders…

In (1) the speaker points at himself in the semantic role of beneficiary, thus indicating that all questions have
been asked to *him*. In doing so, the gesture impacts the syntactic organization of the argument structure as it
realizes a multimodal ditransitive construction (Deppermann 2020). In (2) the speaker points at herself and the
previous speaker thus profiling two referents of the argument structure of the underlying verb ‘share’, which
factors into a cognitively motivated, multimodal construal of this utterance. In (3), self-pointing exemplifies the
speaker as a community member thus realizing a simultaneous cross-modal blend of both source (member) and
target (community) of this metonymy. It appears that integrating the situational setting of the pointing gestures
into the metonymic analysis challenges the long-standing view on the alignment of metonymic relations in terms
of “interactive discourse indices [leading] the interpreting mind to an intended target meaning” (Mittelberg &
Waugh 2014: 1755).
Crucially, examples like these demonstrate the need to integrate both aspects of cognitive construal and situated
interaction as interdependent constitutive dimensions of an accurate multimodal analysis of the process of
meaning making.
References
Bavelas, J. & Chovil, N._2000. Visible acts of meaning (…). Journal of Language and Social Psychology 19(2).
163–193.
Deppermann, A._2020. Lean syntax (…). Linguistische Berichte 263, 255-293
Fricke, E._2007. Origo, Geste und Raum (…). De Gruyter.
Ishino, Mika._2009. Roles of Gestures Pointing to the Addressee in Japanese Face-to-face Interaction (…).
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, 264-278
Kita, S. (Ed.)._2003. Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet. Lawrence Erlbaum.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mondada, L._2014. Pointing, talk and the bodies. (…). In M. Seyfeddinipur & M. Gullberg (Eds.), 95-124. Ben-
jamins

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Combining Conversation Analytic knowledge and


computational linguistics: A case study of pre-sequential
elements in online interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Antti Kanner 1 , Dr. Anna Vatanen 1


1. University of Helsinki

Unlike in several fields of linguistics, in Conversation Analysis (CA) computational methodologies have been rel-
atively rarely used. However, Walsh (2013) has argued that corpus linguistics and CA are, despite their ontolog-
ical differences, not mutually incompatible and has shown this by utilising corpus linguistic methods in several
studies in classroom interaction. Other previous studies approaching computational methodologies from a CA
perspective include Haugh & Musgrave (2018) who present a combinatorial procedure for identifying examples
of an interactional practice across relatively large tracts of data. From the perspective of computational linguis-
tics and HCI, structures of interaction have attracted more attention, as developing talking machines has been
a steady interest (see, e.g., Compagno et al. 2018). We wish to contribute to these lines of inquiry by exploring
ways of exploiting CA knowledge in building quantitative approaches to analysing patterns in large corpora of
online interactions (for more traditional ways of applying CA to the analysis of online interactions, see Meredith
2019). In this way, we seek to continue the discussion initiated by Robinson (2007).
In our presentation, we present our on-going case study that uses different kinds of online interaction conducted
in Finnish - such as Twitter and Facebook conversations - as data. Given that online interactions often comprise
various types of tellings and assertions of personal opinions and evaluations, and given that the tellings them-
selves can be very varied in form, we have chosen to focus on a sequence that in spoken interaction typically
precedes such tellings to reserve the floor: the pre-(announcement) sequence. Our study aims at automati-
cally identifying types of pre-sequences such as pre-announcements (e.g., Sorjonen 2002, Terasaki 2004) and
story prefaces (e.g., Sacks 1974) in the data. In a preliminary phase, based on data from spoken interaction in
Finnish, these segments will be identified by their prototypical response sequences (such as the particle no; Sor-
jonen 2002). The identified pre-sequences will be annotated with a wide range of linguistic features, including
morphological, syntactic and lexical features.
In previous studies, address terms alongside personal pronoun references to participants, mental verbs and
nouns with broad meanings (such as problem, news) have been recognized as central features of turns that
initiate pre-sequences. Statistical analysis based on multinomial regression enables seeing how these and pos-
sibly other features interact to form pre-sequences. Sensitivity to the context of interaction can be maintained
by adding variables related to contextual features. While this procedure will in itself produce interesting obser-
vations about the variety of types and contexts of “pre-sequences”, it can also be further applied in predicting
how likely a given segment is a pre-sequence. This in turn will help to automatically search for new occur-
rences in the data, not necessarily followed by a canonical response. This will allow further analyses, both
qualitative and quantitative, on these segments and their following interaction across different datasets with a
combinatorial procedure such as the one proposed by Haugh & Musgrave (2018).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Comparing the Finnish verbs “pystyä” and “osata”

Panel contribution

Mr. Yida Cai 1


1. University of Helsinki

This paper examines two dynamic modal verbs “pystyä” (‘be capable of’, ‘be able to’, ‘be effective’, ‘can’) and
“osata” (‘can’, ‘be able to’, ‘know how to’) in Finnish as interactional resources in everyday conversations. These
verbs belong to the modal verb type called verbs of possibility and sufficiency (VPS). In grammatically negative
context, the verbs express why something was or will not be done due to the insufficiency of certain resources
(Flint 1980:1). This study has been inspired by Flint (1980: 135) who has pointed out that the semantic properties
of VPS make these verbs suitable for different functions in social interaction.
Verbs investigated in this study are chosen based on their semantic features: “pystyä” and “osata” both belong
to the semantic ability-dimension (Flint 1980: 59, 81-83, 86-88). I will analyze how verbs belonging to the same
semantic dimension differ from each other regarding their interactional tasks. I will discuss the interactional
tasks these verbs fullfil in the possibly larger turns they occur in and the sequential environments of the turn.
The data are conversations collected from the ArkiSyn Database of Finnish Conversational Discourse (University
of Turku).
I will examine the sequential environments of these two verbs and the tasks they fulfil in daily conversation. I
will combine CA and semantic perspectives in the analyses. I will demonstrate how semantic features, especially
the lexical specificity of these verbs, can explain their use in certain interactional environments for completing
interactional tasks. Therefore, in addition to investigating the interactional tasks of these two verbs, this paper
aims at demonstrating the advantages of integrating conversation analytic and semantic approaches. The focus
will be on the negative 1st person singular forms (“en pysty”: I am not able to; “en osaa”: I don’t know how to).
I will show, for instance, the following: i) “En pysty” in negative context generally needs a specific explanation
to clarify which ability is insufficient. In contrast, “en osaa” does not usually require a clarification. ii) The clar-
ification can be done in various ways: a) the speaker clarifies it by him/herself., b) the recipient clarifies it, c)
clarification is done in an embodied way. iii) Each way of clarifying has various tasks in interaction. For exam-
ple, when a clarification is done by the speaker, the clarification and “en pysty” work together as a self-defence.
iv) “En osaa” is used as a resource for downgrading the epistemic stance. The speaker can either still sustain
or abandon his/her epistemic authority depending on the sequential environment. All these interactional phe-
nomena and tasks can be explained by discussing the semantic features of these two verbs: the ability expressed
by “osata” is more specific than the ability expressed by “pystyä”, because the ability expressed by “osata” refers
generally to a certain knowledge, which can be viewed as an ability that “pystyä” expresses.
References
Flint, Aili 1980: Semantic structure in the Finnish lexicon: Verbs of possibility and sufficiency. Helsinki: Finnish
Literature Society.
Kangasniemi, Heikki 1992: Modal expressions in Finnish. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Egophoricity in talk-in-interaction in Wutun: Integrating


Conversation Analysis with linguistic field methods

Panel contribution

Dr. Erika Sandman 1


1. University of Helsinki

In my presentation, I will discuss integrating Conversation Analysis with linguistic field methods in studying
egophoricity in Wutun. Wutun is a little-documented mixed language with Northwest Mandarin lexicon and
Amdo Tibetan grammar spoken by ca. 4000 people in Qinghai Province, P.R. China. Wutun verbal egophoric
marking system includes the ego marker -yek and the sensory-inferential marker -li. According to the traditional
definition, egophoricity encodes involvement/lack of involvement in the described event (San Roque et al. 2018:
2). At first, it seems that this analysis is valid for Wutun and the ego marker -yek is used in first person statements
and second person questions, while the sensory-inferential marker -li is used elsewhere:
1) a. ngu huan xhe-di-yek
1sg food drink-prog-ego
‘I am eating.’ (personal involvement)
b. ni ma-ge nian-di-yek
2sg what-ref read-prog-ego
‘What are you reading?’ (addressee’s personal involvement)
c. ni huan xhe-di-li
2sg food drink-prog-sen.inf
‘You are eating.’ (as I see/infer)
However, examples like 1) are mostly attested in elicitation (data collection directed by the researcher, such as
questionnaires) and in monologues. A study by Sandman & Grzech (2022) reveals that in talk-in-interaction,
Wutun egophoricity is conditioned by the interpersonal context of the interaction. Therefore, any marker can
be used with any person in statements and in questions and the speaker does not need to be personally involved
in the event to use the ego marker.
On line 03 in example 2), the speaker DH uses the ego marker in a warning to position himself as knowledgeable
and to seek vigorous alignment with his directive on line 01:
2) 01 DH: quandi quan-she-ma rai~rai-de ze-she
clothes put on-res.ao-coord warm~warm-nmlz do-res.ao
’Put some clothes (on the child) so it will be warm.’
02 ZJ: ya
inter
ok
03 DH: nanqhan lai-gu-yek
flu come-compl-ego
’Otherwise she will get a flu.’
The data discussed in Sandman & Grzech (2022) comes from a 10h corpus of Wutun, collected in 2010, 2013,
and 2018 during 9 months of fieldwork. The data was analyzed by using methods from Conversation Analy-
sis and the results were compared with elicited examples. The results show that in conversation the Wutun
speakers use egophoricity to signal their epistemic rights and responsibilities with respect to other speech-act
participants. It can be concluded that while traditional field methods like elicitation are necessary in working
on the morphology and syntax of a little-documented language, studying subtle grammatical categories like
egophoricity requires a method that allows in-depth and systematic analysis of the principles that shape the

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interactional context. Integrating methods from CA with more traditional linguistic field methods can yield to
better understanding of the grammar of little-documented languages.
References:
Sandman, Erika & Grzech, Karolina (2022). Egophoricity and evidentiality: Different categories, similar dis-
course functions. Insights on conversational data from the Tibetan Plateau and the Amazonian Foothills. Inter-
actional Linguistics 2 (1), 79-109.
San Roque, Lila, Floyd, Simeon & Norcliffe, Elizabeth (2018). Egophoricity: An introduction. In Simeon Floyd,
Elizabeth Norcliffe & Lila San Roque (Eds.) Egophoricity. Typological Studies in Language 118. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 1–77.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Epistemic summons as an intersubjective resource of


expressing knowledge in online interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Laura Lehmuskoski 1 , Dr. Anna Vatanen 1


1. University of Helsinki

Different facets of how epistemicity - e.g., participants’ epistemic statuses and stances - play a role in social
interaction have attracted a lot of scholarly interest especially in the field of Conversation Analysis (CA) (e.g.,
Stivers, Mondada & Steensig 2011; Heritage 2012). In our study, we wish to contribute to and renew the lines
of the previous research by providing new perspectives to epistemics-related actions in online conversations
through effectively combining CA with different linguistic approaches: interactional linguistics, research on
digital conversations, and the analytical framework of cognitive grammar.
In our talk, we present a study of epistemic summonses in different social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Face-
book). We will focus on the phenomenon of presenting oneself as knowledgeable as an intersubjective resource
of interaction in an asymmetric online discussion. The aim of the on-going study is to distinguish and demon-
strate the actions and sequences where the expression of knowledge marked as certain over a topic is attached
to, and how the platform-specific affordances and algorithms affect the ways of presenting knowledge and pur-
suits of committing others to an epistemically certain point of view.
An epistemic summons (a phenomenon identified by Lehmuskoski 2021) is an intersubjective means by which
the interlocutor can create a knowing and epistemically certain point of view in the discussion, to which the
interlocutor seeks to engage others who participate in the online conversation. The epistemic summons is based
on the interlocutor’s effort to offer his/her own viewpoint as the right and certain one, and to create an impres-
sion of mutually shared knowledge. In Finnish, as the previous study (Lehmuskoski 2021) shows, the epistemic
summons can be formed with various structures, e.g. the -hAn clitic tone particle, rhetorical questions, and
shifting the vantage point of the conceptualizer construed in the comments (Langacker 2008; on combining
Cognitive Grammar and CA, see Etelämäki et al. 2009).
The aim of the current study is to extend linguistic analysis of epistemicity to the polyphonic discourses of
social media and to study how the realizations of epistemic summons are affected by the technical possibilities
and limitations of online discussion platforms, such as varying degrees of anonymity and publicity, or, e.g., the
limited number of characters afforded in a post (e.g., on Twitter). On a more general level, our study also seeks
to contribute to methodological discussions on the benefits and challenges in the effort of combining different
linguistic methods.
References
ETELÄMÄKI, MARJA & ILONA HERLIN & MINNA JAAKOLA & LAURA VISAPÄÄ 2009: Grammar as conceptual-
ization and as action: Combining Cognitive Grammar and Conversation Analysis. – Virittäjä 113 s. 162–187.
HERITAGE, JOHN 2012: Epistemics in action. Action formation and territories of knowledge. – Research on
language and social interaction 45 s. 1–29.
LANGACKER, RONALD W. 2008: Cognitive grammar. Oxford University Press.
LEHMUSKOSKI, LAURA 2021: Episteemisen pääsyn sääteleminen tietäväksi asettumisen resurssina kirjoite-
tussa keskustelussa. Pro gradu. Helsingin yliopisto.
STIVERS, TANYA & LORENZA MONDADA & JAKOB STEENSIG 2011: The morality of knowledge in conversation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Integrating conversation analytic methods with the


investigation of phonetic variation

Panel contribution

Prof. Pia Bergmann 1


1. Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Within the recent past, phonetics and phonology have seen a strong increase in interest in phonetic variation of
spontaneous speech. Couched in theoretical frameworks such as usage-based linguistics or Laboratory Phonol-
ogy, though, the relevance of conversational structure on phonetic detail is often neglected (cf. Bergmann 2018;
Ernestus & Warner 2011; Ernestus & Smith 2018). In conversation analysis, on the other hand, it has been shown
since the 1980ies that phonetic variation is sensitive to interactional influences such as turn-taking, sequence
structure or preference structure (cf. Local, Wells & Sebba 1985; Plug 2010).
Unlike studies from a usage-based or related background, however, conversational analytic studies often rest
on too low a number of instances to carry out statistical testing, which is a standard method in usage-based
approaches resting on corpus studies. Clearly, there is a tension between the need for a thorough qualitative
analysis informed by conversation analysis and Interactional Linguistics on the one hand and the desire to prove
statistical significance on the other. Even when leaving aside deeper theoretical concerns against the analysis of
large data sets with ensuing statistical testing, many challenges come up when investigating phonetic variation
in larger data sets from a conversation analytic background. First of all, both the analysis of conversational
structure and phonetic variation are very time consuming. The need for many instances thus presents one with
practical research problems. Secondly, spontaneous, interactional data is often very heterogeneous while at the
same time phonetic variation is highly vulnerable to just these varying dimensions such as regional variation,
speaker specific variation, prosodic structure, speech rate and more. Consequently, even more data is needed
in order to get a handle on the large amount of variation.
The paper aims to invite to a discussion of the strengths and shortcomings of an integrative approach where
insights from conversation analysis and Interactional Linguistics can contribute to the usage-based modelling
of phonetic variation. It will do so by presenting the quantitative results of an investigation of the prosody and
phonetics of discourse markers in contemporary German (cf. Bergmann subm.) and discussing these against
the background of local contingencies of talk in interaction.
References
Bergmann, P. (2018): Morphologisch komplexe Wörter im Deutschen. Prosodische Struktur und phonetis-
che Realisierung. Studies in Laboratory Phonology. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://langsci-
press.org/catalog/book/155
Bergmann, P. (subm.): Discourse influences on the prosody and phonetics of ‘auf jeden Fall’ and ‘jedenfalls’ in
German spontaneous speech. Subm. to: Schlechtweg, M. (ed.): Interfaces of phonetics.
Ernestus, M., Smith, R. (2018): Qualitative and quantitative aspects of phonetic variation in Dutch eigenlijk. In:
Cangemi, F., Clayards, M., Niebuhr, O., Schuppler, B., Zellers, M. (Eds.): Rethinking Reduction. Berlin: de Gruyter,
129-163.
Ernestus, M., Warner, N. (2011): An introduction to reduced pronunciation variants. Journal of phonetics 39,
253-260.
Local, J.K., Wells, W.H.G., Sebba, M. (1985): Phonology for conversation. Phonetic aspects of turn delimitation
in London Jamaican. Journal of pragmatics 9, 309-330.
Plug, L. (2010): Pragmatic constraints in usage-based phonology, with reference to some Dutch phrases. Journal
of pragmatics 42, 2014-2035.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interjections and response tokens - Integrating functional


linguistics with sequential analysis

Panel contribution

Dr. Søren Sørensen 1


1. Aarhus University

Interjections, response tokens and other one-word-constructions (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018) are well-
studied within Conversation Analysis, and important work has been done on the topic (e.g. Stivers 2022). They
occur very frequently in conversations and perform a variety of actions. For instance, mm is both used to con-
firm, assess and as a receipt and continuer. Such systems may be part of the grammar of a language (Steensig
& Sørensen 2019; Enfield et al. 2019).
My talk investigates such phenomena within functional linguistics and explores how to understand interac-
tional functions (such as action and stance) in relation other concepts of function (e.g. the terminology for units
of certain layers). The talk presents two descriptions: the formulation of response tokens as a word class (or
part-of-speech), based on the approach in Functional Discourse Grammar as laid out by Hengeveld (1992), with
the incorporation of sequential position and action, and an account of the propositional value of response tokens
and related phenomena, and how the layered structure of the clause can be used.
The presentation is primarily based on conversation analytic collections of response tokens in Danish everyday
interactions, focusing on ja ‘yes’, nej ‘no’, nå (approx. ‘oh’), okay and mm in freestanding uses, but will also
incorporate resources and perspectives from other languages based on existing literature.
I argue that functional concepts allow for more precise descriptions and handling of forms in a way that can
more readily relate to “theoretical” linguistics. Specifically for response tokens, the notion of freestandedness
(i.e. being able to function as one-word-constructions) can handle how functions are divided among forms,
while the layered structure of the clause can model the compositional semantics of the individual elements of
a turn and the turn as a whole - and through sequences, in capturing how one-word-constructions both import
and modify meaning from previous turns.

The descriptions form the basis of a discussion on the different functional concepts and how they can be used to
develop interactional descriptions. The discussion fits into ongoing research on action and sequential aspects
in grammar, and how to work with the relation between forms and functions, which are important factors for
cross-linguistic comparison (Rijkhoff 2016), while suggesting possible compromises needed to connect interac-
tional and “non-interactional” linguistics in terms of terminology and method.
References
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Margret Selting. 2018. Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Inter-
action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Enfield, N. J., Tanya Stivers, Penelope Brown, Christina Englert, Katariina Harjunpää, Makoto
Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, et al. 2019. Polar answers. Journal of Linguistics 55(2). 277–304.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226718000336.
Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-Verbal Predication: Theory, Typology, Diachrony. Non-Verbal Predication. De
Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110883282.
Rijkhoff, Jan. 2016. Crosslinguistic categories in morphosyntactic typology: Problems and prospects. Linguistic
Typology 20(2). 333–363. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2016-0010.
Steensig, Jakob & Søren Sandager Sørensen. 2019. Danish dialogue particles in an interactional perspective.
Scandinavian Studies in Language 10(1). 63–84. https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v10i1.114671.
Stivers, Tanya. 2022. The Book of Answers: Alignment, Autonomy, and Affiliation in Social Interaction. Oxford:

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Oxford University Press.

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Multimodal Contextualization of Connectors on Stage

Panel contribution

Dr. Beatrix Schönherr 1


1. Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Germanistik

Theatre performances are not natural talk-in-interaction. But can they nevertheless be subject to a research
project in interactional linguistics? And what could be the profit both for Interactional Linguistics and Theatre
Studies? This talk tries to answer these questions.
A special issue in the interplay of syntax and prosody is prosodic integration vs. disintegration of connectors in
relationship to the connected units. Connectors can either be integrated into an intonation unit that comprises
both conjuncts or form part of the intonation group of the following syntactic unit. In special cases, they can also
be prosodically autonomous (stand-alone connectors) or part of the preceding intonation group with a prosodic
break after the connector. However, upon closer inspection, the prosodic boundaries before and/or after the
connector are unclear in many cases (cf. Barth-Weingarten 2016). Auer (1997) argues that the connector is
usually integrated into the intonation unit of the following conjunct but comprises a phonological phrase of
its own within the unit. The published research has not yet comprehensively described and explained these
phenomena (cf. Pasch et al. 2003, Fiehler et al. 2004).
Using the Interactional Linguistics approach and including theatre semiotic research results (cf. Fischer-Lichte
1994), several cases of stand-alone connectors, in particular, German aber (but), will be analyzed concerning the
question of how the prosodic shape and co-occurring facial expression, gestures, body posture, and gaze modify
the meaning and function of the connector. Several types of contextualization patterns will be distinguished.
The data stem from scenes from classical German plays. These theatre performances are considered a special
kind of natural data. Constituting an elaborate communicative genre of their own, they “resemble” natural
conversations superficially and use the same resources to some extent. From a cognitive point of view, since
the act of memorizing and reciting language differs starkly from spontaneous utterance, the multimodal anal-
ysis of scenes on stage can provide new insights not only into theatric means of expression but also into the
relationships between speech, prosody, and gesture in general.
Auer, Peter (1997): Formen und Funktionen der Vor-Vorfeldbesetzung im gesprochenen Deutsch. In: Schlobin-
ski, Peter (Hg.): Syntax des gesprochenen Deutsch. Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag. 55-91.
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar (2016): Intonation Units Revisited. Cesuras in Talk in Interaction. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins (= Studies in Language and Social Interaction 29).
Fiehler, Reinhard/Birgit Barden/Mechthild Elstermann/Barbara Kraft (2004): Eigenschaften gesprochener
Sprache. Tübingen, Gunter Narr (= Studien zur Deutschen Sprache. Forschungen des Instituts für Deutsche
Sprache 30).
Fischer-Lichte, Erika (1994): Semiotik des Theaters: Eine Einführung. Band 1: Das System der theatralischen
Zeichen. Tübingen, Narr.
Pasch, Renate/Ursula Brauße/Eva Breindl/Ulrich Hermann Waßner (2003): Handbuch der deutschen Konnek-
toren. Linguistische Grundlagen der Beschreibung und syntaktische Merkmale der deutschen Satzverknüpfer
(Konjunktionen, Satzadverbien und Partikeln). Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter (= Schriften des Instituts
für Deutsche Sprache 9).

516
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Socio-pragmatic and conversational-analytic perspectives of


code-switching between the Northern and Central Thai
dialects in online media

Panel contribution

Mr. Isara Pittayasiri 1


1. Mahidol University

In bi- or multilingual language communities, code-switching is considered as one of the means of contextual-
ization cue in an interactional conversation (Gumperz 1982), while pragmatics relates to the social and cultural
perspectives of the language use depending on the contexts (Verschueren 1999). Both code-switching and its un-
derlying pragmatics can be analysed through conversation analysis (CA) based on empirically contextualized
conversation patterns in which code-switching represents socio-pragmatic functions of interlocutors’ language
use in speech communities.
The current research studies pragmatic functions when interlocutors use code-switching in an utterance and
examines how interactional conversations with code-switching can contribute to representation of social iden-
tities among interlocutors. In theory, two applied sociolinguistic approaches and pragmatic frameworks sup-
port this interlanguage phenomenon. The former is both of micro- and macro-levels of socio-pragmatic code-
switching proposed by Tseng and Cashman (2015), focusing on various contexts of interpersonal conversa-
tions in micro-level and how interlocutors’ conversational behaviour in macro-level can show their unique
social identities when they use code-switching with the others. The latter is pragmatic frameworks which code-
switching identifies indirect and figurative meanings of the contexts, reciprocal or contrastive utterances be-
tween the sender and the addressee in a communicative speech, and a difference between two languages of
grammatical structures and lexical terms.
At the methodological level, the data is accumulated from “Nuea Kwa”, an online variety programme launched
on YouTube counting from the first episode in January 2022 onwards. In the referred programme, moderators
and guests use code-switching of Northern and Central Thai dialects. Conversation Analysis (CA) is employed
as the medium of data analysis.
The result of this current research suggests that code-switching occurring in the examined online variety pro-
gramme can illustrate an array of pragmatic functions related to fundamental concepts of pragmatics, such as
speech acts, and stance and evaluation. For instance, Code-switching from the Central to Northern Thai dialect
yields a marked language use observed in a symmetrical relation among the interlocutors. Additionally, the
code-switching has a pragmatic function as contextualization cue as well as performs representation of social
identities and values in the macro-level of sociolinguistic studies.
Keywords: code-switching, pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, Thai dialects,
References

Grice, H. P. (1975). ‘Logic and conversation’, in P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech
Acts. New York: Academic Press, 41– 58. Reprinted 1989 in Herbert Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 22– 40.
Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. Stance-taking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction ed.
By R. Englebretson, 139-182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press.

Schegloff, E. A. (2008). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge:


Cambridge University Press.
Tseng A. and Cashman, H. R. (2015). Code-switching Pragmatics. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
Chapelle, C. A. (ed). John Wiley & Sons.

Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Structural and communicative aspects of intentional silence


as a conversational strategy

Panel contribution

Dr. Thanasin Chutintaranond 1 , Dr. Chingduang Yurayong 2


1. Chulalongkorn University, 2. University of Helsinki & Mahidol University

Silence is understood as meaningful absence of speech in turn-taking (Levinson & Torreira 2015), considered in
Berlo’s (1960) communication model as a responding Message in a communicative Channel between Speaker
and Receiver. Structurally, silence can operate similarly to conventional discourse markers in conveying speech-
act and epistemic functions (Bruneau 1973; Jensen 1973; Johannesen 1974; Ephratt 2008). Communicatively,
silence can reveal the interlocutors’ background and character, as it is not simply a “talk” without words but
concerns the entire universe of language behaviour of the interlocutors (Hall 1990).
This study combines the frameworks of conversation analysis and communication science with a cross-cutting
analysis method in linguistic typology to describe “intentional silence” (Kurzon 1998, 2007; Berger 2004) and de-
termine interrelations between its structural and communicative elements. The primary data comprises audit
conversations among multiple interlocutors who are politicians and public officers, retrieved from Thai audio-
visual news reports such as WorkpointTODAY and Thairath Online. As fundamentals, we adopt Pomerantz and
Heritage’s (2013) idea of silence as a dispreferred conversational strategy for a response which does not align
with the action suggested in the prior turn. In the Austinian (1962) and Gricean (1989) spirits, we also maintain
that silence lacks a locutionary force (what-is-said) and argue that the aforementioned structural characteristics
allow various illocutionary acts (what-is-implicated) to be performed through silence constructively. We pay
a particular attention to how intentional silence as a turn-taking device creates asymmetry in the “territory of
information” (Kamio 1997) between S(peaker) and R(eceiver) in the “engagement system” (Evans et al. 2018a,
2018b).
Applying typological parameters of knowledge distribution (Landaburu 1979; Grzech 2022), the data analy-
sis identifies cross-cutting relations between conversational, communicative, and engagement elements in the
asymmetry-favouring nature of intentional silence. Engagement-wise, when the prior turn is “interrogative” (S
asks about χ which R knows) or “evidentiality” (S and R do not know χ), the next-turn silence may orient the
epistemic authority away from the prior-turn Receiver(s): [S-R+/S-R-] → [S+R-], translated into the Receiver’s
ignorance of the prior-turn message. In contrary, when the prior turn is “assertion” (S knows and tells χ to R) or
“uninformative” (S and R know χ), the next-turn silence may abduct the epistemic authority from the prior-turn
Speaker: [S+R-/S+R+] → [S-R+], translated into the Receiver’s avoidance or self-defence against the prior-turn
message.
Communication-wise, epistemic asymmetry emerging from intentional silence in both scenarios is used as a
confrontation technique, particularly for conflict resolution. In our example, a police officer as Receiver inten-
tionally remains silent while a politician as Speaker keeps yelling at him. Such a constructive use of intentional
silence by considering epistemic asymmetry manipulated in the conflict situation is consciously employed by
the prior-turn Receiver to prevent himself/herself from reacting by carelessly saying unintended things in an
inappropriate style and to minimise a risk due to the prior-turn Speaker’s possible misinterpretation of implica-
tures and presuppositions in the message. This corresponds to a principle for conflict resolution that the more
one opens his/her mouth, the more one feeds the fire and overwhelm the interlocutors (Mellul 2019).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Danish Proximal Modal Particles as Codification of


Disagreement Moves

Panel contribution

Mr. Lennart Westergaard 1


1. Lund University

According to Hansen & Heltoft (2011: 1054-1058), the Danish proximal modal particles nu (‘now’) and da (‘then’)
1. express a polyphonic structure (cp. Nølke et al. 2004) where the point of view of the speaker is opposed
to the point of view of someone else, and 2. they mark the point of view of the speaker as identifiable (da) or
unidentifiable (nu) (cp. mutual manifestness). The following examples are adapted from Hansen & Heltoft (2011:
1056). The text in brackets is the contribution of the two modal particles:
(1) A: Hvad har du brugt pengene på?
B: Det skal jeg da/nu ikke svare på.
’A: How did you spend the money?
B: I don’t have to answer that question
(da: as opposed to what you think and as you should know)
(nu: as opposed to what you think but I don’t expect you to know)’
In my presentation, I will propose a modification of this analysis combining CA analyses of arguing exchanges
(e.g. Muntigl & Turnbull 1998: 227) and the Functional Discourse Grammar notion move (Hengeveld & Macken-
zie 2008: 50). The move is a content layer above illocutions in the scope hierarchy of the clause and I regard
of it as content pertaining to the sequential function of the utterance. I will argue that in addition to specifying
whether the proposition is mutually manifest or not, the proximal modal particles specify that the utterance is
to count as a reactive move in a disagreement or conflict sequence.
This claim will be substantiated with the following three arguments:

1. Subordination of clauses with proximal modal particles presupposes the possibility of an illocutionary
reading of the subordinate clause which is expected if the proximal modal particles specify a content
layer which scopes over illocutions.
2. The polyphonic structure which is proposed in the literature is not constant under different illocutions
as noted in Westergaard (2021: 182). A fact which is explainable if the polyphonic structure is derived
based on pragmatic mechanisms and the specification of the utterance as a disagreeing move.
3. The polyphony theoretical account is forced to propose a different semantic analysis of the proximal
particles when these are used in imperative clauses (they narrow down the illocutionary potential of the
imperative according to Durst-Andersen 1995; Hansen & Heltoft 2011: 1070-1072). In my analysis, the
proximal modal particles in imperatives and indicatives can be given a unified account.

References:
Durst-Andersen, P. (1995). Imperative frames and modality: Direct vs. indirect speech acts in Russian, Danish,
and English. Linguistics and philosophy, 611-653.
Hansen, E., & Heltoft, L. (2011). Grammatik over det danske sprog. Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Hengeveld, K. & J. L. Mackenzie (2008). Functional Discourse Grammar. A Typologically-Based Theory of Lan-
guage Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Muntigl, & Turnbull, W. (1998). Conversational structure and facework in arguing. Journal of Pragmatics, 29(3),
225–256.

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Nølke, H. K. Fløttum, C. Norén (eds.), Scapoline. La théorie scandinave de la polyphonie linguistique, Paris, Kimé.
Westergaard, L. (2021). Grammatikalisering af nu. Fra tidslig kontrast til polyfoni. Ny forskning i grammatik,
(28).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Combining CA with corpus linguistics tools: methodological


considerations and first results”

Panel contribution

Ms. Melissa Juillet 1


1. University of Neuchâtel

25 years after Firth and Wagner’s (1997) call for research that takes more into account the socio-interactional
aspect of second language acquisition (SLA), conversation analytic research in the field (CA-SLA) is booming.
Yet, assessing the development of second language (L2) speakers’ competence is still a challenge. In this paper, I
aim to show how the combination of conversation analysis (CA) with the quantitative tools of corpus linguistics
can offer novel opportunities for tracking the development of L2 speakers’ interactional competence.
Much research has been concerned with how L2 speakers develop methods to perform specific social actions
in interaction (Hellermann, 2008; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). More recently, a few studies have focused
on the precise linguistic resources mobilized by L2 speakers to perform these social actions (Ishida 2009, Kim
2009, Eskildsen 2009, contributions in Pekarek Doehler & Eskildsen 2022). The latter line of research, however,
remains scarce in the field. In my project, I explore the development of L2 linguistic resources for accomplishing
coordinating social interaction, i.e. how L2 speakers develop an ‘L2 grammar for interaction’ (Pekarek Doehler
2018) as an integral part of their interactional competence, that is, how they mobilize grammar to perform social
actions.
To track this development, I combine the fundamentally qualitative procedures of CA with quantitative meth-
ods based on the use of a corpus linguistic software, AntConc (Anthony 2004, 2022). This software enables to
determine which words are most recurrent in a given corpus (absolute frequency), which word combinations
are the most recurrent (lexical bundles or N-grams), and which collocations are recurrent, i.e. which word most
often precede or follow a given word or expression. In this presentation, I discuss how such quantitative results
can be used either as a starting point or as a complement to sequential and multimodal analysis.
The data consist of a longitudinal corpus of video recordings of interactions among L2 French speakers partic-
ipating in a conversation circle. The participants are adult university students in French-speaking Switzerland
who participated in the conversation circle between 6 and 18 months. Two types of transcriptions were done
of these data: a transcription that follows CA standards, and a ‘verbatim’ transcription that works with the
AntConc software. For the purpose of longitudinal analysis, the corpus was divided into time-slots that cor-
respond to university semesters. I trace the emergence and development of multi-word expressions over the
semesters, using quantitative tools (frequency of use, lexical bundles, collocations) and quantitative CA to de-
termine the functional uses of these expressions in their context of production.
In this presentation, I first discuss the methodological procedures and challenges related to combining the two
approaches; I then present the results obtained with regard to the multi-word expression en fait (‘in fact’). My
analyses show that the increase in frequency of the use of this expression over the semesters is related to the
emergence of its functional use as a discourse marker serving interaction-organizational purposes. This testifies
to the development of L2 grammatical resources for social interaction.

522
Interaction in clinical and
non-clinical settings with
children and adults with
communication disorders
(organized by Paméla
McMahon Morin, Carole
Anglade, Stefano
Rezzonico, Claire
Croteau)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Ex)changing perspectives on speech and language


pathologists’ scaffolding practices: when getting the right
meaning becomes more central than getting the right words

Panel contribution

Dr. Lucie Macchi 1 , Dr. Stéphanie Caët 1 , Dr. Cédric Patin 1 , Mrs. Laure Descamps 2 , Dr. Christine Da
Silva-Genest 3 , Ms. Ingrid Gibaru 4 , Mrs. Klerwi Le Bris 5
1. Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France., 2. Etablissement Public de Santé Mentale
de l’agglomération lilloise (EPSM-AL), 3. Université de Lorraine & EA 3450 Devah, 4. Centre hospitalier de Lens, 5. Institut de
Réhabilitation de la Parole et de l’Audition de Ronchin

Speech and language pathologists (SLPs) actively seek ways to improve their practice, by relying on the pillars
of Evidence-Based Practice to develop their interventions (Roddam & Skeat, 2010), assessing the effectiveness
of their methods (Ebbels, 2017), or undertaking supervision (Howes, 2022). One area of their practice SLPs may
want to improve, which is not easy to capture and think about, concerns the quality of their interactions with
their patients. Especially with children, SLPs may want to pay specific attention to their scaffolding strategies,
as scaffolding is theoretically (in a socio-interactionist approach of language development, Bruner, 1983) and
clinically (as the development of dynamic assessment suggests, Hasson & Joffe, 2007) valuable.
In this presentation, we first describe a methodology co-designed by SLPs and linguists to enable the analysis
of SLP-child interactions, combining self-recordings of several therapy sessions with the same child, qualita-
tive group analyses of the interactions run by the SLPs and the linguists, and questionnaires completed by the
SLP on her scaffolding strategies before and after the group analyses. We then illustrate the case of an experi-
mented SLP whose aim was to reflect on and improve her scaffolding practices, in order to get a 4 year-old child
with pragmatic, phonological, lexical and syntactic difficulties to become more informative in particular when
formulating requests.
Building on qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data (3 video-recordings of 47 min on average, made
over a two-months period), we show how the collective analysis of the interactions 1) sharpened the SLP’s rep-
resentations of the child’s linguistic and pragmatic abilities, 2) enabled her to identify scaffolding strategies that
she perceived as being more successful, 3) lead her to implement more of those strategies in the following ses-
sions. We show how her perspective and her scaffolding practices shifted from getting the child being more
informative (by asking information questions in particular) to getting the dyad being more efficient (by asking
clarification questions).
One of the first places where SLPs can facilitate and enhance social interactions is the therapy session. It is a
place where children can experiment successful interactions (with one interlocutor, in child-centered interac-
tions, with little time pressure - a situation which is quite rare in other daily life settings). It is a place where
SLPs can gather information to reflect on situations and language practices that enable the child to contribute
to the exchange and the dyad to achieve pragmatic improvement, in their office and possibly in other contexts.
Bruner, J. S. (1983). Child’s talk : Learning to use language. W.W. Norton.
Ebbels, S. H. (2017). Intervention research : Appraising study designs, interpreting findings and creating re-
search in clinical practice. International journal of speech-language pathology, 19(3), 218�231.
Hasson, N., & Joffe, V. (2007). The case for Dynamic Assessment in speech and language therapy. Child Language
Teaching and Therapy, 23(1), 9�25.
Howes, R. (2023). Reflective clinical supervision in speech and language therapy : Strengthening supervision
skills. Routledge.
Roddam, H., & Skeat, J. (2010). Embedding Evidence�Based Practice in Speech and Language Therapy : Interna-
tional Examples. Wiley.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Aphasia and the impact of the embodied aspect of service


encounter for successful understanding

Panel contribution

Prof. Carole Anglade 1 , Prof. Claire Croteau 1 , Prof. Guylaine Le Dorze 1


1. Université de Montréal

Background : Aphasia is a difficulty in speaking, understanding, reading or writing as a result of neurolog-


ical damage. The quality of life of people living with aphasia (PLWA) is not related to the severity of aphasia
(Franzén�Dahlin et al., 2010), but to their participation - that is, how well a person functions in society (Davidson
et al., 2008). PLWA find it difficult to communicate in their daily interactions, including with people unfamiliar
within their community such as clerks, waiters, etc. (Bernath, 2005). Analyses of interactions with non-familiar
people in activities of daily life could provide knowledge about how to integrate these situations in rehabilitation
and facilitate ongoing PLWA participation post-rehabilitation.
Objective : To examine how PLWA make their requests understood in service encounters despite aphasia.
Methods : Six people living with moderate or severe aphasia were video-recorded in situations of service en-
counters, e.g. pharmacies, restaurants, and others. Their interactions and specifically their requests were ana-
lyzed using multimodal conversation analysis.
Results : The aphasic participants used non-verbal communication in the physical environment to support
their verbal requests, by pointing or gazing toward the product they wanted to purchase. The clerks also used
the context of interaction to guess what the request was, using their knowledge of what usually happens at
that moment in the interaction, and intersubjectivity was achieved. This study highlighted how PLWA – even
severe aphasia - can make the subject of their request understood during service encounters by supporting their
non-verbal communication in the context and physical environment of the interaction.
Conclusion : These results are consistent with what we know about service encounters, which happen in pub-
lic places where the actors of interactions construct meaning from the contextual and sequential ties in the
situation in an embodied understanding (Mondada, 2011)
References :
Bernath, T. (2005). Social participation in adults with aphasia. University of the Witwatersrand.
Davidson, B., Worrall, L., & Hickson, L. (2008). Exploring the interactional dimension of social communication:
A collective case study of older people with aphasia. Aphasiology, 22, 235–257. doi:10.1080/02687030701268024
Franzén�Dahlin, A., Karlsson, M. R., Mejhert, M., & Laska, A. C. (2010). Quality of life in chronic disease: a com-
parison between patients with heart failure and patients with aphasia after stroke. Journal of Clinical Nursing,
19(13�14), 1855-1860. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2702.2010.03219.x
Mondada, L. (2011). Understanding as an embodied, situated and sequential achievement in interaction. Jour-
nal of Pragmatics, 43(2), 542-552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.08.019

525
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Clinically relevant communication behavior analysis in


interaction: Development and practical application in school
setting

Panel contribution

Mrs. Paméla McMahon Morin 1 , Prof. Stefano Rezzonico 1 , Mrs. Laurence Brassard 1 , Prof. Claire
Croteau 1
1. Université de Montréal

In school, the teacher has a special status in the interaction as being the representative of authority. He.she can
therefore speaks without being challenged in the right to take many speaking turns. He.she also have the right
to allocate – or interrupt – the speaking turn of children (Seedhouse, 1996). This makes that, for many children,
particularly those with communication disorder, an explicit support from the teacher will be required to fully
participate in class activities, especially in activities held with the entire group, like storybook reading. The
teacher has to be aware of his.her role in interaction in order to fully support the children’s participation. Doing
so, the teacher can effectively scaffold children’s responses to promote their language development.
This research aimed 1) to develop a measure of language scaffolding strategies offered by kindergarten teachers
to children in their group during book reading sessions and 2) to measure the effect of a professional develop-
ment program using interactive storybook reading on the teachers’ use of scaffolding strategies with children
in their group, and particularly to children with an identified language disorder.
The interactive storybook reading intervention was delivered in class by a school-based speech-language pathol-
ogist, three times per week over the course of 7 weeks. Participants were 11 teachers and the children in their
class. Parents of six children with diverse disorders affecting communication (for example: developmental lan-
guage disorder, stuttering, Down syndrome) accepted to transmit the last language evaluation for the purpose
of the study. Teachers were filmed during book reading session before, after and 3 months after the in-class
intervention.
The presentation will first address aim 1 which is the development of our video-based analysis method. Rooted
in the approached developed by Croteau et al. (2018), which falls within an ethnomethodological paradigm,
a qualitative analysis was first realised on sequences between two children with language and communica-
tion disorder and a school-based SLP during whole-group interactive storybook reading sessions. This analysis
allowed us to identified main patterns of supportive behaviors. Second, based on those patterns, bottom-up
categories of communicative behaviors from the SLP and the children were developed to describe the scaffold-
ing strategies sequences. An inter-rater reliability was performed. Then, the presentation will expose results
for aim 2, to show how those categories were applied to interactions between kindergarten teachers and the
children of their class during storybook reading activities. Some categories were refined and further developed
to suit the content of the professional development program. Another inter-rater reliability was performed.
The developed analysis method revealed diverse patterns of scaffolding sequences, differing regarding the
length of those sequences. Results suggested changes in scaffolding strategies used by teacher in interaction
with the children of their class following, and 3-month after the professional development program. Those
changes seem to impact the children’s participation during the book reading, among them, those with a commu-
nication disorder. This method allowed us to measure how scaffolding sequences unfolds in teacher-children
interactions in a meaningful and clinically relevant way.

526
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Comparing timing of other-initiation of repair: a multimodal


approach

Panel contribution

Ms. Kati Pajo 1 , Prof. Minna Laakso 1


1. University of Helsinki

Background: When recipients of talk solve various troubles during a conversation, they utilize other-initiation
of repair (OIR), such as questions “what, where, you mean x”. These utterances are typically produced with
delayed timing. Multimodal, bodily features are also typically included. To date however, there have been few
studies investigating the multimodal timing of OIR of individuals with hearing impairment and comparing them
to normally hearing individuals.

Method and aims: The current study examined with ELAN-software and conversation analysis video-
recordings of 14 dyads with normal hearing and with mild to severe degree of hearing impairment. The re-
search focused on verbal OIR sequences (N=167) but adopted a multimodal approach. The research questions
were presented as follows: (1) In relation to the trouble source turn, what is the timing of OIRs?; (2) What visual
bodily resources the recipient utilizes during OIR sequences?; (3) Does timing of OIRs and their visual bodily
style of production differ between participants with normal hearing and different degrees of hearing impair-
ment?
Results: The results show that gaps preceding OIRs displayed variation and mean values for participants with
normal hearing were �700 ms and with hearing impairment �500 ms. However, all participants took longer
time to initiate restricted OIRs than open OIRs. Especially, �200 ms mean gap for open OIRs with participants
with severe hearing impairment indicated very fast turn-taking, occurring even in overlap with the trouble
source turn. In terms of visual bodily actions, the results showed some fundamental differences. Participants
with severe hearing impairment held their gaze at the speaker more intensively than other participants. Other
visual bodily actions, such as, upper body lean forward, or changes in facial expressions, were found in all par-
ticipant groups. However, their frequency, timing, and quality displayed variation. Visual bodily actions were
mostly utilized by participants with severe hearing impairment. In comparison to other participants in the data,
severely deteriorated hearing increased the need to indicate trouble already while the speaker was talking and
more overt visual bodily actions were utilized. If we consider repair as a primary and vital action in conversa-
tion, it is important to consider the differences in participants´ abilities to follow the ongoing conversation and
their use of various multimodal resources to take part when due.

527
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Engaging children with autism in interactions with AAC:


professionals’ strategies in an inclusive classroom

Panel contribution

Ms. Roxane Perrin Hennebelle 1


1. Laboratoire CLESTHIA (EA 7345) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

This study aims to explore interactions between minimally-verbal children with autism and professionals, and
more specifically the strategies professionals develop to involve children in verbal and nonverbal interaction
exchanges.
The socio-interactionist perspective (Bruner, 1983; Veneziano, 2005; Vygotsky, 1934) we adopt is helpful to un-
derstand the communicative specificities of children with autism, especially minimally-verbal children. Chil-
dren with autism are atypical interactional partners, because their unexpected moves or lack of reactions may
discourage their partners. Nevertheless the quality of interactions improves when the adult is acquainted with
these specificities, and knows how to provide support and encourage them (Plumet, 2014, 2020). Thus, to pro-
vide a richer and more adapted context to children, professionals need to adjust their speech and language to
children’s specificities.
In this study, professionals’ strategies were analysed through the lenses of scaffolding. We focused on one
activity, the snack time, during which the children used the alternative and augmentative tool PECS (Picture
Exchange Communication System) (Frost & Bondy, 1994). These data are part of a larger corpus recorded in
a special-needs class. The four children of the study were aged between 4;05 and 5;08 at the beginning of the
recordings.
The adults’ and children’s interactional moves were analysed according to four axes: a) their communicative
mode; b) their function; c) the presence of gestures; d) the children’s initiations and reactions. We focused on the
children’s engagement during the activity, and then followed the de Weck & Salazar Orvig’s (2019) coding grid
to analyse the task and linguistic scaffolding strategies used by the professionals, and their impact on children’s
reactions.
Results show that professionals mainly relied on multimodality rather than only verbal utterances. Moreover,
their gestures and actions, which differed from ordinary moves in conversation, were mainly devoted to di-
recting the children’s attention or physically guiding their moves. The professionals’ verbal utterances tended
to direct children’s attention, regulate their behaviour, or encourage them to verbalize. The use of PECS en-
tailed multimodality, with specific gestures and actions such as pointing or exchanging pictures. Requests were
mostly multimodally co-constructed, with the nonverbal modality produced by the children, who pointed to the
pictures, and the verbal modality by the adults, who verbalized the request.
The adults’ verbal utterances were mainly repetitions and verbalizations of the children’s moves. These con-
tributions are typical of interactions with children with communication difficulties, including communication
with the PECS.
The scaffolding strategies used by the professionals adjusted to the children’s profiles and their engagement
state. When the children failed to maintain engagement, the professionals scaffolded joint attention throughout
instructions and physical guidance. Language was scaffolded mostly through verbalizations, speech elicitation
and questions. They mostly asked yes/no or alternative questions with deictic gestures which facilitated the
children’s answers.
Discussion will address the aim of these preferential strategies. For instance, the professionals used snack time
as a pretext to train the children to make requests. Their practices differ from those with typically developing
children, as we will discuss by comparing our results with previous studies in childcare (Degotardi et al., 2016).

528
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Parents with aphasia – How focusing on their everyday family


interaction may inform interventions

Panel contribution

Ms. Helene Killmer 1


1. University of Oslo

Raising a child happens through interaction. Parents with aphasia describe change in interaction with their
children, loss of parental authority and need for support to engage with their children. Thus, in the younger
stroke population, interventions requires a focus on demands of the whole family, including children. However,
we are lacking insights into how parents with aphasia and children engage in real time interaction. Parental re-
quests, such as ‘go to bed’, and ‘sit still’, are common and have been described in typical parent-child interaction.
Aphasia may impede involvement in interaction and thus potentially also the possibilities to make requests to
children. The aim of the study is threefold:
(1) To analyze the conversational practices used by parents with aphasia to make requests.
(2) To examine how severity of aphasia influences requesting.
(3) To consider what consequences the formulation of requests have for deontic authority (the right to direct
another person’s future action) of parents with aphasia.
Using conversation analysis (CA), I carried out a collection-based study of 46 request sequences in 10 hours
of video recordings involving three parents with aphasia (two with mild and one with severe aphasia) during
everyday interactions with their children (e.g. mealtimes, games).
The results show that when initiating requests, stopping a child’s action may be easier to achieve than getting
a child to do something, as it requires less specification of the action. The severity of aphasia may limit the
fine-tuning of deontic authority. Whereas the two parents with mild aphasia cautiously calibrate authority,
such fine-tuning is not present when the parent with severe aphasia involves in requesting. He uses intrusive
physical practices, gestures, increased volume and repetition.
The analysis offers insight into practices that may allow or hinder these parents with aphasia to perform re-
quests and thus to engage in parenting. The findings suggest that individuals with aphasia may benefit from fo-
cusing on activities such as requesting in interventions. Further CA research on parental interactions in aphasia
would be desirable to develop training aimed at overcoming challenges such as those described in the present
study.

529
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Spoken and written persuasive discourse in deaf and


hard-of-hearing adolescents

Panel contribution

Ms. Maude Gagnon 1 , Prof. Claire Croteau 2 , Prof. Louise Duchesne 1


1. Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2. Université de Montréal

Persuasive discourse is a difficult task requiring many language abilities, logical thinking, and perspective-
taking (Heilmann, 2020). Good argumentation skills are essential in many contexts, including school, work, and
social relationships (Nippold, 2005). However, very few studies have examined the persuasive skills of high
school students, particularly in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students. Although many studies have exam-
ined language acquisition in DHH young children, we have much less knowledge of the language skills of ado-
lescents. This study aims to determine whether the spoken and written persuasive discourse abilities of DHH
adolescents are comparable to those of hearing peers. We hypothesized that DHH adolescents would obtain
significantly lower scores than their hearing counterparts in all measures of persuasive discourse (lexical di-
versity, complex syntax, and macrostructure) in the spoken and written language samples. We collected spoken
and written persuasive samples from DHH adolescents aged between 12 and 17 years and from age-matched
controls with typical hearing. In each student’s persuasive discourse, we assessed: 1) the use of complex vo-
cabulary, as measured by the number of different words, 2) the use of complex syntax, as measured by clausal
density and mean length of T-units, and 3) the macrostructure of the discourse, as measured by a persuasive
scoring scheme (Heilmann, 2020). Results from a subsample of students will be presented. Findings from this
study will help confirm that using functional language tasks is a valid way to identify the language challenges of
DHH students. Moreover, learning more about the language strengths and challenges of DHH adolescents will
enable clinicians to better assist those students both in clinical and school settings.

530
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Multiple Assessment of Connected Speech (MACS): an


attempt to balance ecological validity and standardization in
the assessment of communication disorders

Panel contribution

Prof. Anna Zumbansen 1


1. University of Ottawa

Assessment of communication disorders in clinical Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) and research requires
some standardization in data collection and analysis in order to reliably compare an individual’s performance
to that of a reference population and to document change over time. Traditional evaluation tests in SLP pri-
marily include isolated language tasks (e.g., naming objects, repeating isolated words or sentences), which help
diagnose a communication disorder by identifying one or more impaired components of language skills. These
tasks are easy to standardize but lack ecological validity. Conversely, a sample of spontaneous conversational
speech is probably the ideal linguistic material in terms of ecological validity, but difficult, if not impossible, to
standardize.
Eliciting monologic discourse with a standardized stimulus (e.g., asking to tell what is happening in a picture
representing a scene from daily life) has emerged as a good compromise and has been used in major diagnos-
tic test batteries for acquired language disorders since the 1970s. Several analysis protocols have been used
and research efforts have been renewed in the field with the improvement of automated analysis possibilities.
However, there is still a lack and need for psychometric data for the use of discourse analysis in SLP. Crucially,
inter-rater reliability must be ensured in analysis protocols.
As a result of these considerations, I have led a team of SLP students and researchers in the development of the
Multiple Assessment of Connected Speech (MACS), a picture description test that attempts to balance ecological
validity and standardization in the assessment of communication disorders. The MACS includes 15 comparable
pictures of scenes from daily life. It is the first discourse test constructed with parallel versions, which allow
a participant to be tested multiple times to measure changes while minimizing learning bias. Since its first
version applied to post-stroke aphasia in 2011, the analysis protocol of the MACS has been refined by adapting
Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) software that automatically computes dozens of linguistic measures
based on the discourse transcriptions and coding. A detailed manual with practical exercises was created to
train future users of the method in French (including Canadian French).
The inter-rater reliability of the analysis protocol is tested by having new users re-transcribe discourse samples
of 30 participants, based solely on the manual instructions. Preliminary results with a speech-language
pathologist show excellent to perfect reliability according to recent guidelines (ICC = .97-1.0) on speech mea-
sures such as number of words, utterances, and duration, which underlie most of the other computed variables.

The manual will be used for further psychometric studies of the MACS and can also be used to analyze different
types of monologic discourse samples (e.g., narratives). It has been shared with other research laboratories
working on discourse analysis in Canada and is available on request (azumbans@uottawa.ca).

531
Interaction in nursing:
Conversation and
multimodal analytical
studies (organized by
Esther González
Martínez, Evelyne
Berger)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Displaying limited availability for an upcoming recruitment


in nurses’ interactions with hospital co-workers

Panel contribution

Dr. Angeliki Balantani 1 , Prof. Esther González Martínez 1


1. University of Fribourg

This multimodal conversation-analytic study explores recruitments in nurses’ interactions with co-workers in
hospital corridors. Despite the growing interest in the examination of recruitments in recent years (Kendrick &
Drew, 2016; González Martínez & Drew, 2021), little work has been undertaken to study preliminary activities
to recruitments. In our project, we have identified four types of preliminary activities that lead to recruitment,
that is locating a co-worker by means of a summons, securing their attention, securing their availability and
providing them with backgrounding information on the issue at hand. The present study focuses on one such
preliminary activity, namely securing availability for recruitment (Kidwell, 2013; Keisanen & Rauniomaa, 2012;
Kendrick, 2021). Already when responding to a summons, participants display readiness to get involved in
interaction and/or in a new practical activity that will divert the requestee from his or her current involvement
or add to it. However, there are instances where participants display limited availability for interaction and
reluctance to abandon their current practical activity and get involved in a new one (Schegloff, 2007). The
study focuses on such instances where participants visibly mark their resistance to an upcoming recruitment,
i.e., by “visible deflation” (Clift, 2014) and/or implicit complaints.
The data for the current study consists of video recordings in an outpatient clinic of an acute-care hospital in the
French-speaking part of Switzerland. The recordings took place in the clinic’s corridors and liminal spaces over
the course of seven consecutive days, twelve hours per day resulting in 331 hours of video data that were then
synchronized into multi cam files. For the present study, a collection of 67 instances of recruitments has been
selected. By investigating the sequences prior to the utterance of the initial recruitment turn, we further iden-
tified 12 instances where participants display limited availability and potential resistance to engage in a new
activity. The study will show that resistance to an upcoming recruitment is projectable from the preliminary
activities before it has actually been produced. We will concentrate on linguistic and bodily resources available
to participants to convey resistance to comply with an upcoming recruitment. The study aims to contribute to
our understanding of how nurses move from unfocused to a focused interaction in the distributed work space of
a hospital clinic and how talk begins in face-to-face, mobile interaction in a work environment characterized by
a pseudo continuing state of incipient talk. More specifically, it could form the basis for a contribution on how
recruitment emerges in this specific environment, in which the participants are in and out engaged in common
courses of action and how they display (un)availability to do so.

533
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From the transmission of clinical information during nursing


handovers to the sharing of knowledge. Keywords: handover,
nurse, multimodal interaction, knowing, learning

Panel contribution

Mr. Louis Maritaud 1 , Ms. Isabel Colon de Carvajal 2 , Ms. Justine Lascar 1 , Mr. Benoit Chalancon 3
1. CNRS, ICAR, 2. ICAR Lab, 3. Centre Hospitalier Le Vinatier, Lyon

The transmission of information concerning a patient at the hospital is governed on the one hand by the comput-
erized patient’s file, and on the other hand by the nurses’ and multiprofessional’s handovers. As a real challenge
for the quality of healthcare, these oral and written transmissions are a specific concern of healthcare institu-
tions. Psychiatry, marked by orality (Barett, 1997), differs from the world of somatic care by this specificity.
Nursing practice primarily uses relational care and uses a thought activity in the service of collective intelligence
(Merkling, 2007). The CIPSY study (PSYchiatric Nurses Interaction Skills) conducted in collaboration between
the Vinatier Hospital and the ICAR laboratory has the main objective of determining the language repertoire
of the two production formats (oral and written) during nurses’ handovers and written transmissions, using
qualitative and quantitative analyses.
We conduct an interactional and multimodal analysis of oral nurses’ handovers in psychiatric institutions,
which has emerged as a possible place to “know” and “learn” among health professionals. Although the main
objective of a nurses’ handover is to transmit and share the up-to-date information on the different patients
present in the unit, we have been able to identify exchanges during which participants can “complement pro-
fessional knowledge” or “help the partner see more clearly” (Grosjean &Lacoste, 1999: 112).
Our analysis is based on four excerpts. The study includes multi-view audiovisual recordings of the three han-
dovers on five consecutive Mondays of the same psychiatric unit. The choice was only on Mondays because, for
an adult psychiatry service and as the first day of the week, these are particularly rich handovers, since they are
abundant of clinical events that happened during the weekend. This original audiovisual corpus, with a total
duration of 14 hours 30 minutes, depicts 38 health professionals, and concerns 40 patients put on the agenda of
these meetings.
We question the pre-established organization of nurses’ handovers in a psychiatric unit and to identify moments
that modify the planned interactional sequence of a meeting to bring a more didactic aspect to the current
conversation. Indeed, the handovers follow a similar process. A particular nurse designates themself or is
designated to list the clinical updated information of each patient, according to an order established by the
room numbers. We also use the concept of “super speaker” to define this central role in the succession. Other
participants can write down on a handover sheet what is said by the nurse in charge of the meeting. However, in
our excerpts, the didactic dimension is more present in the discourse of professionals and temporarily suspends
the expected progression of the current transmission.
From a multimodal point of view, the results of the analyses show that these more didactic moments are de-
tectable by specific postures. In the “knowing” sequences, the note taking on their sheet by caregivers is a central
activity and can modify the progression of transmissions, while in the didactic phases of “learning”, the gazes
are oriented more to the speaker who transmits knowledge and skills, stopping the writing activity.

534
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Getting to know patients: opening sequences of a simulation


in psychiatric nursing education

Panel contribution

Dr. Evelyne Berger 1 , Prof. Alexandra Nguyen 1 , Prof. Jérôme Favrod 1


1. La Source School of Nursing, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

Simulation is a widespread method for training health care professionals in both vocational and continuing
education. It is meant to provide participants with an opportunity to practice technical and communicative
skills within a realistic reproduction of a clinical setting yet controlled environment (Jaffrelot & Pelaccia 2016).
In this paper we aim at a better understanding of the interactional practices participants routinely deploy during
the simulation as they go about doing the assigned task in the field of psychiatric nursing education.
In our data the simulation is meant for students to practice facilitation skills of a psychoeducation program
(PEPS – enhancing positive emotions for people with schizophrenia, see Favrod et al. 2019) for which they have
been trained aforehand. In this context, the simulation is rather a practical exercise involving advanced nursing
students with expert patients (i.e. people having an actual mental illness diagnosis and putting their personal
experience at the service of teaching and research). The corpus consists of 8 videorecorded group sessions
lasting 20-minutes each and taking place in a nursing school in French-speaking Switzerland.
We will focus on the opening sequence of the simulation in which participants greet each other and introduce
themselves to one another in a go-around fashion led by the students before moving into the actual task at hand.
Across all 8 groups, the introduction sequence unfolds according to a similar pattern: the students initiate the
sequence by first self-introducing and then solicit patients to self-introduce as well. It appears that the opening
sequence is quite a crucial moment of the simulation: it allows participants to mutually engage in face-to-face
interaction (see Pillet-Shore 2018, Robinson 1998) and to create familiarity among them (see Svennevig 2014)
while also organizing a shared orientation towards the business to be done (see Hellermann 2007).
Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, we provide a detailed description of the interactional practices
students and patients deploy as the introduction sequence unfolds. We will focus on the way students’ invite
patients to self-introduce and how patients respond to that invitation. We show how the specific linguistic and
multimodal formatting of the students’ invitation turn shapes patients’ responses namely in the amount of self-
disclosure they volunteer about their identity, medical condition and life experiences. In fact, some of these
sequences become rich occasions for personal sharing and creation of a positive group dynamics .
More generally, our interest lies in understanding how nursing students’ practices foster increased patient par-
ticipation and relational work. In conclusion, we argue that the simulation opening sequence is a locus for pro-
fessional development insofar as it offers students the possibility to engage in rapport-building with patients
which is key to further therapeutic work (Scarvaglieri 2020).

535
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narratives and agency in the arts-based activities for Persons


living With Dementia

Panel contribution

Prof. Ilkka Arminen 1 , Ms. Anna Heino 1


1. University of Helsinki

We explore storytelling in the arts-based activities for Persons living With Dementia (PlWD). Our wider interest
in the agency of Persons living With Dementia is also well served by the analysis of storytelling practices of
art group activities for PlWD. Narratives are an elaborate form of social activity that demands both social and
linguistics skills that require social and cognitive competence, and therefore are also used in the diagnostics of
conditions, such as various types of dementia. More importantly, storytelling can be empowering and allow
the tellers a channel for rewarding self-expression. Our perspective is to use video-recorded data of arts-based
group activities to explore how PlWD are using narratives in group activities. The aim is to analyze affordances
and limitations of arts-based activities in allowing PlWD to engage in story telling as a way to articulate and
maintain their agency. We use multimodal conversation analysis to explore interactional practices, in particu-
lar, various kinds of story telling in the arts-based groups. Our data comes from a particular type of arts-based
activity in Finland, TATAMURI®, which is a group art activity based on clinical work and expressive art therapy
methods. Our aim is to contribute to the emerging field of studies on atypical interaction; we address ways
to in which arts-based activities can invoke agency for PlWD. We explore the articulation of various degrees of
agency in storytelling practices in group activities. In all, we aim to gain insight on, whether arts-based activities
in the TATAMURI® group invoke and support the agency of PlWD, and if so, in what ways?

536
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Nursing staff looking for objects with hospital co-workers

Panel contribution

Prof. Esther González Martínez 1 , Prof. Barbara A. Fox 2


1. Department of social sciences, University of Fribourg, 2. University of Colorado, Boulder

Hospital nursing personnel spend a considerable part of their time dealing with objects: tools, products, medical
equipment and records (Strauss et al., 1985; Michel et al., 2021). They are responsible for the provision of items
to be used by the nursing staff themselves, as well as their coworkers and patients, at the appropriate time and
place and under the right clinical circumstances. This implies controlling the stocks, placing orders, organizing
the delivered items and moving them from place to place as needed. The hospital environment abounds in rules
and procedures as well as human and material constraints governing where objects should be kept, used and
disposed of (Volland et al., 2017). Nevertheless, hospital departments are also distributed workspaces, staffed
with many different professionals, new and old recruits, all engaged in interdependent activities that require
them to move around constantly, taking objects with them. This sets the scene for recurrent searches for objects
whose whereabouts are not known to the staff or cannot be found in the expected places at the expected times
(Tucker, Spear, 2006).
The paper focuses on nursing staff looking for objects that they try to locate in cupboards and rooms or across
hospital departments, recruiting co-workers in the process. It is based on conversation and multimodal analysis
of data collected in acute-care hospitals in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. This data is composed on
the one hand of audio-recorded telephone calls between Surgery nurses and other members of the hospital
personnel and on the other, of video-recorded interactions between co-workers in the corridors of an out-patient
clinic.
In the paper, we will first present the importance of studying how objects feature in work practices (Day, Wag-
ner, 2019) and, in particular, how nursing staff look for objects in a hospital setting. We will then concentrate on
a specific interactional sequence in which a nursing staff member asks a coworker where an object is. In a few
cases, the question is dealt with as a request for information. The recipient either provides the item’s location or
produces a knowledge disclaimer and/or redirects the question to someone else. More frequently, the question
is dealt with as also conveying a request for practical action: to provide the object or assistance in finding it. We
examine these sequences as perspicuous interactional moments for delving into the analytical issues of what
functions as a recruitment method (Kendrick, Drew, 2016) and as preliminary activities for recruitment, such
as (so-called) pre-requests (Fox, 2015). The analysis also provides insight into how participants index who is
responsible, or not, for the location and provision of the object in question, for finding it or assisting someone
in finding it (Horlacher, 2019). The paper thus addresses complex issues of division of labor, teamwork solidar-
ity and material entitlement, played out in-and-through social interaction, that are conspicuous in the hospital
setting and also transcend it.

537
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Use of the “burden of care” levels in discharge planning


activities: An occasioned semantics analysis of healthcare
interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Hiroaki Izumi 1


1. Kyoto University of Foreign Studies

In the Japanese healthcare system, elderly persons who need long-term care must obtain a certification that
specifies the amount of care services they can receive. This certification has a seven-level scale that consists of
two major categories: yooshien (“support required”) and yookaigo (“care needed”). Yooshien comprises support
required levels 1 and 2, whereas yookaigo consists of care levels 1 to 5, where the burden of care increases with
the level. Using occasioned semantics (Bilmes 2015), this study investigates how Japanese rehabilitation team
members utilize the seven-level scale in team interactions during discharge planning for stroke or orthopedic
patients. Focusing on three major activities including (1) assigning patient priority, (2) evaluating discharge
plan proposals, and (3) matching patient criteria with institutional requirements, the analysis systematically
examines how the participants accomplish these activities by creating contrastive and scalar relations in the
course of their actions (Bilmes 2021; Deppermann 2005; Izumi 2017, 2019; Hauser 2022). The data consist of
65 video-recorded meetings of the rehabilitation team in a Japanese hospital and ethnographic information re-
garding the long-term care certification and patients’ case histories. The analysis shows that the participants
deploy various scales, including burden of care levels, amount of service, and time and financial scales, in dis-
charge planning activities. These scales are not used in isolation but are sequentially combined to create and
modify the meaning structures, thereby allowing the participants to make sense of whether the patients are
eligible for admission to the facility or whether the discharge plan proposals are adequate. Moreover, when
there is a disagreement among the participants in assigning priority to patients or when a proposed discharge
plan seems problematic, the participants list patients’ functional status as the grounds to determine whether to
classify the patients as yooshien or yookaigo so as to arrive at a mutual agreement. This study contributes to the
empirical study of meaning in talk-in-interaction and healthcare discourse by showing how the analysis of “se-
quential regrading” (Bilmes 2019) in combination with ethnographic information (Deppermann 2011; Hauser
2011) helps explicate the complex interactional scaling and contrasts that emerge in ongoing interprofessional
decision-making practices.

538
Interaction in
video-mediated settings
in higher education
(organized by Sabine
Hoffmann, Margarethe
Olbertz-Siitonen, Götz
Schwab)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Autoethnographic reflections on video mediated interactions


in higher education

Panel contribution

Mr. Bjoern Stoevesand 1


1. Bielefeld University

When the COVID19-pandemic hit us back in 2020, nearly everyone had to deal with specific challenges both
privately and professionally. People active in learning and educational environments, at schools and universi-
ties faced issues regarding the mastering of organization of socially distanced formats. This necessarily led to
adaptions to and changes of common concepts and practices of teaching and learning. Facing these challenges
in our day-to-day teaching at Bielefeld University, we quickly noticed a fundamental crisis of established forms
and practices in institutional talk and work and with that a feeling of reduced professionality. We dealt with
changing participation frameworks (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin 2007) between teachers and learners, unusual
configurations and quantities of interaction and new forms of mutual perception and social interpretation in
video conferencing tools. All of these demanded spontaneous adaptations from both teachers and learners
simultaneously, which led to overwhelming and irritating situations on both sides. Reflecting on those experi-
ences, our lab at Bielefeld University decided to do a small autoethnography (Ellis et al. 2011) of our teaching
experiences in this unfamiliar situation, to take a step back and get an analytic view of the situation (see also
AEDil, 2020). Seven of us took ethnographic notes during our teaching sessions, held via Zoom, and collected
these protocols as “tales of the field” (van Maanen, 2011), in order to build a corpus of data and make a collab-
orative analysis possible.
The present work aims to give some insights in the results of our linguistically and conversation-analytically
inspired work with the autoethnographic texts, about video-mediated interactions in higher education. With
special reference to Goffmans (1956, 1981) remarks on (multimodal-) interaction and mutual perception, I want
to provide an inquiring view on our affective reactions and notions of discomfort from the first semester of
the pandemic. In a reflective and even therapeutical manner I further want to embrace autoethnography and
conversation analysis as a prolific instrument to deal with professional (and individual) challenges concerning
interactional processes.

540
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Critical feedback between language teachers in international


video conferencing

Panel contribution

Prof. Sabine Hoffmann 1


1. University of Palermo

Video conferencing as part of teacher training is only slowly becoming established; and, as Benitt and Schmidt
already pointed out a few years ago (2016: 260), it has hardly been researched empirically. Despite the in-
creasing use of videoconferencing due to the pandemic, there is still a lack of studies that determine how the
participants in a teacher training course actually interact in video conferences (Hoffmann and Kasper 2021).
This is the same issue we have when we look for empirical studies on collegial feedback (Funk 2016: 28) that
reconstruct the processes of interaction in presence as well as in digital spaces, in order to understand how
(foreign language) teachers deal with feedback – which can be positive as a kind of affirmation, or negative in
the sense of criticism – in discourse and negotiate it (Viebrock 2022: 210/211).
The talk proposed deals with collegial feedback as an interactional process in video conferences as part of in-
ternational training for teachers of German as a foreign language. The focus is on showing how the teachers
provide feedback on the topics to be discussed and how this feedback is received. Particular attention will be
drawn to negative or critical feedback and the reaction to it (Hoffmann, in print), especially when it is negated
by the addressed colleagues.
The data used for this comes from the Erasmus+ project LEELU (teaching competence development for extensive
reading lessons, www.leelu.eu), international teacher-training designed and implemented in a blended learning
format. The program was aimed at eighteen DaF teachers from three different countries, who discussed several
sequences recorded in their lessons during eight international video conferences. Selected sequences from
these digital meetings were subjected to multimodal analysis, which is based on conversation analysis and is
used specifically in research into video-based professional communication. The transcripts were carried out
according to GAT 2 (Selting et al. 2009); for other multimodal practices, Mondada (2019) was used. The aim
of the study is to reveal interaction patterns that characterize the behavior of teachers in the context of digital
teacher-training in order to promote an international and intercultural professional feedback culture.
References
Benitt, N. and Schmidt, T. (2016), Lehrerbildung – besser interaktiv? Videokonferenzen als digitale Brücke zwis-
chen Theorie und Praxis in der Englischausbildung. In: T. Zeyer et al. (Eds.), Interaktivität beim Fremdsprachen-
lehren und -lernen mit digitalen Medien: Hit oder Hype? Tübingen, Narr, 259-283.
Funk, C. M. (2016), Kollegiales Feedback aus der Perspektive von Lehrpersonen, Springer, Wiesbaden.
Hoffmann, S. (2022), Kritisches Feedback bei internationalen Videokonferenzen, Studi Germanici 2, 219-240.
Hoffmann, S. and Kasper, G. (2021), Arbeitsanweisungen zu Videomitschnitten in digitalen Lehrendenbil-
dungskonferenzen, Zeitschrift für Interaktionsforschung in DaFZ (ZIAF), 1, H. 1, 143-168.
Mondada. L. (2019), Conventions for Multimodal Transcription, https://www.lorenzamondada.net/_files/ugd/ba0dbb_986ddd49
Selting, M. et al. (2009), Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2), Gesprächsforschung - Online-
Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion 10, 353-402.

541
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How visual access to ongoing digital text production shapes


co-orientation in video-mediated Mandarin tutorials

Panel contribution

Mr. Hsin-Tzu Jen 1 , Dr. Gabriele Kasper 1


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Multimodal conversation analysis of video-mediated interaction seeks to reveal how participants navigate the
affordances and constraints of screen-based encounters in orientation to the activity at hand (Mlynář et al.,
2018). A growing body of literature identifies participants’ methods for managing the “fractured ecologies” (Luff
et al., 2003) of video-mediated spaces, such as extended pointing as a practice of next speaker selection (Hjulstad,
2016), collaborative referencing of shared objects through translocal gestures (Luff et al., 2016), or verbalizing
nonvocal action and adjusting visuals (Femø Nielsen, 2019). CA research of digitally mediated interaction in ed-
ucational settings (González-Lloret, 2015; Jakonen et al., 2022) has shown how students and teachers observably
attend to the specific design features of the platform (Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022; Rusk & Ståhl, 2022) or
device (Hellermann & Thorne, 2022; Ro, 2021) as a practical matter of jointly accomplishing the activity.
Building on these lines of research, our study examines how participants in video-mediated dyadic tutorials
in Mandarin Chinese use PowerPoint (PPT) slides as inscribed objects to accomplish the instructional agenda.
Specifically, we focus on how the changing visibility of the tutor’s ongoing typing of Chinese text on the PPT slide
shapes the tutee’s recipient practices. Unlike digital text production in an alphabetic script, Chinese characters
are generated through three steps. (1) The user types the syllable in alphabetic script; (2) the device generates
matching characters; (3) the user selects the contextually fitting character. Tutors and tutees are literate in the
procedure of digital text production.
Data for this study come from a corpus of 64 hours of video-mediated dyadic tutorials in Mandarin Chinese (128
sessions). The participants are four tutors from an M.A. program of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language
in China and 17 tutees from an advanced Chinese language course at a public U.S. university. The tutors are
tasked with helping the tutees prepare assignments such as essays, oral reports, and discussion questions for
the students’ co-local classes. Throughout the tutorials, the tutors routinely type on the PPT slides for such
actions as outlining, summarizing, and correcting.
Preliminary analysis reveals two sequential trajectories. (1) When the tutor’s typing-in-progress is visible on the
screen, the tutee displays recipiency through vocal continuers and nodding. In this way the tutee observably
orients to the tutor’s sentence production from typing out the phonological combination in alphabetic script,
to selecting the corresponding characters, to completing the whole sentence. In this event the tutor moves on
to the next action as soon as the student claims understanding of the completed typed sentence. (2) When the
typing-in-progress is not visible on the screen, the tutee temporarily gazes at the screen without any vocal or
visual recipient activity and only resumes displays of recipiency when the completed sentence becomes visible
on the PPT slide. In this event the tutor will review or comment on the produced sentence before proceeding to
the next activity. The contrasting sequential trajectories exhibit “the procedural consequentiality of mediation”
(Arminen et al., 2016) in the video-mediated Chinese language tutorials.

542
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Maybe I can share my screen - The role of screen sharing on


Spanish online interactions within a Virtual Exchange Project

Panel contribution

Ms. Naiara Martínez Niño 1 , Prof. Marta García 1


1. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Virtual Exchange (VE) initiatives in higher education have seen an extraordinary increase in recent years, partly
due to the Covid pandemic that made any other kind of exchange almost impossible. While the language of
communication in the VE is, in the great majority of cases, obviously English, and therefore the research has
been conducted almost only with English as the target language (Balaman, 2016; van der Zwaard and Bannink,
2014), there is an appalling lack of studies on how VEs are conducted in other languages.
In this paper, we report some preliminary results of a Spanish as a lingua franca VE project that took place
in autumn of 2021 between 6 European universities, all of them members of the ENLIGHT Network. During
the project, over 30 participants, students of Spanish from different fields such as, e.g., translation studies and
teacher education, met in small groups for three Zoom sessions of approximately 45 minutes each. The VE
had a voluntary character – it was not part of any lecture or university course for any of the participants –
and its goal was to discuss – in Spanish – the topics of Sustainability and Social Justice, two of the pillars of
the ENLIGHT Mission. The interactions in the small groups, therefore, had the character of conversations-for-
learning (Kasper and Kim, 2015) and there was no specific task or assignment to complete. The VE coordinator
sent several documents to the participants before each session (newspaper articles and videos) so that they
could prepare themselves, and suggested some possible talking points, but did not actively participate in the
meetings. The participants, thus, had to manage and negotiate all the interactional tasks themselves; nobody
officially had the role of teacher or leader.
The focus of this paper is the groups’ interactional self-management. We will be taking a look at how the leading
roles are managed, distributed and assumed, and which resources the participants draw on in order to steer
the conversation. Specifically, we will analyze the common strategy of sharing the screen on zoom: How, by
whom and when it is initiated. By comparing groups where screen sharing was used to ones in which it was
not, we also provide some insights into the effects of this particular practice on the interactions.
REFERENCES:
Balaman, U. (2016). A conversation analytic study on the development of interactional competence in English in an
online task-oriented environment. Doctoral dissertation, Hacettepe University. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3583.7687/2
Kasper, G. and Kim Y. (2015). Conversation for learning: institutional talk beyond the classroom, In The Hand-
book of Classroom Discourse and Interaction (Numa Markee, ed.), London, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 390–408. DOI:
10.1002/9781118531242.ch23
Van der Zwaard, R. and Bannink, A. (2014). Video call or chat? Negotiation of meaning and issues of face in
telecollaboration. System 44. 137-138. DOI: 10.1016/j.system.2014.03.007

543
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal interaction analysis of task-oriented student


group work in higher education: observations and reflections
on studying online interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Silke Tork 1


1. European University Institute, Florence

This paper presents and discusses observations emerging from the study of two differently situated data cohorts
(video-mediated and in person) of task oriented student group work in Higher Education. Through the compar-
ison of these two settings particular phenomena of online interaction and requirements for its analysis have
been observed. The applied multimodal approach takes into account the variety of resources used to construct
meaning, create intersubjectivity, build up knowledge and relations in task-oriented student group work online
and in presence.
The PhD project from which this paper originates is a corpus-based study of multilingualism in Higher Education
for which the first data cohort was recorded within a seminar that took place in presence at the PH Karlsruhe
while the second cohort was collected during the pandemic within an online-workshop (using the video confer-
encing platform Zoom) at the European University Institute Florence. The data have been transcribed on the
basis of the Conventions for transcribing multimodality by Mondada (Mondada 2019).
This paper traces the process from data collection to analysis, reflecting on basic principles and concepts of
conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis such as interaction order, face-to-face interaction,
interaction space, spatiality and the body (Goffman 1963 and 1983; Deppermann/Streeck 2018; Mondada 2005
and 2016; Imo/Lanwer 2019; Due/Licoppe 2020). Through a series of examples specific issues resulting from
the situatedness online or in person are highlighted, e. g. the reciprocal visibility in the interaction space,
backchannel signals, inter- and intrapersonal embodied actions, gazes as well as technical issues.
Through comparisons of phenomena like verbal overlaps or embodied backchannel signals and the detailed
description of selected sequences the analysis aims to point out foci for further research on task-oriented student
group work in video-mediated settings in Higher Education.
References:
Due, Brian L. / Licoppe, Christian (2020), Video-Mediated Interaction (VMI): Introduction to a Special issue on
the multimodal accomplishment of VMI Institutional Activities, Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies in Human
Sociality , Vol. 3, Issue 3, 1-20.
Deppermann, Arnulf / Streeck, Jürgen (2018), The body in interaction: Its multiple modalities and temporalities,
in Time in Embodied Interaction. Synchronicity and sequentiality of multimodal resources, Deppermann, Arnulf
/ Streeck, Jürgen (eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam 2018, 1-29.
Goffman, Erving (1963), Behavior in public spaces. The Free Press, New York.
Goffman, Erving (1983) The interaction order: American sociological association, 1982 presidential address.
American Sociological Review, 48/1, 1-17.
Imo, Wolfgang / Lanwer, Jens Phillip (2019), Interaktionale Linguistik. Eine Einführung, J. B. Metzler, Berlin 2019.
Mondada, Lorenza (2005), La constitution de l’origo déictique comme travail interactionnel des participants:
Une approche praxéologique de la spatialité. Intellectica, 41-42/2-3, 75-100.
Mondada, Lorenza (2016), Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction, Journal of
sociolinguistics, Vol. 20/3, 336-366.
Mondada, Lorenza (2019): Conventions for transcribing multimodality, available:
https://www.lorenzamondada.net/multimodal-transcription

544
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Online Second Language Interactional Competence (L2 IC) in


International Student Video Conferencing

Panel contribution

Mr. Nils Drixler 1


1. University of Education Ludwigsburg

This presentation will demonstrate L2 interactional resources in video team meetings within a Virtual Exchange
(VE) project between German and Israeli students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The data shown is
based on an ongoing doctoral study that utilizes multimodal conversation analysis of synchronous L2 online
discourse.
The VE project Extended Telecollaboration Practice (www.telecollaboration.eu) comprises seven semesters of
telecollaboration between undergraduate EFL teacher students at the University of Education Ludwigsburg,
Germany and Kibbutzim College of Education Tel Aviv, Israel. It links research on teacher training at univer-
sity level (Waldman, Harel & Schwab, 2019) with an on-going micro-analytic study focusing on online Second
Language Interactional Competence (online L2 IC) during video conferencing (Drixler).
In the course of our telecollaboration, students from both countries cooperate in joint online projects whereby
group sizes are usually four to six students. Recorded video team meetings are being held between the Israeli
and German students. Along selected transcripts and video sequences I will show how intercultural student
teams yield interactional practices such as turn-taking, sequence organization, repair and common ground
practices in a virtual setting. To assess students‘ interactional performances in online video team meetings,
not only participants‘ utterances but also multimodal resources such as mimical expression, gesture and gaze
movement will be regarded.
My panel contribution will (1) delineate the new and emerging field of online L2 IC, (2) illustrate specific in-
teractional resources that play a role in online video team meetings from a multimodal conversation analytic
perspective.

545
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Orientations to locality and local meanings of food in a virtual


exchange project

Panel contribution

Dr. Margarethe Olbertz-Siitonen 1 , Dr. Malgorzata Lahti 1


1. University of Jyväskylä

This study explores online interactions of a group of intercultural communication students at two European
universities collaborating in a virtual exchange project (e.g., Dooly, 2017) focusing on the pre-assigned topic
of food. Popular discourses on both student exchange and culinary practices are predominantly essentialist,
drawing on the understanding that culture exists outside interaction and that – consequently – learning about
others’ cultures increases intercultural competence. Here, we are interested in how the participants jointly
construct their identities with relation to the two themes as they mutually orient to their different physical
locations (“here” and “there”) and negotiate local meanings of food and groceries.
Our analysis concentrates on three video-based meetings of a five-member student group. Three group mem-
bers were taking a critical intercultural communication course in a university in the Netherlands, while the
remaining two were enrolled in a similar course in a university in Finland. The data was collected before the
COVID19-pandemic, in the spring of 2019, using automated recording. We treat the online meetings among stu-
dents who hardly know one another as situated in the public sphere where the participants put on front stage
performances of desirable identities (Goffman, 1959). We further draw on discursive psychology and conver-
sation analysis to explore identities as common sense and publicly available resources for building accounts of
the social world across distances.
The participants produce both essentialist and non-essentialist identities to make sense of their relationships
with one another, and their relation to their offline localities, skillfully reconciling the two ways of explaining
the social world. A better understanding of these observably unproblematic blendings of mundane and so-
phisticated accounts of interculturality in the ‘public sphere’ of virtual exchange sessions can prove useful for
the development of novel intercultural communication competence trainings, especially in terms of so called
“simplexity” (Dervin 2016, p. 81).
References
Dervin, F. (2016). Interculturality in Education. A Theoretical and Methodological Toolbox. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books.
Dooly, M. (2017). Telecollaboration. In: Chapelle, C. A. & Sauro, S. (Eds.). The Handbook of Technology and Second
Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 169-183). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.

546
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Task repetition and variance in online teachers’


instruction-giving: a multimodal (inter)action analysis

Panel contribution

Dr. Ciara Wigham 1 , Dr. Hatice Müge Satar Coen 2


1. Laboratoire ACTé, Université Clermont-Ferrand, 2. Newcastle University

Described as a semio-pedagogical activity, synchronous online language learning requires socio-affective, ped-
agogical, semiotic, and technological competencies, including the ability to provide “clear and concise instruc-
tions” (Guichon, 2009: 169). Procedural instructions for language tasks are important for several reasons. First,
successful task completion “is often predicated on the effectiveness of [the] instructions” (Watson Todd, Chaiya-
suk, & Tantisawetrat, 2008: 26). Second, language learning happens in meaning-focused interaction (Nunan,
2004) and instructions offer opportunities for authentic communication (Watson Todd, Chaiyasuk, & Tantisawe-
trat, 2008). Third, instruction-giving is part of task-based teaching competencies (Raith & Hegelheimer, 2010).
In face-to-face contexts, studies have largely drawn on Conversation Analysis to investigate different compo-
nents of instructions (Markee, 2015), their interactive nature (Somuncu & Sert, in press), and teachers’ verbali-
sations of written instructions (Ha & Wanphet, 2016). Our understanding, however, of teachers’ use of semiotic
resources within the complex multimodal affordances of videoconferencing is limited. Indeed, from a mul-
timodal perspective, earlier studies have analysed online teachers’ semio-pedagogical competence (Develotte,
Vincent & Guichon, 2010), the way in which a single resource is employed (e.g. gaze, gestures, Wigham, 2017) or
largely explored the social or interactive aspects of language learning (Cappellini & Azaoui, 2017, Satar, 2016).
The few studies that have examined task instruction-giving from a multimodal perspective have largely been
limited to trainee teachers (Codreanu & Combe-Celik, 2012; Cappellini & Combe, 2017; Satar & Wigham, 2017)
In this paper, we will present a multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2019) of screen-recorded lessons to
understand variance in an experienced online teacher’s instruction-giving (inter)actions as a result of task rep-
etition. We explore whether higher- and lower-level actions (HLAs and LLAs) in task instructions-as-process
differ when the same teacher repeats the same task with two different dyads of University-age learners of B1-
B2 CEFR level (Council of Europe, 2001). Lessons were conducted via the videoconferencing platform Skype
and adopted TBLT approach to engage learners in authentic language use during a meaningful task and elicit
linguistic output (Ellis, 2000). Our analysis for this paper explores a convergent task (information-gap).
Our analysis demonstrates that task instructions appear to be more efficient during a second iteration: fewer
higher-level actions are employed and, overall, instructions are shorter in length. In terms of lower-level ac-
tions, our findings indicate that the teacher uses the same gestures or gesture types across iterations. We will
conclude with a discussion of (1) how semiotic misalignment may fragment or distort the shared interactional
space and (2) how modal density misalignment can lead to different foregrounding of actions for the teacher
and the learners.

547
18th International Pragmatics Conference

To teach or not to teach: Communication strategies in


video-mediated online interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Caroline Collet 1


1. Saarland University

The paper investigates in how far authentic examples from video-mediated online interaction can be used to
improve language proficiency, in particular pragmatic competence.
Language proficiency is the ultimate goal for every language learner – no matter at which age (CEFR 2001). In
this paper, the focus lies on communicative competence and communication strategies following descriptors
from the new volume of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR 2020). The aim of this paper
is to provide authentic examples using excerpts from video-mediated interaction which will help learners to
improve pragmatic competence and provide communication strategies.
The data which will be used are video-mediated conversations from the CASE project, in fact from the two sub-
corpora ViMELF, (Diemer et al 2017), the corpus of video-mediated English as a Lingua Franca conversations,
and TaCoCASE (Collet forthcoming), the Transatlantic component of the CASE project. Both corpora consist of
conversations between international University students which were held via Skype. The conversations had
been collected under the same conditions and the participants were provided with topic prompts about their
everyday life.
Following a corpus-based discourse analytical approach, the paper examines what kind of communication
strategies the speakers use when for example explaining a new concept or mediating a concrete situation. As
far as pragmatic competence in particular is concerned, discourse markers play an important role (see e.g.
Schiffrin 1987; Fraser 1999; Bolden 2006). We will take a look at what kind of discourse markers are used and
what functions they fulfill. Following research conducted by Redeker (2006), House (2013), Buysse (2012), dis-
course markers fulfill different functions in non-native or ELF conversations. Therefore, the differences in use
between native and non-native speakers will also be explored in greater detail.
The paper provides concrete and authentic examples using excerpts from video-mediated corpora and thus
presents a new way of teaching and developing language proficiency.

References:
Bolden, Galina. 2006. Little words that matter: Discourse markers “so” and “oh” and the doing of other-
attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication 56, 661-688.
Buysse, Lieven. 2012. So as multifunctional discourse marker in native and learner speech. Journal of Pragmat-
ics 44 , 1764 –1782.
Council of Europe. 2001. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages – Companion volume. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2020. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fraser, Bruce. 1999. What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 31 (7), 931—952.
House, Juliane. 2013. Developing pragmatic competence in English as a lingua franca: Using discourse markers
to express (inter)subjectivity and connectivity. Journal of Pragmatics 59, 57 -67.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
TaCoCASE. Forthcoming. Transatlantic Component of the Corpus of Academic Spoken
English. Saarbrücken: Saarland University & Birkenfeld: Trier University of Applied Sciences. [http://umwelt-
campus.de/case] (18 October 2022)

548
18th International Pragmatics Conference

ViMELF. 2018. Corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations. Birkenfeld: Trier University
of Applied Sciences. Version 1.0. The CASE project [umwelt-campus.de/case]. (18 October 2022).

549
Interactionally
troublesome exchanges:
Accounts, evaluation, and
antagonism (organized by
Melisa Stevanovic,
Mervyn Horgan)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Epistemics and deontics in the story world: (In)congruent


status-stance relations in direct reported speech in stories of
interactionally troublesome exchanges

Panel contribution

Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop 1 , Dr. Melisa Stevanovic 2 , Dr. Minna Leinonen 2 , Mr. Henri Nevalainen 2
1. KU Leuven, 2. Tampere University

Research on epistemics (Heritage, 2012) and deontics (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012) has shown that through
careful interactional analysis, researchers can tease out the relation between the different positions participants
hold on epistemic and deontic gradients (viz., their status) and how they actually talk these positions into being
(viz., their stance). The status and stance can be aligned, resulting in a congruent relation, or they may be
incongruent, as people can invoke stances that imply more or less knowledge or authority than their statuses
would suggest. Especially the latter case is prone to result in interactionally troublesome exchanges (ITEs).
The problematic nature of these exchanges often makes them tellable and so they may become the topic of
post-hoc storytelling. Moreover, given that the problem source around which the story revolves is situated
in a troublesome interaction, it is frequently through direct reported speech that the point of the story is be-
ing made. Importantly, while this term may suggest a ‘direct’ rendering of previously uttered formulations,
research has instead highlighted that these reported utterances are adjusted and constructed – hence the alter-
native term ‘constructed dialogue’ (Tannen, 1989) – to fit the purposes and format of their new interactional
context. Especially in stories, direct reported speech is often used to position story-characters vis-à-vis one
another (Deppermann, 2013), seemingly objectively ‘showing’ – rather than ‘telling’ (Buttny, 1997) – the story
recipients what kind of people the narrator interacted with. Moreover, when direct reported speech takes the
form of lengthy sequences of reported exchanges, narrators may convey character-sketches of pro-/antagonists
through the sequentiality they construct (Van De Mieroop & Clifton, 2013).
Building on this previous work, we argue in this presentation that (in)congruence in the epistemic and deontic
status-stance relations constructed in direct reported speech utterances may function as a way to ‘show’ the
story recipients the breach in social relations that ITEs cause. Drawing on a large and multilingual corpus of
mundane conversations and research interviews, and using conversation analysis as a method, we analyze
the establishment of (in)congruent status-stance relations in direct reported speech in stories of ITEs. We pay
particular attention to how these relate to the surrounding storytelling context – for example through additional
character sketches or metacomments – and to the moral and identity work of the narrator.
References
Buttny, R. (1997). Reported Speech in Talking Race on Campus. Human Communication Research, 23(4), 477-506.
Deppermann, A. (2013). Editorial: Positioning in narrative interaction. Narrative Inquiry, 23(1), 1-15.
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on
Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 30-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646685
Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2012). Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and De-
cide. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(3), 297-321. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.699260
Tannen, D. (1989). Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge
University Press.
Van De Mieroop, D., & Clifton, J. (2013). Enacting Power Asymmetries in Reported Exchanges in the Narratives
of Former Slaves. Discourse Processes, 50(1), 52-83.

551
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interviewees’ interpretative and naming practices as


troublesome tools for tellability in sharing negative
experiences

Panel contribution

Dr. Minna Leinonen 1


1. Tampere University

Sharing negative experiences in qualitative research interview interaction is a sensitive business that is shaped
by the situational context and the overall task and research interests that researchers have explicated to the
prospective interviewees beforehand. Earlier research has shed light on complaining as a delicate activity that
may challenge one’s sense of self unless one is able to present oneself as a reasonable person rather than as
overly sensitive or a whiner.
The research presented here is based on the analysis of interviews conducted with people working in the Evan-
gelical Lutheran Church of Finland on their experiences on interactionally troublesome exchanges at work. The
dataset consists of interviews with people from different hierarchical positions and professional backgrounds
who also vary in terms of their age and gender, to name just a few social divisions that surface in the accounts
of their experiences. Interviewees were invited through different channels, using intra-organizational commu-
nication platforms, social media and personal networks. In the interview invitation people were encouraged to
talk about both everyday challenges in workplace interactions and possibly more severe situations, including
bullying, discrimination and gender-based/ sexual harassment.
By using the tools of conversation analysis and narrative analysis, we explore the interpretative and naming
practices of the interviewees. These practices serve to highlight the organizational context and how and as what
the described negative experience should be understood. We ask, firstly, how the interpretative and naming
practices relate to the tellability of the accounts; secondly, how they contribute to the agency and competence
of the narrator and, thirdly, how risks to tellability are managed in these practices.
Although ongoing research indicates that in some contexts naming negative behaviour as discrimination, bul-
lying or something in the same vein is avoided, interview contexts openly framed as handling issues of equality
seem to offer a possibility to increase the tellability of an incident by categorizing the experience. Naming prac-
tices may require careful management, though, to make use of the discursive power of naming morally ques-
tionable behaviour and to avoid miscategorizations that increase interviewees’ accountability in the interview
situation. Interviewees’ interpretative and naming practices are important in understanding how inequalities
can be addressed and discerned in interview interaction and what risks they entail to their user.

552
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Public spaces as sites of interactionally troublesome


exchanges for immigrants residing in Finland

Panel contribution

Ms. Annika Valtonen 1


1. Tampere University

Social interaction between immigrants and native people of their new country can become troublesome in a
variety of ways, ranging from discrimination and well-meaning daily interactions to troubles in the service sys-
tem. These interactionally troublesome exchanges (ITEs) may cause stress, discomfort and feelings of otherness
for long periods of time after the initial interaction. Being able to account for these situations is integral in over-
coming their negative effects on the personal level, as well as seeking social change. However, accounting for
these experiences in a tellable way may prove difficult due to multiple reasons. For example, difficulties may
arise from moral dilemmas relating to avoidance of being seen as someone who complains, differing cultural
understandings or lack of a shared language with other characters in the ITE account.
In this study, a dataset of semi-structured interviews with 20 first-generation immigrants from various back-
grounds recruited through Finnish multicultural organizations is analyzed, using Bamberg’s positioning analy-
sis. This study explores how immigrants make sense of the ITEs they experience with strangers in public places
in Finland, to answer the research questions: 1) How do immigrants make their accounts of ITEs in public
spaces with strangers tellable? And 2) How do immigrants position themselves as moral actors in relation to
the offender in the story and the recipient of the account?
In accounting for these ITEs occurring in public spaces, immigrants are faced with various dilemmas. The
experiences may be hard to verbalize, when a big part of the ITE – the contents of what is said – is not under-
standable to the teller of the story. In the dataset, several problematic patterns of telling were identified, which
reflect these dilemmas. First, the participants resorted to describing murky feelings of impoliteness or embar-
rassment, especially when they could not understand the verbal content of the potential insult. Second, they
used reported speech of one’s own interpretation of what was said in the situation in order to make the account
tellable, which may undermine the credibility of the account. Third, they described troubling experiences of
non-action by others, which makes it difficult to point out the exact violation that was committed.
When making sense of the experienced ITEs, the interviewees often denounced discrimination as a possible
explanation for the ITE. Instead, explanations of differing cultures, drunkenness or the offending person’s per-
sonality characteristics were offered.
Findings are discussed to shed light on the ITEs that immigrants regularly experience in their everyday lives, and
the dilemmas relating to accounting for these experiences. Deeper understanding of the ITEs and the dilemmas
relating to accounting for them is key to fostering healing and supportive interaction through social support
and affiliation.

553
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reporting the thoughts of the antagonist: A delicate practice


in the accounts of interactionally troublesome exchanges

Panel contribution

Mr. Henri Nevalainen 1 , Prof. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen 2 , Dr. Melisa Stevanovic 1


1. Tampere University, 2. University of Helsinki

People’s accounts of their past interactional experiences often take the form of stories, which in turn commonly
involve “reported speech”. The dramatization of the events in the story enhances the impression of tellability,
vividness, and authenticity of the story. When the story is about an interactionally troublesome exchange in-
volving the speaker as the protagonist and an absent third-party as the antagonist, reported speech may serve
as a culmination of the criticism towards the third-party conduct. When the complainable matter is precisely
what that person has said, reported speech enacts the compainable matter instead of merely describing it. Re-
ported speech may be part of accounts about one-time interactional events, but also about general tendencies
in the unfolding of interaction with certain antagonists.
In addition to reported speech, accounts of interactionally troublesome exchanges are sometimes embellished
by the teller reporting the thoughts of the antagonist. While reported thoughts may also be assumed to add to
the dramatic effect and tellability of the story, the practice—we argue—may also draw negative attention to the
teller’s own moral and psychological disposition. This is due to the simple fact that people’s private thoughts
are technically inaccessible to other people—and the more specific the details provided by the teller are on the
thoughts of the antagonist, the higher the risk is that the teller will be held accountable for the accuracy of the
thoughts reported.
In this paper, we investigate accounts of interactionally troublesome exchanges in which the teller reports the
thoughts of the antagonist as an essential part of the criticism being made of the antagonist’s conduct. Drawing
on Finnish and English conversations in a broad range of data sets in everyday and institutional settings (e.g.,
performance appraisal, workplace meetings, research interviews), and on conversation analysis as a method,
we investigate the immediate sequential consequences of this practice in terms of the recipients’ responses, in
this way also seeking to understand the preconditions and consequences of using reported thought as a sto-
rytelling practice in different interactional contexts. More specifically, we describe three sequential patterns
associated with reports of the antagonist’s thoughts: the recipient (1) refraining from taking any stance toward
the report (no affective or epistemic stance-taking), (2) providing an affiliative response to the report, which al-
lows the participants to circumvent the question of the accuracy of the report (affective stance-taking), and (3)
challenging the report on epistemic grounds, thus refraining from providing affiliation (epistemic stance-taking).
The consideration of these three patterns in detail sheds light on the dilemmas and paradoxes of accounting for
subtle transgressions in interactional conduct, which may nonetheless be psychologically disturbing for those
who are targeted by the transgressions.

554
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social and health care professionals’ narratives of


interactionally troublesome exchanges with their clients:
accounting for and against the active role of the client

Panel contribution

Dr. Elina Weiste 1 , Ms. Nanette Ranta 2 , Dr. Melisa Stevanovic 2 , Mr. Henri Nevalainen 2 , Ms. Annika
Valtonen 2 , Dr. Minna Leinonen 2
1. Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, 2. Tampere University

A current trend in health and social care is to involve clients in the development, evaluation, and production
of services. Whereas clients have traditionally been treated as objects of treatment and their role has been
restricted to agreeing with the professionals’ decisions, today they are expected to have a word to say in their
own treatment and to actively express their opinions about the services that they use. Indeed, giving the client
such an active role is a central ideal and of value in itself. However, prior research has noted that there is a
gap between the ideal and practice. Social and health care professionals appreciate client involvement but may
simultaneously be hesitant about adopting it as their guiding work practice. Some professionals feel that equal-
ized power relations with active clients threaten their professional competence and the boundaries between
the professional and the client. From this perspective, social and healthcare professionals may sometimes ex-
perience their encounters with clients as interactionally troublesome.
In this presentation, we aim to investigate the contradicting views between the ideal and practice in social
and health care professionals’ narratives about interactionally troublesome exchanges with their clients. The
data come from 14 audio-recorded thematic interviews with social and health care professionals working in
municipal health organizations in Finland. By utilizing Bamberg’s narrative positioning analysis, we ask how
the client’s role is constructed in these narratives, and how it is constructed in relation to the agentic roles the
professionals assign to themselves.
We found that the social and health care professionals’ experiences of interactionally troublesome exchanges
with their clients were consistently related to the professionals’ evaluations of clients along a continuum of their
activity versus passivity in the service encounters. Clients’ active participation was often seen as a straining dis-
turbance that required the professionals’ interactional competence to be resolved. The clients’ passiveness was
needed to smoothen out the service encounter, but it was also experienced as problematic. If the passiveness
was considered to be caused by the client’s illness and difficult life-experience, the professionals saw the pas-
siveness as an interactional problem, and explored the ways in which they could reactivate the client in the
service-process. If, however, the passivity was explained as being due to the client’s attitude, the professionals
cast themselves as unable to do anything to help the client. In the presentation, we show how the professionals
in and through the narratives construct, adopt and contest moral obligations of an active client who should not
“be laying around” but be motivated to actively participate in their services. We also show how the profession-
als allocate division of responsibilities between clients and themselves in mobilizing, and restricting, the clients’
activeness.

555
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The prosodic construction of inevitability of gender-based


intergroup discrimination

Panel contribution

Dr. Melisa Stevanovic 1 , Mr. Henri Nevalainen 1 , Dr. Minna Leinonen 1 , Ms. Annika Valtonen 1 , Dr.
Elina Weiste 2
1. Tampere University, 2. Finnish Institute of Occupational Health

Discrimination is a deeply hurtful and widespread phenomenon in human social life, argued to be rooted in the
fundamental psychological disposition of humans to categorize and differentiate between in-group and out-
group members. While discrimination based on intergroup differences may be gender-neutral, it sometimes
overlaps with, and becomes strengthened by, considerations of gender. Gender-based intergroup discrimina-
tion and the severe limitations it constitutes to women’s freedom and capacity to obtain social recognition is
common across cultures. This commonality of the problem only increases its severity. However, the paradoxi-
cal consequence of the commonality of the problem involves people’s tendency to normalize it. The idea of such
discrimination thus being inevitable has consequences for the ways in which people can tell other people about
their experiences of thereof.
Problematic social experiences have been discussed in many conversation-analytic studies on complaints.
These studies have shown that complaining is a delicate activity, which necessitates careful management of
the degree of self that the teller invests in the complaint, as a complaint may easily cast them in a negative light.
Therefore, complainants commonly work to distance themselves from the negative dispositional identities of a
moaner, whiner, or an otherwise irrational and overly emotional person. Such distancing may become partic-
ularly relevant when the topic of the complaint is about a very common discriminatory behavior, which may
hardly be considered as “news” to anyone.
In this paper, we analyze accounts of gender-based intergroup discrimination. Drawing on a data set of 11 video-
recorded theme-based individual interviews (900 min in total), collected from December 2021 to July 2022 in
Finland, we investigate the ways in which the speakers account for the events in which they experienced having
been discriminated by their gender. We analyze the prosodic realization of these event-references, focusing
specifically on those in which the speaker deploys a flat-stylized pitch contour with a relatively high tone on an
unstressed syllable.
In line with previous conversation-analytic research on Finnish prosody, we show how the pitch contour can
be used to mark the information conveyed in the utterance as routine for the speaker—that is, as something
that is “no news” to anyone or as something like a destiny that one simply needs to endure. The stylization un-
derlines the ritual nature of the utterance, which allows the speaker to distance from it. At the same time, the
flat pitch span conveys a notable lack of enthusiasm in what is being said. Here, we show how these prosodic
displays of fatalistic emotional stance serve the construction of inevitability of gender-based intergroup dis-
crimination, allowing speakers to tell stories about their problematic experiences—their typical precondition,
characteristics, and consequences—in a morally unproblematic way. However, the paradoxical consequence of
these displays is that, in underlining the lack of newsworthiness of the problem of discrimination, the speaker
implicitly undermines the need to act against it.

556
Intergenerational
encounters and old age
(organized by Kaarina
Hippi, Camilla Lindholm)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Does Age Influence Intergenerational Interaction?


Experiences from the UnVergessen Project

Panel contribution

Prof. Katrin Karl 1 , Mrs. Aldona Rzitki 1


1. University of Bern

Age is a complex construct that includes numerical, biological, social, and interactive characteristics
(Fiehler/Thimm 2007). Based on these characteristics, we perceive another person’s age, as well as our own.
What are the implications of this for the interactions among people who differ according to some or all of these
characteristics?
This is the primary research question, which is discussed with the help of the experiences from the long-standing
intergenerational project UnVergessen (UnForgotten). In this project, couples are formed consisting of a student
and an older person, usually in need of care. The couples meet over several months and exchange ideas on a
variety of topics. A sub-project, called Letters against Loneliness, transfers the same personal exchange between
representatives of two generations to the written space.
During the project, different data are collected:
1) General (biographical) data on the participants.
2) Excerpts from the conversations (audio recordings of the couples’ free conversations) or letters.
3) Testimonies of the student’s reflection (written and oral reports).
In our talk, we will present five of these partly multilingual couples and their data and evaluate them from
different perspectives and with the help of different methods:

• Sociolinguistic analysis: presentation of the linguistic context of the persons involved (speaker biogra-
phies, including multilingualism) and classification of numerical and biological age.
• Discourse or text analysis: evaluation of conversation recordings or letters and elaboration of passages
in which certain facets of age play a role in the interaction, either explicitly or implicitly.
• Qualitative content analysis: evaluation of the written and oral reflections regarding students’ percep-
tion of age differences and their influence on the level of the relationship.

With the help of these results, we will discuss which facets of age are especially focused on and if and how they
influence intergenerational interaction. Finally, we ask: Can a feeling of belonging arise in intergenerational
exchange despite perceived differences? After considering the individual specificities, the average result is that
differences are perceived, but they are not a hindrance to the constitution of the relationship. Rather, they serve
to rethink and refine the concept of age.
Fiehler, R., Thimm, C. (2003): Sprache und Kommunikation im Alter. Radolfzell: Verlag für Gesprächsforschung.

558
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Generations through time: Investigating ‘ageing talk’ via


re-interviewing

Panel contribution

Dr. Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak 1


1. Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań

As Nikander (2009) has demonstrated, a qualitative approach to discourse analysis can successfully capture
continuity and change in language and in life. The aim of our long-term research has been to investigate ‘ageing
talk’ over the life span, specifically the way language constructs life(time) and how it is used to express attitudes
to growing older at different life-stage points.
This study presents interactions, 15 years apart, between members of two generations across time via a
young(er) interviewer re-interviewing (Gerstenberg 2015; Andrews 2018) older interlocutors. Polish partici-
pants (aged 65-76 in 2006 and 80-91 in 2021-22) discussed “being old” with the same interviewer (in his early
twenties for the first interviews and mid-thirties for the second). Additionally, the original interviewer was
interviewed by a second researcher about his experiences of travelling through life side by side with others.
The interviews were then qualitatively analysed, with the aim to uncover the discursive patterns and strategies
used to mark:

• participants’ responses to their own passing to another life stage


• older adults’ constructing their lifetimes, fine-grading the later part of life, in particular, their construct-
ing the difference between young-old and old-old
• younger interviewer’s expressing attitudes to ageing through the lens of his own growing old(er).

Both parties, now friends, refer to their own and each other’s lives. They share their (changing) perception
of ageing, both having experienced growing older themselves and having witnessed each other’s ageing. They
refer to their previous encounter as the interviewer introduces excerpts from earlier conversations. Specifically,
late life seniors address their earlier assessments of what it takes to be old (in Poland); they sympathize with
their younger selves, but are critical of their attitudes.
In both rounds of interviews, participants were observed to position and re-position themselves in order to
manage their aged selves vis-à-vis their age peers and other generations (children, parents), and in the context
of social expectations (Gullette 2004), i.e. the Polish context of growing social awareness of societal ageing
(Leszko et al. 2015), yet with ageism rarely being challenged (cf. Gorman 2021).
The analysis of the initial round of interviews showed interviewees’ flexible attitudes to age categorisation,
claiming and, at the same time, disclaiming age categories. Speakers were also ready to collaborate with the
(younger) interviewer to recognize common ground (e.g. events shared). The comparison with re-interviews re-
vealed interlocutors’ ability to understand the process of ageing from multiple viewpoints and positions (Biggs
and Lowenstein 2011). Again, much of the shared understanding was achieved interactionally (and collabora-
tively).
The interviews revealed the expected redefining of speakers’ understanding of life experience and their per-
ception of life time as well as relations between generations (cf. “[understanding] on the basis of a newly gained
complexity and changed coherence – realization in hindsight” Pawelczyk and Graf 2020). Methodologically, the
conclusions address the idea of using parts of previously recorded interviews as input in a follow-up study and
the usefulness of re-interviewing as a research approach in longitudinal studies.
Keywords: ageing, discourse, constructing life(time), interaction, re-interviewing

559
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intergenerational encounters and multilingual resources in


the talk of older adults

Panel contribution

Prof. Boglárka Straszer 1 , Dr. Kaarina Hippi 2


1. Dalarna University, 2. Tampere University / University of Helsinki

The aim of this presentation is to discuss how older adults construct meanings and identities when they describe
their changing repertoires and language choices in the past and present with their own parents and children
and how they reflect on the transmission of languages to younger generations.
Ethnolinguistic analyses are done on semi-structured in-depth interviews with linguistic biographies in two
datasets. In the first dataset, there are six interviews (á 46-87 minutes long) among Swedish- and Finnish-
Hungarians elderly. All of them had moved to Sweden respectively Finland as adults directly from Hungary.
The three Swedish Hungarian informants (68-83 years old) have a refugee background (during the year 1956)
and they moved to Sweden with a Hungarian speaking spouse. The another three informants (59-65 years old)
moved to Finland because of marriage with Finnish-speaking partner. In the second dataset, there are six inter-
views from a project A Hundred Finnish linguistic life stories, in which there are interviewees of other linguistic
minorities residing in Finland (70–104 years old). Three of them represent the so called old minorities and three
another official language group in Finland, Swedish Finns. Interviews were about 1 hour each.
In both of the datasets, there are questions on interviewees’ relationship to different languages in their life and
their language attitudes. Despite slight differences, these datasets offer an interesting possibility to compare and
discuss language use between generations. We explore the subjectively expressed experiences of languages in
relation to the societal situation and the linguistic biographies (cf. Busch, 2017) that can be seen as social and
cultural itineraries (Blommaert & Backus, 2013). The descriptions comprise norms and expectations of the
interviewees. In addition, we pay attention to language political and language ideological changes in societies,
as in line with Busch (2017) we regard linguistic repertoire reflecting linguistic practices that are bound to a
certain time and place.
We find personal descriptions among the interviewees when they talk about the role of heritage language
versus majority language and other linguistic resources in their family. The Hungarian older adults seem to
have a more multilingual repertoire than their grandchildren. All of the Hungarians speak Hungarian with
their children but they express that the language choice with the grandchildren generation depends on the
choices of the children generation. In case of minority speakers in Finland, the picture is more complicated, and
thus, we end up comparing the role of individual choice and status of the language in respective (micro)society.
The heritage language is sometimes emotionally most significant but sometimes pragmatic reasons override
the use of it.

Reference
Blommaert, J. & Backus, A. (2013). Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In de Saint-Georges, I. & Weber,
J.-J. (Eds.), Multilingualism and Multimodality: Current Challenges for Educational Studies (pp. 11–32). Springer,
Rotterdam.
Busch, B. (2017). Biographical approaches to research in multilingual settings. Exploring linguistic repertoires.
In Martin-Jones, M. & Martin, D. (Eds.), Researching multilingualism. Critical and ethnographic approaches (pp.
46–59). Routledge, London.

560
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Perceptions of language use and generational differences


between young and old

Panel contribution

Dr. Kaarina Hippi 1 , Prof. Hanna Lappalainen 2


1. Tampere University / University of Helsinki, 2. University of Eastern Finland

Our paper discusses perceptions of age in intergenerational interactions. We focus on the perceptions that older
adults have of the language used by young, and the views young people express of the language used by old. We
explore how language use between generations is conceptualized, and which opinions are explicitly mentioned,
but we also pay attention to how these perceptions are negotiated in interviews.
Our main data come from a project called A Hundred Finnish linguistic life stories. The data for this study consist
of 60 interviews. Half of the interviewees were born in 1913–1948 and another half in 1990–2011. We focus on
their views on intergenerational communication and differences they have noticed in the language use between
young and old. As a complementary data, we use notes written by students on the basis of interviews they
have conducted on the topic. We approach the data in the sociolinguistic framework, identifying the parts in
interview data where intergenerational communication is discussed and then analysing the topics discursively,
as part of interview interaction (Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain 2017). The written comments of the students are
classified using qualitative content analysis.
On the basis of our findings, many interviewees identify clear differences between age groups and express also
emotions concerning the language use of old and young. First of all, addressing older people by using T or V
forms is a topic that is frequently commented. It proves to be a complicated question in Finland, as the age is
most prominent factor in choosing an address form, but personal preferences vary: some older adults value
more distant addressing while others prefer informal forms also in institutional encounters. Secondly, other
perceptions on the differences of the language use are described. For instance, lexical choices of the young
generation are frequently commented on, and in particular, these choices are connected to the digitalization
and social media. Older adults find this kind of language difficult to understand. In addition, the dialect use and
tempo of the speech are issues that are mentioned as generational issues. However, many informants express
reservations to their comments that show the multifaceted nature of the topic and that informants do not only
circulate stereotypes but recognize individual variation.
Our study offers new insights into the questions of language use and ageing. It focuses on people who are not un-
der institutional care, and in addition to obvious stereotypical remarks, it sheds light on how these perceptions
are presented and dismantles the perception of older adults as a homogeneous group.
Reference
Liebscher, G. & Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2017). Contextualizing language attitudes. An
interactional perspective. Language and Linguistics Compass 11(9), 1–14.

561
Internet memes of
everyday life (organized
by Loukia Lindholm,
Tuija Virtanen)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A semio-pragmatic analysis of the meme “El Risitas”: a


trajectory from laughter to politics

Panel contribution

Dr. Michel Marcoccia 1


1. University of Technology of Troyes

In the early 2000’s, Juan Joya Borja, known by the pseudonym of El Risitas (the laughter), tells jokes in a TV
program hosted by Jesus Quintero, in the local Andalusian television channel Canal Sur. El Risitas is the embod-
iment of an “ordinary” man, rather socially disadvantaged, poorly educated and expressing a form of common
humor. A joke posted on YouTube in 2007 was a big hit: El Risitas tells a funny story to Jesus Quintero (whom
he calls “Issou”), interrupted by contagious laughter. This video has been viewed more than a million times,
has been the subject of numerous variations and become an emblematic meme of internet culture since 2015.
Thus, El Risitas can be seen as the memefication of an ordinary man.
In France, El Risitas is very popular in the very frequented discussion forums of the Jeuxvideo.com website, in
particular “Blabla 18-25 ans”, whose members produce many diversions of the image of the laugher: the memes
of El Risitas and the word “Issou” become a sign of recognition for the core members of this forum.
This study will focus on the use of El Risitas in this forum and will address three aspects. First, a semioprag-
matic analysis of the meme allows us to address the following questions: what forms (visual or scripto-visual
language)? What type of propagation: replication or variation (Paveau, 2017)? What functions: expressing
emotions, especially laughter and joy (Danesi 2017), enacting collective identities (Yus, 2018), etc.
This analysis highlights the polysemic nature of the meme (Jost, 2022) and its role in the building of a community,
based on cultural references shared in the group but incomprehensible outside the group.
A dialogic analysis will allow us to define the function of the meme in the interactional dynamics of discussions.
Does it appear in messages opening sequences or as a reaction meme? What types of reaction does it express
and what types of reaction does it elicit?
Finally, this study shows the way the meme becomes a political object. Like “Pepe The Frog” in the USA, El
Risitas is used in France by extreme-right Internet users to express their support for a set of extremist, racist,
anti-feminist or homophobic opinions. The meme then becomes a means of redefining the community as a
political community; it makes it possible to enter into public debate and constitutes a new form of political
commitment (Wagener, 2021).
M. Danesi, 2017. The Semiotics of Emoji, London, Bloomsbury Academic.
F. Jost, 2022. Est-ce que tu mèmes ? De la parodie à la pandémie numérique, Paris, CNRS Editions.
M.-A. Paveau, 2017. L’analyse du discours numérique. Dictionnaire des formes et des pratiques, Paris, Hermann.
Wagener, 2022. Mèmologie. Théorie postdigitale des mèmes, Grenoble, UGA.
F. Yus, 2018. Identity-related issues in meme communication. Internet Pragmatics 1(1):113-133

563
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Beyond bonding icons: Memes in interactional sequences in


digital communities of practice

Panel contribution

Dr. Ying Tong 1 , Prof. Chaoqun Xie 2


1. Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, 2. Zhejiang International Studies University

Existing research on memes has pointed out their prevalence in identity negotiation and community-building
(e.g., Yus 2018; Wiggin 2019; Newton et al. 2022), apart from being humorous literacy practice (e.g., Knobel &
Lankshear, 2007, Lewis, 2012, cf. Dynel 2021). Yet limited attention has been paid to memetic practices within
interactional sequences, i.e., How are memes actually employed in everyday communication to facilitate discur-
sive exchanges? What role do they play in initiating, facilitating, ending digital conversations, strengthening,
and mitigating the illocutionary force of utterances within? For the present study, internet memes, in the form
of animated GIFs as well as image macros, are examined as utterances embedded in the unfolding task-based
interactions that may further, counter, or re-direct a discourse. Situated within the digital communities of prac-
tice (henceforth DCoP), this study focuses on the way community members practice stance imitation through
memes deployment and their uptakes, which will be analyzed, following Shifman (2013), in terms of partici-
pation structures, keying, and communicative functions. Given that different platforms may be perceived as
evoking different feelings and flavours, DCoP members interacting on different platforms may engage memes
in variable ways. At the same time, one member of a particular DCoP may actively engage in other DCsoP that
are equally task oriented. As such, this study on meme roles in discourse development attempts to address the
following issues:
1) In what interactional sequences are internet memes used?
2) How do meme-framed digital utterances contribute to task and identity negotiations?
3) To what extent would digital affordances promote/prohibit the use of (particular) internet memes from an
emic perspective?
By focusing on five DCoP members and drawing on their meme practices from more than one DCoP they belong
to, the study follows the virtual ethnography for data collection (starting from May 2022 and ending in March
2023), and CA-informed analysis for data interpretation. The data triangulation through in-depth individual and
group interviews (scheduled in March and May 2023) allows first-order conceptualization of memetic practices
to inform second-order theorization on memefied ways of life. The study is expected to contribute to the move
of excavating the wealth out of the coupling of memes and digital communication.

564
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From me to you: building relatability in academic Tumblr


posts

Panel contribution

Dr. Celia Schneebeli 1


1. University of Burgundy / Centre Interlangues

Tumblr is a “microblogging and a social networking site” that “enables users to post and share a variety of
different types of media (text, photos, videos, GIFs) on their individual blogs” (Vasquez 2019: 87). It hosts a few
popular blogs where users share their experiences of academic and / or PhD life thanks to posts combining a
caption describing a situation and a GIF mirroring the situation in question. In this contribution, I explore how
posters construct relatability in such posts. The data mostly originates in one particular Tumblr blog, PhD in
Gifs!, including content posted since January 2020 .
Building up on previous research about GIF use, humour online and Tumblr posts, the study looks at four po-
tential (mutually inclusive) factors of relatability:
-form of caption. The posts deal with situations appealing to common experiences shared by the expected audi-
ence of the blog . Their captions often use a first person singular, but a large portion also go for a second person
singular, which directly projects the poster’s experience on the receiver, be it quite general or very specific.
-content of caption. Most posts in the dataset can be described as self-defeating while only a minority is self-
enhancing: they recount what can be vaguely called “negative” experiences rather than “positive” experience.
This self-defeating style of humour has been found to be the most viral (Taecharungroj & Nueangjamnong 2015).
-image choice. GIFs enable users to illustrate the recounted experience with scenes from famous pictures, car-
toons, series, or popular figures from the fictional and real world. As Miltner and Highfield write, “The selection
and presentation of GIFs are also a performance of cultural knowledge. The GIF is not just a proxy for the in-
dividual’s particular affective or emotional state, but an illustration of the user’s knowledge of a certain text or
cultural conversation” (Miltner and Highfield 2017: 6-7). In selecting a GIF, users may then make a statement
about themselves while creating a sense of belonging with other users who are familiar with the same culture
the GIF comes from.
-interaction between caption and illustration. Posts often rely on tropes (metaphor, hyperbole, irony), which
dramatize the rather banal experiences recounted in the captions. Incongruous associations (Dynel 2009), dis-
crepancy between caption and GIF, are the main source of humour and comic relief in the posts.
The study takes a broad discursive approach to the analysis of the posts, considering traditional linguistic mate-
rial (linguistic markers used in the caption) and semiotic features (non-linguistic communication markers used
in the GIFs) within the broader perspective of posting as a social practice.
Dynel, M. (2009). Creative Metaphor is a Birthday Cake: Metaphor as the Source of Humour. Metaphorik.de 17.
Miltner, K. and Highfield, T. (2017). Never Gonna Gif You Up: analyzing the Cultural Significance of the
Animated GIF. Social Media + Society.

Taecharungroj, V. and Nueangjamnong, P. (2015). Humour 2.0: Styles and Types of Humour and Virality of
Memes on Facebook. Journal of Creative Communications 10(3).
Vasquez, C. (2019). Language, Creativity and Humour Online. London: Routledge.

565
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Internet memes in China: multimodal creativity in a


translocal discourse system

Panel contribution

Dr. Freek Olaf de Groot 1 , Ms. Zhuoli Gao 2


1. University of Kurdistan Hewler, 2. University of Pennsylvania

This paper reports on the translocal ludic internet meme practices of a student community at a private uni-
versity in China with the aim to present a different perspective on the role that internet memes play as part of
digital practices. Internet memes are part of a genre of ludic multimodal digital practices and their production
involves multiple processes of multimodal digital remixing (Jones and Hafner, 2021), entextualization (Blom-
maert, 2005; Bauman and Briggs, 1990) and resemiotization (Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Iedema, 2003). Internet
memes are generally produced and shared within a particular genre or across or within various cultural, na-
tional and linguistic boundaries. In addition, they are often studied as independently operating artifacts ‘going
viral’ and ascribed a certain degree of agency without taking into account the discourse system (Scollon, Scol-
lon and Jones, 2012) they are shared within. This study takes a social semiotic (Kress, 1996, 2009) and Mediated
Discourse Analysis approach (Scollon, 2001; Scollon and Scollon, 2004; Norris and Jones, 2005) to understand
the processes of creation of these memes, the meaning potential these memes create when used in social in-
teraction, and how this meaning potential and use result in these memes being unique to a distinct discourse
system. The data was collected using a form of digital ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2015). The researchers
were participants and members of discourse system within which these memes were produced and used. The
memes were collected and translated by a native speaker of Mandarin who is also a member of the discourse
system. This enabled us to understand the translations and meanings of the memes within the context of the
discourse trajectories leading up to these moments of creation. These trajectories are essential to understand-
ing the meaning potential of these memes as they are used in digital communication among members of the
discourse system. The memes studied in the current paper are unique in two ways. First, they combine both
local and global visual elements deploying both Chinese and English texts and effectively forge semiotic trajecto-
ries between highly localized digital meme practices and more global mainstream meme practices. Second, the
practices of producing, sharing and remixing these memes are exclusively situated and bounded by a distinct
discourse system. Based on our findings, we conclude that the internet memes analyzed as part of this study
are multimodal ensembles that create a meaning potential that is unique to the discourse system of a student
community. In addition, these signs perform an important function in mediating a wide range of ludic digital
literacy practices within this discourse system.

566
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal creativity, narrativity, and daily life in the


“Breaking things down” meme

Panel contribution

Dr. Loukia Lindholm 1


1. Åbo Akademi

Adding to recent work on multimodal creativity and humor in internet memes (e.g., Dynel, 2020; Piata, 2020;
Vásquez & Aslan, 2021), this paper focuses on the memetic construction and mediation of everyday, common-
place experiences by examining a set of image macro memes known as “Breaking things down” or “Sections
of”. This meme format features an up-close image of an object labeled in sections, with each section marked off
by curly or square brackets. Meme creators use the objects depicted in these image macros as visual references
for experiences of everyday activities (e.g., eating and drinking, driving, going shopping, reading, using social
media), which they comment on and typically–though not always–cast in a humorous light in the labeled sec-
tions. The dataset comprises a sample of 200 “Breaking things down”/“Sections of” memes collected from three
different social media platforms. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis (e.g., Jewitt, 2013) and cyberprag-
matic approaches to memes (e.g., Yus, 2018), the analysis focuses on how the visual and verbal components in
the multimodal ensembles under investigation interact to articulate and comment on personal experiences of
everyday activities. The study shows how meme creators use the brackets as a creative semiotic resource for
narrativization to organize labeled sections in a temporal frame, show cause-effect relationships, and indicate
contrasting stances that generate humorous meanings. The analysis also demonstrates how meme creators es-
tablish common ground and shared identities through creative iterations of the same image macros in local
discourse contexts, such as Twitter threads.
References
Dynel, M. (2020). COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks. Discourse
& Society, 32(2):175-195.
Jewitt, Carey. 2013. Multimodal methods for researching digital technologies. In S. Price, C. Jewitt & B. Brown
(Eds.), SAGE handbook of digital technology research (pp.250-265). London: Sage.
Piata, A. (2020). Stylistic humor across modalities: The case of Classical Art Memes. Internet Pragmatics,
3(2):174-201.
Vásquez, C. & Aslan, E. (2021). “Cats be outside, how about meow”: Multimodal humor and creativity in an
internet meme. Journal of Pragmatics, 171.
Yus, F. (2018). Multimodality in memes: A cyberpragmatic approach. In P. Bou-Franch & P.Carcés-Conejos
Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp.105-132). Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan.

567
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Language Play and Social Indexicality of Internet Memes:


An Analysis from Turkish, English, and Bilingual Memes

Panel contribution

Mr. Ümit Can Tunçer 1 , Dr. Didar Akar 1


1. Bogazici University

The phenomenon of Internet memes has been a point of interest for many communications studies (Shifman,
2014; Wiggins 2019). Recently, this phenomenon has caught the attention of scholars of linguistics as well, es-
pecially in the domain of pragmatics (Xie, 2020, 2022). Vasquez & Aslan (2021) categorizes the humor in memes
under three categories which are voicing, wordplay, and register humor. The works such as Yus (2016, 2021)
approach a subgroup of memes (image-macro memes) in the framework of incongruity-resolution, treating
them similar to verbal jokes but with visual elements to either aid or complement the meaning. Some stud-
ies in sociolinguistics (George, 2020) have also recognized Internet memes as significant facilitators of social
meaning and interaction. However, considering the vast diversity of memes, these frameworks remain inade-
quate for capturing the role of language in memes in terms of social meaning and humor. This study builds on
these frameworks by adding additional categories based on examinations of a dataset of Turkish, bilingual, and
English memes (n=500) collected from various social media platforms. These new categories are determined
by adopting Vasquez & Aslan’s (2021) three categories and expanding them into a total of eight categories by
adding labeling, framing, foreign effect, distorted use of language, and narration. These additional categories are
used to classify the language play, code-mixing, written narrative, and the relation of visuals and text inside
Internet memes. While these categories together provide a broader tool to analyze Internet memes, humor and
meaning achieved in them can be a result of a complex social structure of meaning and interaction. Words and
phrases used in memes can have multiple distinct social meanings available only to their specific communities
and subgroups via indexes. Therefore, this study also utilizes the framework of indexicality (Peirce, 1935) as it
was used in sociolinguistic studies (Ochs, 1992; George, 2020) to further explain the source of humor and mean-
ing in Internet memes. With the help of concepts such as indexical order (Silverstein, 2003) and indexical field
(Eckert, 2008), the study shows the meaning-making process of memes, by exploring the layers of meaning and
identity construction from the language and imagery used in memes. Overall, this study aims to provide an
analysis of the language, social meaning, and humor in Internet memes. Building on what is already available
in the newly emerging literature, it presents a set of tools that can capture the meaning and humor within the
domains of pragmatics and sociolinguistics.

568
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What can visual aphorisms tell us about multimodal internet


memes?

Panel contribution

Ms. Kukka-Maaria Wessman 1


1. University of Turku

Aphorisms – short statements containing a truth of general import –circulate through speech and writing, and
they have been combined with pictures in postcards and decorative paintings. Thus, aphorisms are memes of
everyday life; cultural ideas spread by imitation (Blackmore 1999). The internet speeds the circulation of memes
(Shifman 2014), and has also transformed the way people share and create visual aphorisms on social media.
This paper explores online aphorisms as multimodal internet memes. Focusing on visual aphorisms in a Finnish
Facebook group, I examine collective meaning-making and stance-taking from the perspective of Construction
Grammar. The research questions addressed are the following:

1. How are the aphorisms in the data constructed?


2. What is the role of the visual mode in visual aphorisms in this group?
3. What are the communicative functions of visual aphorisms within the group?

The data consist of a collection of online aphorisms from a Finnish Facebook group meant for sharing bad or
shallow aphorisms called Paskat teepussiaforismit eli kuinka lakkasin rakastamasta ja opin vihaamaan ’shitty
tea bag aphorisms or how I stopped loving and learned to hate’, which at the time of data collection had 16 000
members.
The visual aphorisms comprise a textual and a visual mode. The text is an aphorism, either a well-known
quote or one made up by the creator of the visual aphorism. Arguably, the text is completely understandable
without the image in most of the visual aphorisms under investigation. This differentiates the visual aphorisms
from other multimodal internet memes, such as image macros, where the image is often an integral part of the
linguistic construction (see e.g. Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017). Therefore, these visual aphorisms challenge
our understanding of multimodal internet memes.
Visual aphorisms are multimodal, for two reasons. First, a difference in form always entails a difference in
meaning (Langacker 1987); adding a mode thus affects the meaning. Second, it is speculated that pictures are
preferred to plain text by Facebook algorithms. Marketing professionals encourage users to add pictures to
posts to boost engagement, which makes multimodality intrinsically important (Li & Lie 2020).
The role of the image varies across the visual aphorisms. In some the image is a plain color background, whereas
in others it contributes to the stance of the aphorism. The study shows that most visual aphorisms shared to
the group originally contain an encouraging stance, which is reversed and ridiculed in the context of the group.
The visual aphorisms may not have been originally intended as amusing, but by adding a caption and sharing
them with the group, the members reframe the aphorisms with a humorous stance.
References
Blackmore, Susan 1999: The Meme Machine. OUP.
Dancygier, Barbara & Vandelanotte, Lieven 2017: Internet memes as multimodal constructions. Cognitive Lin-
guistics 28(3): 565–98.
Langacker, Ronald1987: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford University Press.
Li, Yiyi & Xie, Ying 2020: Is a picture worth a thousand words? Journal of Marketing Research 57(1).
Shifman, Limor 2014: Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press.

569
It’s not what you are like,
it’s what you like:
Appraisal, stance and
evaluation in online
fandom (organized by
Thomas Messerli, Miriam
Locher)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How K-wave Fandoms Create Language that is Between and


Beyond Korean and English

Panel contribution

Prof. Jieun Kiaer 1


1. University of Oxford

This paper focuses on the agentive role of K-pop, K-drama, and K-film’s fandoms in the creation of a language
that is between and beyond Korean and English. Over the last two decades, Hallyu (the Korean Wave) has swept
across the globe, gaining global fame in recent years. K-dramas, K-films, and K-pop now have fandoms made
up of young people all over the world. These fans take to Twitter to discuss their favourite K-content, the most
famous of which includes Parasite (2019), Squid Game (2021), and an array of BTS’ songs. In 2021, #Kpoptwitter
amassed 7.8 billion tweets. K-fans have become so numerous and active on Twitter that the platform now has a
dedicated Global K-pop and K-content Partnerships team. This paper is written in collaboration with this team
at Twitter.
As K-fans discuss Hallyu content in online spaces, they employ translanguaging. English is the lingua franca
of social media, and so fans innovatively mix Korean and English together, regardless of the border between
the two languages. Fans use translanguaging to go back and forth between the two languages, flexibly and
creatively interweaving various linguistic features (Garcia & Li, 2014). K-fans absorb Korean words through K-
content. They use these words on social media so often that traditional linguistic authorities have started to pay
attention. In 2021, the Oxford English Dictionary added 26 Korean words because the words were being used
so often online. Fans often romanise Korean words as they perceive, picking spellings that look most friendly
to the eye of the English speaker. These words are not limited to verbal expressions. The finger heart is now
a commonly recognised gesture amongst the younger generations, and it was added to the emoji keyboard in
2021. Thus, K-fans innovatively create translingual expressions (Kiaer, 2018).
K-fans fiercely debate the accuracy of translations in online spaces. They scrutinise subtitles and translations
of their favourite K-content. For example, Squid Game’s translation of address terms caused much debate on
Twitter. K-fans often create their own translations. These fans are known as fandom translators. They actively
engage in creating the language and culture of the K-wave, meaning that the K-wave is a grassroots linguistic
phenomenon.
Overall, this talk will explore how K-fans are a transnational, transcultural, and translingual body. They en-
gage in matters of nationality, culture, and language without limitations from nation-state borders. K-fans’
impact now goes beyond being loving fans, and extends into linguistic developments. They actively construct
the meaning of Hallyu and the significance that it has in the world. They have changed the K- in the K-wave to
mean something bigger than ‘Korean’. K-ness is now a phenomenon that is being shaped globally.
References
García O., Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging and Education. In: Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Edu-
cation. Palgrave Pivot, London.
Kiaer, J. (2018) Translingual words an East Asian lexical encounter with English. London.
Laffan, Derek A. “Positive Psychosocial Outcomes and Fanship in K-Pop Fans: A Social Identity Theory Perspec-
tive.” Psychological Reports 124, no. 5 (October 2021): 2272–85.

571
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stancetaking by book bloggers in public and private:


Investment in relation to audience

Panel contribution

Ms. Jenia Yudytska 1


1. University of Hamburg

This paper presents an investigation of stancetaking by a small group of ‘book bloggers’ within the sci-fi and
fantasy book fandom. Book bloggers are fans who post reviews and recommendations of books on their own
websites and/or across social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. They have complex identities
within their communities. To some extent, they are simply passionate fans, sharing their thoughts on books,
authors, and the hobby of reading more generally. However, as a blog gains popularity, they typically develop
connections with publishers and authors, e.g., receiving free books in exchange for ‘an honest review’. Book
bloggers are thus also a semi-formal part of the marketing branch of the publishing industry, acting as influ-
encers on its behalf (cf. Steiner, 2010).
Drawing on Kiesling’s notions of investment as a dimension of stance (2020), this paper investigates the same
book bloggers’ stancetaking in public and private, focusing on their use of discourse markers to vary their
degree of investment. Investment refers to how committed the speaker is, that is, the extent to which they
commit to their evaluation of a stance object. Using hedges, boosters, and other linguistic cues, the speaker can
lower or heighten the strength of positive and negative evaluations. I examine to what extent a difference in
audience leads to a difference in commitment for the book bloggers: mitigating negative reviews in public or
alternatively boosting a positive evaluation while promoting a book on behalf of publishers, compared to the
way they express the evaluation in private.
The analysis is two-fold: a corpus study comparing the frequency of hedges and boosters across two platforms,
followed by a small-scale case study of the bloggers discussing the same book in public and private. The corpus
used comprises ca. 50,000 messages across the platforms Discord and Twitter, collected from a small group of
voluntary participants; they all use both platforms to interact with each other and others in the community. The
bloggers’ Discord server is small and private, consisting of only several dozen close-knit friends. However, on
Twitter, they fall into the category of micro-influencers, promoting books to several hundred/thousand follow-
ers. Thus, while on Discord, they can discuss books freely as fans, on Twitter, they must decide more carefully
what and how to promote or critique in order to maintain their connections within the publishing industry,
while nevertheless maintaining their integrity as honest reviewers. Comparing their practices in public and
private allows a thorough analysis of how book bloggers navigate the sometimes-conflicting identities of fan,
critic, and influencer.
Kiesling, S.F. (2020). Investment in a model of stancetaking: I mean and just sayin’. Language Sciences, 82, 1-15.
Steiner, A. (2010). Personal readings and public texts: Book blogs and online writing about literature. Culture
Unbound, 2, 471–494.

572
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The discursive construction of online fandom: Stancetaking in


Chinese e-commerce live streaming interactions

Panel contribution

Mr. Jialiang Chen 1 , Dr. Ping Liu 1


1. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Fandom has become a social and cultural phenomenon in the digital era, especially in e-commerce live-
streaming discourse. This study explores how Chinese livestream shopping celebrities present a particular
‘public private self’ through their interactional stance with their fans. To address this question, we draw on
a self-built corpus comprising 100 h of transcribed texts from live streaming interactions on top Chinese so-
cial media platforms Taobao and Douyin. After identifying stance expressions in the corpus (cf. Fuoli, 2018),
we find that Chinese livestream shopping celebrities constantly disclose their actual interior state through epis-
temic, evaluative, and affective stances. These stance expressions are used to dynamically construct and display
preferred celebrity identities based on ongoing interactions and foster a strong feeling of connection and em-
pathy with their fans. The present study is expected to enlarge our understanding of stance-taking in Chinese
e-commence live-streaming interactions and provide insights into the mechanism of the discursive construction
of online fandom in the digital era.

573
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘It just had a sneaky vibe is all’: Stancetaking and the


collective negotiation of advertising norms in YouTube
comment sections

Panel contribution

Ms. Olivia Droz-dit-Busset 1


1. University of Bern

Orienting to recent research on elite language work (Thurlow, 2020), this paper addresses the negotiation of
advertising norms on YouTube. As ‘new-generation’ copywriters, social media influencers strategically blend
commercial and social discourses in peer-to-peer recommendations (cf. Kelly-Holmes, 2016), and walk the fine
line of catering to both audiences and advertisers. As part of a larger project, this paper documents the expecta-
tions of an influential group of stakeholders in this exchange: audiences who actively contribute to YouTubers’
audience design efforts by leaving evaluative comments. Specifically, I analyse commenters’ stances towards
a contentious ad created by YouTuber Casey Neistat. The video in question elicited over 17,000 comments –
about double the usual number – of which a considerable amount pertains to the format of the ad featured
in the video. The 500 top-rated comments were sampled for analysis. Using a discourse analytical framework
developed by Droz-dit-Busset (2022), I explore how audiences use stances to (de)legitimise Neistat’s advertising
practices. I argue that, in doing so, they collectively create advertising norms for their community of practice.
My paper ends by considering the sociopragmatic implications of such controversial ‘participatory spectacles’
(Androutsopoulos 2010) and the rare moments in which audiences attempt to dictate rules for ‘correct’ social
media advertising.
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. (2010). Localizing the global on the participatory web. In N. Coupland (Ed), The
handbook of language and globalization (pp.203-231). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cameron, D. (2000). Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service
economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(3), pp.323-347.
Droz-dit-Busset, O. (2022). “So-called influencers”: Stancetaking and (de) legitimation in mediatized discourse
about social media influencers. Discourse, Context & Media, 49, 100629.
Kelly-Holmes, H. (2016). Digital advertising. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (Eds), The Routledge Handbook
of Language and Digital Communication (pp. 212–225). London: Routledge.
Thurlow, C. (Ed.) (2020). The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, Linguists and Other Language Workers. London:
Routledge.

574
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“OMG I ship them like crazy”: Acts of self-positioning through


evaluations in Korean TV-drama fan comments

Panel contribution

Prof. Miriam Locher 1 , Dr. Thomas Messerli 2


1. University of Basel, 2. Univers

On the online platform viki.com, fans of Korean TV drama series meet and use the affordances of the platform
to engage with each other and with the series they stream. We have previously explored how these fans orient
towards the community and the audiovisual artefacts they are engaging with, constructing common ground (e.g.
Kecskes, 2014: 151–175) and community in comments written primarily in English (as a Lingua Franca). While
scholars such as Richardson (2010), Androutsopoulos & Weidenhöffer (2015), Lee (2016) or Bednarek (2017)
work on fandom practices in diverse spaces such as reviews and social media affordances, we also build on our
previous research on fan-generated subtitles (Locher, 2020) and on comments that users post, so-called timed
comments (Messerli & Locher, 2021; Locher & Messerli, 2020), within the same streaming platform. We work
with KTACC, the “K-Drama Time Aligned Comment Corpus”, which is a corpus of 320,000 timed comments that
were written to exchange thoughts about 80 different K-Drama episodes. The timed comments, by being tied to
the video stream, create an effect of pseudo-synchronicity (Johnson, 2013) and thus of communal watching and
at the same time let many viewers contribute their thoughts and opinions to the K-Drama discourse.
Fans construct their own identity as viewers and community members in many different ways: They laugh
together; they develop shared understandings of the genre they are engaging with; they look for others with
shared common ground; they use Korean terms as jargon to position themselves as experts and to affiliate
with others even across linguistic borders; and not least of all they share evaluations and opinions about the
streamed K-drama episode and aspects within and outside of it. We have noticed such evaluative practices
when manually coding a subcorpus of KTACC exhaustively, e.g. discovering the importance that is given to the
physical appearance of actors, but also the actions of characters within the plot.
Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, we now ask how acts of evaluation contribute to the construction of
the Viki fandom. We systematically searched our corpus for documented and novel patterns of evaluation, ad-
dressing the objects and the polarity (positive/negative) of evaluation as well as their linguistic realization by
means of established general patterns (e.g. adjectives such as good, bad, amazing, cute, etc.) and more local,
genre-specific realisations (including e.g. evaluations initiated by omg and other acronyms, emojis, and expres-
sions like ship in the sense of ‘wanting someone to begin or continue a romantic relationship’, as in our title
“OMG I ship them like crazy” ).
By expressing what they like and dislike about the shows they are watching, Korean TV-drama fans perform
acts of motivational evaluation, establishing which aspects are worth to be foregrounded and collectively eval-
uated. They also position themselves relative to these evaluated aspects, primarily by means of adequation and
distinction. And they thus discursively construct their own identity as a fan community, as separate fan groups
and as individual fans, e.g. of particular plots, actors, and dramas (see Bucholtz & Hall, 2005).

575
Language aggression and
conflict in post-digital
societies (organized by
Pilar Garces-Conejos
Blitvich, Maria Sifianou)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Aggression, conflict and the interactional emergence of


discriminatory discourse in social media

Panel contribution

Prof. Stavros Assimakopoulos 1


1. University of Malta

As evidenced by the extensive literature in the field of Critical Discourse Studies, textual analysis can provide
significant insight into the particular ideological stances that underlie discriminatory attitudes. Within this
setting, the relatively recent growth of social media into what is increasingly being recognised as a main player
in the realm of ideological control has led to a shift of analytical interest from elite to social media discourse
(see, e.g., KhosraviNik 2018). While research in this vein is still in its infancy, it appears to have so far focused,
for the most part, on the analysis of individual posts, with a view to assessing the extent to which discriminatory
attitudes surface in some delimited context; be it a single thread, a topic of interest or even a whole social media
group or platform. Obviously, this approach has its merits, but it downplays the role that the interactive social
media setup plays in the process of discursively constructing a stance. As Giles et al. (2015: 46) note, however,
“it is important to be able to track the spread of ideas or opinions through hundreds of thousands of [social
media posts…], but to ignore the interactional dynamics at the local level would be losing sight of the trees in
order to understand the wood”.
Acknowledging that stances are not simply expressed, but are primarily negotiated in the social media setting,
the main objective of this paper is to elucidate the central role that interactivity plays in both the dissemination
and confrontation of discriminatory discourse. More specifically, it aims to pinpoint the main interactional
patterns that underlie stance negotiation within the social media polylogual context. Drawing on an analysis
of comment threads found under six YouTube videos that deal with migration, LGBTIQ issues and abortion in
turn, this paper zooms in on the ways in which commenters engage in conversation and evaluate each others’
opinions. The upshot of the analysis is that there is a distinction between aggression at a personal level and
conflict at an ideological one and that the two categories are not necessarily co-extensive, even though they
do appear to criss-cross when it comes to stance negotiation. Following this, an attempt is made at providing
a preliminary analytic taxonomy of the observed patterns, while its implications for the identification of spe-
cific participatory online spaces as echo chambers or fora for more democratic deliberations are also briefly
discussed.
References:
Giles, David, Wyke Stommel & Trena M. Paulus. 2017. The microanalysis of online data: The next stage. Journal
of Pragmatics 115: 37–41.
KhosraviNik, Majid. 2018. Social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS). In John Flowerdew & John E.
Richardson (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, pp. 582-596. London/New York: Rout-
ledge.

577
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Annotating hate speech: particular challenges and


opportunities along the online-offline continuum

Panel contribution

Dr. Didar Akar 1 , Dr. Ayşecan Terzioğlu 2 , Mr. Burak Işık 1 , Ms. Pelin Önal 1 , Ms. Elif Erol 2 ,
Mr. Halil İbrahim Ergül 2
1. Bogazici University, 2. Sabancı University

Recently, hate speech has gained a new visibility in academia, partly because of the increasing popularity of
social media. Political and cultural polarization at both global and local levels also fosters and is fostered by
hate speech. Due to the voluminous number of social media users, hate speech reaches a larger audience ex-
peditiously, and this, in turn, facilitates its normalization as a common form. Most studies on this topic take an
NLP (natural language processing) and computational perspective, focusing on hate speech detection models.
As the exponential growth of hate speech data makes manual detection unsustainable, AI (artificial intelligence)
solutions have become indispensable. Although there are several studies on social media, distribution of hate
speech through newspapers is largely overlooked in Turkish academia. Through an interdisciplinary perspec-
tive including linguistics and cultural studies, we seek to understand the similarities and differences between
offline and online hate speech patterns in Turkish print and social media.
In this study, we use data from two research projects aiming to develop an algorithm to detect hate speech in
Turkish, one focusing on print media and one on Twitter, using Twitter’s Academic API (application program-
ming interface). Methodologically speaking, only target groups and texts containing hate speech were analyzed
in the project on hate speech in newspapers. On the other hand, the Twitter data have been annotated regard-
ing general tone of the tweet, the degree of hate speech, the category of hate speech, and discriminatory speech.
Apart from this, the target group of the tweet is predetermined, independently of hate speech. Within these
target groups, there are countries, races, nationalities, gender groups, as well as people of certain views, status
and profession.
The data we examined in these two projects are different from each other in various ways which offer valuable
opportunities for a deeper understanding of hate speech patterns in Turkish print and social media. To begin
with, people often know the ideological position of a newspaper, which gives us contextual clues about what
is being said. On the other hand, obtaining contextual clues is not always possible on Twitter using the limited
amount of available information. It is difficult to trace the users’ political stance or any contextual information
due to the limitations caused by working with a large data set. While the articles in the newspaper can be sup-
plemented with longer texts and photographs and fonts, the data from Twitter consists of very short sentences
and often does not have more contextual clues. Based on the semi-structured interviews we have conducted
with ten annotators from both projects, we contend that inter-annotator disagreements are more pronounced
regarding tweets than news articles, not only because of the lack of contextual information but also because of
the annotators’ disciplinary and academic backgrounds.

578
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Covid-19 and “Divine” hate speech against women on Arabic


Twitter

Panel contribution

Dr. Najma Al Zidjaly 1


1. Sultan Qaboos University

In this paper, I examine the appropriation of Covid-19 pandemic by Arabs as a resource to unleash systematic
hate speech, including some which border on violence, against women on Arabic Twitter. To systematically
analyze the connection between pandemics and hate speech, I highlight the hostile posts Arabs published on
Twitter in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. Analytically, I draw upon a relational approach toward impolite-
ness (Locher 2018); the concept of moral order (Kádár 2017), defined as ritualistic practices; and research that
has identified the role that intertextual references can play in facework and identity negotiation in the digital
Arabic context.
Specifically, I pose the following research questions: What are the types and functions of systematic hate speech
against Arab women used by Arabs on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic? What are the linguistic strategies
used by Arabs to construct impolite-oriented discourse in favor of keeping the traditional Islamic moral order
which highlights patriarchy? (e.g., directives, metaphors, intertextual references, sarcasm, and irony)? What
is the role that divine impoliteness, or intertextually referencing religious texts in favor of or against an exist-
ing (im)moral order (Al Zidjaly 2019), and facework play in the negotiation of the Islamic intersubjectivity as
apropos to gender equality? And what are the ramifications of such discursive actions for women and gender
reform in Arabia and social justice research in general?
I have identified five types of hate speech used in tweets against women during the pandemic: 1) ridiculing
Arab women by using metaphors that construct them as deadly viruses, 2) attacking the character/behavior of
Arab women through erroneously positioning them as immoral, 3) encouraging physical violence against Arab
women (taking advantage of the lockdown that shut down police stations), 4) directly requesting the removal of
women’s rights which have erroneously been constructed as the reason behind the pandemic, and 5) positively
constructing the pandemic for forcing women to stay at home and cover up (i.e. verbally welcoming the coro-
navirus for “disciplining” or bullying women into abiding by sharia laws [e.g. staying indoors, covering face]).
Collectively, the strategies legitimize violence against women and uphold outdated patriarchal norms.
The paper contributes to impoliteness research by examining the connection between pandemics and hate
speech against women in understudied Arab societies. The findings further illuminate the role that impolite-
ness can play in the negotiation of the Islamic moral order and gender reforms in the Arabic context. More
importantly, the paper adds to the special topic of the conference by demonstrating how atypical events (e.g.,
pandemics) turned Arabian Twitter into a site of atypical linguistic behavior (e.g., aggression), threatening the
female members of Arab society.

References

Al Zidjaly, Najma. (2019). Divine impoliteness: How Arabs negotiate Islamic moral
order on Twitter. Russian Journal of Linguistics. Vol 23, No 4 (2019): 1039-1064
Kádár, Dániel (2017). Politeness, impoliteness and ritual: Maintaining the moral order in
interpersonal interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locher, Miriam A. (2008). Relational work, politeness, and identity. In G. Antos & E.
Ventola (eds.). Handbook of interpersonal communication, 509—540. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Digital Discourses of Arab Feminism: Intersecting Layers,


Conflicting Visions, Emerging Transnationalism

Panel contribution

Dr. Eleonora Esposito 1 , Dr. Francesco L. Sinatora 2


1. University of Navarra, 2. The George Washington University

Embedded in a post-colonial context characterized by deeply rooted cultural and ideological divisions, Arab
feminist digital platforms currently advance their local and global agendas while facing different degrees of
religious conservative backlash and delegitimization as mere neo-imperialist projects.
This paper examines the digital discursive strategies of contemporary Arab feminist social movements through
a corpus of over one-hundred multimodal texts and comments drawn from the public Facebook and Instagram
accounts of thirty-two feminist groups in Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. A longitudinal, “screen-based” obser-
vation (Androutsopoulos 2017) of data published between 2011 and 2021 allowed us to “purposefully sample”
(Patton 2002) texts grounded in historical events such as the Arab Spring, the #MeToo movement, as well as the
2019 wave of protests in the Arab Levant.
Within a social media critical discourse perspective (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018), and through the
notion of “entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990), we build on the concept of “digital mirroring,” (Esposito
and Sinatora 2021) to show how the digital circulation of multimodal texts across the Arab world constitutes an
informal, subtle practice of grassroots activism with regional repercussions. This translates in a critical analysis
of multimodal digital discursive practices (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), that is further enriched by a linguistic
analysis grounded in the notion of “diglossia as indexicality” (Bassiouney 2014)
The analysis unravels the complex interactions between different layers and contexts of digital discourses (and
counter-discourses) of Arab feminism.
Firstly, the “fourth wave” of (cyber) feminism in the Arab world is consolidating as a (multifaceted) movement.
Social media emerge as a leading space for the multimodal discursive negotiation of internal debates and his-
torical differences, as well as for growing networking and transnationalism.
Secondly, the creative and transgressive Arab feminist semiotic repertoire is fully exposed to virulent backlash
rooted in postcolonial nationalist and religious patriarchal discourses.
Thirdly, a further counter-discourse also emerges, as activists appropriate this conservative pushback through
entextualization. As a result, they engender a digitally facilitated dialogue surrounding their counter-
hegemonic post-Arab Spring struggle on a local and global socio-political scale.
References
Androutsopoulos, J. (2017). “Online Data Collection”. In Data collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and appli-
cations, edited by Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs and Gerard Van Herk, 233-244. New York: Routledge.
Bassiouney, R. (2014). Language and Identity in Modern Egypt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life.
Annual review of Anthropology, 59-88.
Esposito, E. & F L. Sinatora (2021). Social media discourses of feminist protest from the Arab Levant: digital
mirroring and transregional dialogue, Critical Discourse Studies, 19:5, 502-522.
KhosraviNik, M., & E. Esposito (2018). Online hate, digital discourse and critique: Exploring digitally-mediated
discursive practices of gender-based hostility. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 14(1), 45-68.
Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd Edition). New York, NY:
Routledge.
Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

580
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Face-threats and Aggression in Televised Political Debates: A


Case-Study of U.S. American Presidential Debates

Panel contribution

Ms. Lin Jiao 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

In this talk, we examine the realisation of face-threats in U.S. American televised presidential debates from
the perspective of interaction ritual. Presidential debates provide a ritual frame in which the candidates are
expected to aggressively interact. Failure to do so implies face-loss and long-term political consequences for the
participants, and so aggression in such debates can be intensive. At the same time, such aggression also must
be kept within strict ritual boundaries, and the role of the moderator in the debates is to prevent trespasses
of the aggressive moral order of such debates. While some previous studies have examined language use in
presidential debates, to the best of our knowledge no previous research has attempted to investigate such data
from an interaction ritual perspective. We aim to fill this knowledge gap, by exploring how aggression is realised
through recurrent ritual patterns (Kádár, 2017), including speech act realisation patterns (Edmondson, 2023) in
a corpus of U.S. American televised presidential debates.

581
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Linguistic violence and online metapragmatic disputes on the


aggression against a brazilian newswoman

Panel contribution

Ms. Amanda Vallada 1


1. Universidade Federal de Goiás

This research investigates the linguistic violence episode (Silva & Alencar, 2014) practiced by Douglas Garcia, a
candidate for the Legislative House of the State of São Paulo (Brazil), against the journalist Vera Magalhães. In
order to carefully look into the online/offline nexus of contemporary language conflict situations in post-digital
societies (Blommaert, 2019, 2020), this research also analyses the online discussions that took place on Twitter,
right after the end of the event. These Twitter debates were centered around the possibility to truly characterize
the verbal threat as somekind of actual violence.
This study is a Digital Ethnography (Hine, 2015) investigation conducted on Twitter throughout the month of
October 2022, shortly after the language aggression event happened, in late September 2022, at the end of a
state gubernatorial debate among the candidates. The empirical material constructed during the ethnography
highlights the ongoing metapragmatic dispute (Pinto, 2019; Silverstein, 1993) around the appropriateness to
name a verbal offense or threat against a woman as an act of violence. In relation to this, the research has shown
that the choosing between naming or not naming an act of verbal abuse as violence is highly based on some
ideological and political affiliations, such as feminism (or sexism and misogyny) and some other progressive (or
conservative) positionings.
The political proximity of Garcia and the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro has also been evidenced
during the analysis, since some Twitter users questioned another previous moment of verbal abuse against the
same journalist, which was practiced by the then president himself. Thus, the question is posed: could the ex-
president also be an agent of violence in the second conflict event? This situation is analysed based on Judith
Butler’s (1997) Excitable Speech, and her account of injurious speech as a violent act, and her interpretation of
John L. Austin’s work (1962).

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blommaert, J. (2019). Sociolinguistic restratification in the online-offline nexus: Trump’s viral errors. Tilburg
papers in Culture Studies, paper 234.

Blommaert, J. (2020). O discurso político em sociedades pós-digitais. Trabalhos Em Linguística Aplicada, 59 (1),
390–403.

Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech. New York: Routledge.


Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet. Londres: Bloomsbury Academic.

Pinto, J. (2019). É so mimimi? Disputas metapragmáticas em espaços públicos online. Interdisciplinar, 31 (1-
2), 221-236.
Silva, D.; Alencar, C. (2014). Violência e significação: uma perspectiva pragmática. In: D. Silva; D. Ferreira; C.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Alencar (Eds.). Nova Pragmática: modos de fazer (pp. 259-282). São Paulo: Cortez.

Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In: J. Lucy (Ed.). Reflexive lan-
guage, reported speech and metapragmatics (pp. 33-58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

583
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metapragmatic conflicts via memes: A Greek case study

Panel contribution

Prof. Villy Tsakona 1


1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Recent research suggests that internet memes, whether humorous or not, constitute ideological texts referring
to a wide variety of sociopolitical events which become well known through the media. Memes thus constitute a
“discursive response” (Wiggins 2019: 52) to such events: meme creators and disseminators comment on various
aspects of the events, offer their criticism, and build online communities on the basis of common values and/or
interests, even though the members of such communities may never meet offline (Tsakona 2018; Denisova 2019;
Wiggins 2019).
Among other things, memes convey speakers’ views and values concerning language use. White-Farnham
(2019) claims that such memes constitute arguments in ongoing conversations and conflicts about ‘(in)correct’
and/or ‘(in)appropriate’ language use. She also makes a distinction between traditionalist grammar memes,
which support ‘correct’ language use often through extreme expressions of strictness; and backlash memes,
which oppose traditionalist grammar ones and criticize and parody those who support ‘correct’ language use.
In this sense, speakers seem to employ memes to participate in metapragmatic debates and to convey their
(often opposing) metapragmatic stereotypes, namely their culture-dependent and context-specific internalized
models on how language should (not) be used (Agha 2007).
The present study investigates a corpus of Greek backlash memes collected from the social media during 2020-
2021 and referring to a proposal for translating specific English loanwords into Greek, which was also posted
on the social media. In particular, I intend to examine how memes become part of a public online conflict
concerning loanword translation: they express online participants’ disagreement with the proposed ‘correct’
or ‘appropriate’ translation equivalents, and even their resistance to the translation practice itself. The analysis
concentrates on the humor attested in these memes, which plays a significant role in expressing participants’
conflicting views about, and resistance to, loanword translation. More specifically, it is suggested that humor
is employed to frame the proposed translation practices and equivalents as incongruous (on incongruity as
the core of humor, see among others Attardo 2020). The analysis of memetic humor also brings to the surface
participants’ metapragmatic stereotypes concerning when a translation equivalent is deemed (un)successful,
(un)usuable, stylistically (in)appropriate, etc.
Agha, A. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Attardo, S. 2020. The linguistics of humor: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Denisova, A. 2019. Internet memes and society: Social, context, and political contexts. New York: Routledge.
Tsakona, V. 2018. Online joint fictionalization. In Villy Tsakona & Jan Chovanec (eds.), The dynamics of interac-
tional humor: Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters, 229–255. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
White–Farnham, J. 2019. Resisting “Let’s eat grandma”: The rhetorical potential of grammar memes. Computers
and Composition 52. 210–221.
Wiggins, B. E. 2019. The discursive power of memes in digital culture: Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality.
New York: Routledge.

584
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Morality, civility, and aggression in the attribution and


ratification of the Karen social identity

Panel contribution

Dr. Lucía Fernández-Amaya 1 , Prof. Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich 2


1. Pablo de Olavide University, 2. University of North Carolina, Charlotte

The main goal of this talk is to explore the off/online nexus of post digital societies (Blommaert 2019) and how
it may affect the synergy between off/online public spaces in what regards conceptualizations of in/civility and
concomitant evaluations of morality. In that respect, it will be argued that off/online public spaces are mutually
co-constitutive. It does so by continuing the exploration of a stigmatized social identity, Karen (Garcés-Conejos
Blitvich 2022a). Applying mainstream im/politeness models (Brown & Levinson 1987; Culpeper 2011, 2016),
general notions of morality (Monroe & Plant 2019, Workman et al. 2020, among others), moral emotions (Haidt,
2003) and conceptualizations of digital technology facilitated (DTF) violence against women (Esposito & Alba
Zollo 2021), we analyze posts evaluating 12 videos depicting Karen-like behavior and posted to Instagram’s
Karens Gone Crazy (KGC). Results showed that, from an emotional geographies’ perspective (Davidson et al.
2005), KGC constitutes an “other condemning” emotional space where behavior considered antinormative in
off-line public spaces is, in turn, uncivilly evaluated; further, the dynamic between incivility against Karen and
ingroup civility emerges as key to the site’s normativity. The analysis also unveiled the widespread use of DTF
in the data, which would lead to preliminary conclusions regarding essential connections between widespread
misogynistic ideologies and the emergence of Karen. In sum, these uncivil online public spaces become sites
of normativity and moralizing about what constitutes civil behavior in offline public spaces, effectively co-
constituting each other.
References
Blommaert, Jan. 2019. “Political Discourse in Post-Digital Societies.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 236.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2016. “Impoliteness Strategies.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and
Society, edited by Alessandro Capone and Jacob L. Mey, 421-445. Springer.
Davidson, Joyce, Mr Mick Smith, and Liz Bondi, (Eds). 2012. Emotional Geographies. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Esposito, Eleonora, and Sole Alba Zollo. 2021. “ ‘How Dare You Call Her a Pig, I Know Several Pigs Who Would
Be Upset If They Knew’ A Multimodal Critical Discursive Approach to Online Misogyny against UK MPs on
YouTube”, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9 (1): 47-75.
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2022a. “Karen: Stigmatized Social Identity and Face-Threat in the On/Offline
Nexus.” Journal of Pragmatics 188: 14-30.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2003. “The Moral Emotions.” In Handbook of Affective Sciences, edited by R.J. Davidson, 852–
70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Monroe, Andrew E., and E. Ashby Plant. 2019. “The Dark Side of Morality: Prioritizing Sanctity over Care Mo-
tivates Denial of Mind and Prejudice toward Sexual Outgroups.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
148 (2): 342-360.
Workman, Clifford I., Keith J. Yoder, and Jean Decety. 2020. “The Dark Side of Morality–Neural Mechanisms
Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence.” AJOB Neuroscience 11 (4): 269-284.

585
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Offensive gestures and taking offense: Precision grip gestures,


penis size and the cross-modal construction of anti-feminist
discourses in South Korea

Panel contribution

Dr. Lucien Brown 1


1. Monash University

Offensive gestures and taking offense: Precision grip gestures, penis size and the cross-modal construc-
tion of anti-feminist discourses in South Korea
This paper examines the emergence of a new offensive hand gesture in South Korea in 2021, which became the
locus of struggles between pro-feminist and anti-feminist communities. The goal is to explore how a gesture or
bodily visual practice (Ford et al., 2012) can become a cross-modal semiotic location for conflict and aggression
across online and offline spaces.
In May 2021, male-dominated online communities in South Korea complained that an advert for convenience
store chain G25 was misandric (i.e., man-hating). This was not due to the language in the ad, but rather the
representation of a hand in a pinch-like position reaching out to pick up a small sausage. This “precision grip
gesture” (Hassemer & Winter, 2018; Lempert, 2011) was visually similar to the logo of defunct radical feminist
group Megalian, who had purportedly used this gesture (which denotes small size) as an emblem mocking men
for having small penises. Over the next few weeks, these complaints snowballed as male-dominated online
communities complained about numerous adverts that featured precision grip gestures and other hand con-
figurations that vaguely resembled them. To the dismay of many, some brands accepted these complaints and
issued public apologies for using gestures that were offensive to men.
In this paper, I apply critical multimodal discourse analysis (e.g., Jewitt et al, 2016; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001)
to explore the emergence of this precision grip gesture as a locus for discourse on feminism in South Korea, as
presented in media discourse. I analysed all articles that appeared in the month of May 2021 in online versions
of the seven top South Korean newspapers, and also the influential news website OhmyNews.
The analysis captures a discursive dispute surrounding the hand gesture and its potential to cause offense. Po-
litically conservative newspapers position the hand gesture as being part of an intentional campaign by radical
feminists to offend male sensibilities and to create gender conflict. In contrast, the progressive press sees the
backlash to the gesture as another instance of women being silenced.
In the analysis, I focus on the different indexical meanings ascribed to the hand gesture, as well as its represen-
tation across different modalities (photographs, illustrations, emojis, verbal descriptions). I demonstrate how a
variety of different visual representations of various related handshapes all become identified with the offen-
sive gesture, which is a process I treat as a form of “indexical bleaching” (Squires, 2022). I propose that it was
the ambiguous appearance of the hand gesture that helped it to emerge as an important semiotic in ongoing
discourses surrounding feminism in South Korea. As communication transcends online and offline spaces, this
type of indexical bleaching may be central to the social semiotics of “taking offence” (see Haugh 2010; Mitchell
& Haugh, 2015).

586
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reciprocity and impoliteness online

Panel contribution

Prof. Jonathan Culpeper 1 , Dr. Vittorio Tantucci 1


1. Lancaster University

Culpeper and Tantucci (2021) proposed that (im)politeness in interaction is governed in large part by a Principle
of (Im)politeness Reciprocity (PIR). However, that paper focussed more on politeness than impoliteness, and on
relatively short face-to-face dyadic interactions. The latter “micro” focus led Grainger and O’Driscoll (2022: 5) to
comment that the PIR “as articulated so far only deals with adjacency pairs”. This paper explores impoliteness
online, or, more precisely, digitally mediated impoliteness interactions, whose analysis will require a move
beyond the “micro”, both theoretically and methodologically.
We examine both how impoliteness might differ in digitally mediated interaction from face-to-face dyadic inter-
action (building on extant work, e.g. Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011), and whether the PIR can offer a better explanation
than has been postulated for at least some impoliteness differences (e.g. the role of anonymity). We also aim
at some methodological innovations. Impoliteness online research often claims that at least some features are
in some way specific to that domain. It is, however, rare that that research sets out to make an empirical com-
parison, something which is not entirely surprising because of the challenges involved. For our face-to-face
dyadic data, we chose the highly conflictive arguments between neighbours posted on YouTube (deemed by the
posters to contain “rude”, “nasty” interactions). For our digitally mediated data, we chose controversial political
debates on the social platform Reddit (deemed by participants to contain “rude”, “sarcastic”, etc. interactions).
Neither type of interaction constrains participants within particular institutional power structures. We focussed
on threads starting with disagreement, and analysed how and when these lead to ‘spirals’ of impoliteness reci-
procity, that is, when participants would (repeatedly) respond to a previous comment with the same or an even
higher degree of impoliteness. Our methods involve novel plotting, visualisation, and statistical assessment of
network analysis graphs (e.g. Tantucci et al. 2022), in combination with multiple linear regression of features
(e.g. personal vs impersonal impoliteness, taboo language, sarcasm, participants’ word counts).
Initial results, centred on 250 online disagreement threads, show that 20% led to clear impoliteness reciprocity,
with an average of 3.5 turns before the beginning of impoliteness escalations. In 3 cases, the degree of impolite-
ness reached a point where the final comment was removed by the website administrators. In all these cases,
impoliteness reciprocity exceeded 8 turns of online interaction.
References
Grainger, K., & O’Driscoll, J. (2022). Where we have been and where we are going. Journal of Politeness Research,
18(1), 1-9.
Culpeper, J., & Tantucci, V. (2021). The principle of (im)politeness reciprocity. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 146-
164.
Lorenzo-Dus, N., Blitvich, P. G. C., & Bou-Franch, P. (2011). On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of
postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(10), 2578-2593.
Tantucci, V., Wang, A., & Culpeper, J. (2022). Reciprocity and epistemicity: On the (proto) social and cross-cultural
‘value’ of information transmission. Journal of Pragmatics, 194, 54-70.

587
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The metapragmatics of “offence” in Chinese in online


discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Wei-Lin Melody Chang 1 , Dr. Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen 2 , Prof. Michael Haugh 1 , Prof. Hsi-Yao Su 2
1. The University of Queensland, 2. National Taiwan Normal University

The notion of “offence” lies at the core of the theorisation of impoliteness and language aggression in pragmatics
(e.g. Bousfield 2008; Culpeper 2011; Kádár 2017). However, while it is broadly understood as a moral emotion
(Haidt 2003), “offence” is a multi-faceted concept in English that can refer to: (1) interpersonally transgressive
conduct; (2) (perceived) moral transgressions; (3) a complex moral emotion occasioned by (perceived) trans-
gressions; (4) the acts of ‘causing’ and/or ‘taking’ of offence; and (5) the act of verbally attacking someone (as
opposed to defending oneself) (Haugh and Sinkeviciute 2019; Haugh, Kádár and Márquez Reiter 2022). In ad-
dition, despite its central import to the theorisation of impoliteness, there has to date been little consideration
of how “offence” is conceptualised across languages and cultures. The aim of our paper is to contribute to the
growing body of work on impoliteness and language aggression in Chinese (Kádár and Pan 2011; Kádár, Ning
and Ran 2018), and broader issues in theorising the metapragmatics of offence across languages (Culpeper and
Haugh 2021; Chang, Haugh and Su 2021), through systematic examination of the metalanguage used in Man-
darin Chinese by ordinary speakers when talking about “offence”. We focus on analogous terms in Chinese,
including màofàn (cf. offence), gōngjí, qiàng (cf. offend), bù shuǎng (cf. offended), and dúshé, guòfèn (cf. offen-
sive), in order to provide an account of how these terms relate to each other (within a semantic field), how
they compare with analogous terms in English, and what participants are doing through using such terms in
different contextual settings. Our metapragmatic dataset draws both from elicited metapragmatic discussions
in Chinese about events where participants report have taken “offence”, as well as such discussions on online
discussion boards and related broadcast media. Drawing from methods in corpus pragmatics (Aijmer and Rüh-
lemann 2015; Haugh 2018), we undertake vertical (i.e. aggregated) and horizontal (i.e. sequential) analyses of
metapragmatic uses of terms for “offence” in Chinese, thereby contributing towards the groundwork necessary
for constructing a cross-culturally valid theory of impoliteness and language aggression.

588
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘We are nationalists, not hate-filled supremacists’: A Corpus


Assisted Discourse Studies Approach to Categorising (Online)
Extremism

Panel contribution

Prof. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus 1


1. Swansea University

There is a long-standing academic debate around the meaning of terms like extreme-right, far-right, radical-
right and right-wing extremism. This debate chiefly concerns which actors, ideologies, and behaviours should
(or should not) fall within the ambit of one or another term (Jupskås and Segers, 2020). While there is a high
degree of consensus among scholars (Carter, 2018), no universally accepted definitions of these terms exist - each
has been employed, at various times, as blanket terms, simultaneously describing political ideologies, parties,
and violent rhetoric and actions. This can be problematic for the purposes of policing and the criminal justice
system (Bjørgo Ravndal, 2019). Law enforcement, for instance, may use different terms – such as extreme-right
or far-right – to determine who, what and why needs prioritising.
This presentation discusses a study that sought to contribute discourse analytic insights to resolving this im-
portant terminological/conceptual debate. Specifically, the study aimed to identify the ‘discourse signature’ of
certain groups that were yet to be ‘categorised’ by law enforcement within the extreme-far right spectrum at a
particular point in time, in this case 2018-19. The data consists of three corpora shared by UK law enforcement
and comprising tweets from: 6 groups categorised as extreme right (277,600 words); 4 groups categorised as far
right (481, 759 words), and 2 groups that, at data collection time, were yet to be ‘categorised’ (161, 244 words).
These corpora were respectively labelled group clusters A, B and C.
A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) methodology (see, e.g., Mautner, 2019; Partington, 2010; Partington
and Marchi, 2015; Taylor and Marchi, 2018) was employed - with keyword and collocation analyses being con-
ducted, alongside subsequent examination of subject-positioning (Anton and Peterson, 2003) within extended
concordance lines. The analysis showed that, on the whole, the cluster C groups displayed more common-
alities with the cluster B than they did with the cluster A groups. This is not to say, however, that cluster C
and cluster B were homogenous. Significant differences emerged, including a more prevalent reliance on self-
promotional discourse in cluster C, in contrast with a more salient use of a crime/terrorism discourse in cluster
B. Similarly, a reflexive discourse around the concepts of far-right/extreme-right ideology and identitarianism
emerged as being discursively unique to cluster C. Across all three clusters, these groups constructed subject po-
sitions of victimhood for themselves and their (to-be) members (see also Wodak, 2015; Lorenzo-Dus and Nouri
2020; Lorenzo-Dus, 2023). These were legitimised through othering strategies whereby various out-groups were
blamed for a chaotic reality that must be changed. Expectedly, change was presented as being possible through
affiliation to their group. Use of this ‘out-group provoked crisis – in-group enabled solution’ strategy is common
across other extremist ideology formations, ranging from jihadi (e.g., Lorenzo-Dus et al., 2018) to populist (de
Vreese et al, 2019) groups.
This presentation will also reflect upon the challenges and opportunities of integrating, on the one hand, CADS
methods with those used in other disciplines (specifically, Criminology and Public Policy) and, on the other,
academic results and stakeholder needs.

589
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country
anymore.” Violence, ambiguity and metaphors we fight with
in Donald Trump’s speech of January 6, 2021

Panel contribution

Prof. Massimiliano Demata 1


1. University of Turin

Trump’s speech of January 6, 2021 has often been indicated as the key factor behind the Capitol Hill riots
that took place on that same day. The speech is notable for its violent language and, on the basis of alleged
conspiracies of vote fraud, seemed to incite the crowd to forcibly prevent Senators and Representatives from
certifying Joe Biden’s victory. In the aftermath of the Capitol riots, most of the debate about the speech focused
on the true nature of Trump’s war language. Many commentators argued that the audience was instigated by
Trump’s words to commit violent actions, while those who defended Trump claimed that his speech was based
on figurative, non-literal language, which would supposedly pre-empt the possibility of inviting people to
action: according to Trump’s lawyer Michael van der Veen, “No human being seriously believes that the use of
such metaphorical terminology is incitement to political violence” (van der Veen 2021), while Mark Meadows,
Trump’s former chief of staff, claimed that when Trump incited attendees to march down the Capitol, he was
“speaking metaphorically” (Meadows 2022).

By applying a discourse approach to metaphor (Charteris-Black 2005 & 2009; Musolff 2016), this paper analyses
Trump’s speech and the semantic ambiguity of its violent style and contents. Trump’s use of the traditional
metaphorical use of war in politics was both in line with the tradition of US political discourse and deliberately
ambiguous. On the one hand, as Trump’s defenders rightly argued, war metaphors are traditionally used in po-
litical communication as they are used to raise the pathos (Charteris-Black 2005 & 2009); specifically, metaphors
of war have heightened the polarized US political discourse and have contributed to making it a very emo-
tional arena (Kalmoe 2014; Kalmoe, Gubler & Wood 2017). On the other hand, by raising certain emotions, war
metaphors are known to effectively mobilize people around a common goal, often turning the metaphor into
reality: for example, Trump himself often used war metaphors in his anti-immigration agenda, using the sce-
nario of immigrants as invaders in order to advocate the necessity of real, effective military intervention, as
borders were seen as a security issue and, as a consequence, had to be protected militarily (Demata 2017).
References
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric. London: Palgrave.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2009. Metaphor and Discourse. London: Palgrave.
Demata, Massimiliano. 2017. ““A great and beautiful wall”. Donald Trump’s populist discourse on immigration.”
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5/2: 277-97.
Hartmann-Mahmud, Lori. 2002. “War as Metaphor”, Peace Review 14 /4: 427-32.
Kalmoe, Nathan P. 2014. “Fueling the fire: Violent metaphors, trait aggression, and support for political vio-
lence.” Political Communication 31/4: 545-63.
Kalmoe, Nathan P., Joshua R. Gubler, and David A. Wood. 2017. “Toward conflict or compromise? How violent
metaphors polarize partisan issue attitudes.” Political Communication 0/0: 1-20
Meadows, Mark. 2021. The Chief’s Chief. St Petersburg, FL, All Seasons.
Musolff. Andreas. Political Metaphor Analysis. London: Bloomsbury.
Van der Veen, Michael. 2021. “Michael van der Veen Opening Statement Transcript: Trump’s Second Impeach-
ment Trial.” rev, Feb. 12, 2021. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/michael-van-der-veen-opening-statement-
transcript-trumps-second-impeachment-trial

590
18th International Pragmatics Conference

591
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“With this kind of spelling, you should not be speaking”:


Linguistic corrections as an impoliteness strategy in Greek
online political discussions

Panel contribution

Dr. Maria Vasilaki 1


1. King’s College London

Recently, online impoliteness studies have been drawing links between digital political communication and
the ‘trench warfare dynamics’ (Karlsen et al., 2017) that may develop in social media interactions between
users with different political ideologies, particularly when such discussions concern critical national issues (e.g.
Blitvich, 2010; Bahaa-eddin, 2019; Teneketzi, 2022). However, within this growing line of research, grounded on
various impoliteness conceptualizations and categorizations, impoliteness strategies that utilize the language
system itself and the linguistic resources available to users have not been extensively discussed. In such con-
flictual instances, posters can mobilize linguistic corrections related to diverse aspects of opponents’ contribu-
tions/comments (e.g. grammar, orthography, syntax, or in the case of Greek online posts, the use of Greeklish)
to offend, thus diverting attention from the expressed political viewpoints to the linguistic realization of the out-
groups’ arguments. Hence, the resulting impoliteness, which approximates a straw-man fallacy (widespread in
politics- see Talisse & Aikin, 2006), bears links to the concept of ‘Grammar Nazism’, that involves self-appointed
linguistic ‘vigilantes’ (Sherman & Švelch, 2015).
Therefore, drawing from my research on online political impoliteness in relation to the 2015 Greek socioe-
conomic crisis (July 2015 referendum and subsequent elections), this study focuses on public Facebook and
YouTube comments (pertaining to a left-vs-right political divide), in which different types of linguistic correc-
tions are featured as a clearly manifested impoliteness strategy. Through an NVivo-assisted qualitative close
analysis of the dataset, I am examining how linguistic corrections contribute to ‘otherising’ the perceived po-
litical opponents. I am also investigating how users exploit their shared linguistic background (which encodes
facets of their cultural identity and collective memories) to target co-interactants, thus allowing distinct lin-
guistic ideologies, perceptions of the national self and interpretations of Greekness to materialize through the
corrections.
Findings suggest that linguistic corrections hold a special place in the arsenal of users attacking disagreeing
addressees, since the ability to highlight others’ linguistic errors is associated with occupying an epistemic high-
ground (Eriksson, 2014), which in turn further validates the correctors’ viewpoints. Thus, this type of grassroots
online gate-keeping of appropriate language use (particularly prevalent in ‘classical’ languages such as Greek)
divides commenters into those who, due to their linguistic/argumentative expertise, are accepted within the
community of ‘knowing participants’ (Georgakopoulou, 2016) and are granted the right to partake in political
debates regarding the national future, and those who are being denied such an access, since their perceived
linguistic inefficiency undermines their authority and their national/Greek identity. Moreover, results indicate
that users resorting to impolite linguistic corrections do not always compose error-free posts. This underlines
that corrections are not necessarily motivated by pure linguistic interest- their purpose may be to establish intel-
lectual/cultural capital and discursive power. Generally, the use of impoliteness based on background knowl-
edge of linguistic rules and standards foregrounds the need to theorise the existence of linguistically-shaped
(and not just verbally expressed) impoliteness strategies- i.e. metalinguistic impoliteness, through which inter-
actants “make active and local use of the metalinguistic function of language in goal-oriented ways in commu-
nicative acts and events” (Jaworski et al., 2004, p.3).

592
Language and geopolitics:
On the linguistic
consequences of Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine
(organized by Helena
Halmari, Arto Mustajoki)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A study of metalinguistic comments in the Ukrainian comedy


series “Servant of the People”

Panel contribution

Prof. Helena Halmari 1


1. Sam Houston State University

The main character, a history teacher, wins the Ukrainian presidential election, against all odds. The actor
portraying the history teacher in this political satire is, as we all now know, Ukraine’s current actual President,
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who won the post as a representative of the “Sluha Narodu” -party.
In this presentation, I explore the interplay of Ukrainian and Russian, focusing on the metalinguistic comments
and jokes in the three seasons of the political satire “Sluha narodu” (Servant of the People) (2015–2019). While
the languages of the series are listed as Russian and Ukrainian, some interesting changes over the four-year
period of the series surface: from Russian-dominated discourse, a shift to more Ukrainian takes place. The
division of Ukrainian- vs. Russian-speaking characters may be somewhat predictable, but what is significant
is the strong tone of rational and comic detachment, which reflects the voice of Zelenskyy’s “Sluha Narodu” -
party (Ash and Shapovalov 2022), underscoring cohesion and moderation rather than division and polarization
(Lytovchenko et al. 2021). The series pokes fun at both Russian-speakers and Ukrainian-speakers. Metalinguis-
tic comments address characters who speak Ukrainian poorly. Some thinly veiled jokes about Vladimir Putin
become understandable in the light of the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
This popular satirical series serves as a window into the years between Russia’s annexation of Crimea and
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The two languages in “Sluha narodu” could serve as symbols of polarization,
but the series manages to bridge the serious divide by humor. The third season makes heroes of Russian firemen;
a professor, in Russian, leads a discussion with medical students pointing to a bright future for Ukraine (a
paradox in the current situation); and one student reveals unity in his heterogeneous DNA profile, which makes
him—a Ukrainian. Through an analysis and discussion of metalinguistic comments in “Sluha narodu,” I argue
that the series reflects Zelenskyy’s judgment on the production company Kvartal 95’s page: “Our ambitious
objective […] is to make the world a better place, a kinder and more joyful place with [the] help of those tools
that we have, that is humor and creativity” (Kvartal 95).
References:
Ash, K., and M. Shapovalov. 2022. Populism for the ambivalent: Anti-polarization and support for Ukraine’s
Sluha Narodu party. Post-Soviet Affairs, Online. DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2022.2082823.
Kvartal 95. Online. https://kvartal95.com/en/about/.

Lytovchenko, A., D. Boiko, D. Yashkina, and J. Holm-Hansen. 2021. The discourse of moderation and cohesion
as an effective electoral tool: Sluha Narodu in Ukraine’s 2019 parliamentary campaign. In Aasland, A., and S.
Kropp (eds), The accommodation of regional and ethno-cultural diversity in Ukraine. Federalism and internal
conflicts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80971-3_5.

594
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Current challenges and language choice among


Transcarpathian Hungarians

Panel contribution

Dr. Daniele Artoni 1 , Ms. Timea Lucsok 1


1. University of Verona

According to the last Ukrainian census (2001), Transcarpathian Hungarians are the largest ethnic minority in the
Ukrainian region of Zakarpattya (12.08%), followed by Romanians, Russians, Romani, and Ruthenians. Hungar-
ians are a recognised minority and have the right of schooling in their language, albeit criticism has been raised
against the laws “On education” (2017) and “On supporting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the
State language” (2019), which aim at widening the use of Ukrainian without protecting minority languages (see
Csernicskó 2021). Furthermore, the already multilingual landscape of Zakarpattya has been recently enriched
by the presence of a large number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) – more than 165,000 (about 13% of the
entire population of the region) as of September 2022 (IOM-DTM 2022) – who fled towards Western Ukraine
after Russia’s invasion in February 2022. The majority of IDP are Russophone Ukrainians.
Our presentation aims at investigating the sociolinguistic status of today’s Zakarpattya, especially among its
Hungarian-speaking population.
The present research was conducted in the summer of 2022 and involved eighty-six Ukrainian citizens with
Hungarian L1 living in the Zakarpattya region. The informants were asked to fill in a survey on (a) their lin-
guistic habits in different contexts, i.e., within the family, in the education sphere, in their workplace, in official
contexts, and during their leisure time, and (b) to spell out their own and their children’s language choices.
A preliminary analysis of the data collected suggests that even though Hungarian is by far the dominant lan-
guage within the Hungarian-speaking population of Zakarpattya, most of the informants are fluent also in
Ukrainian (93%) and Russian (72%).
Two opposite tendencies are noted in the domain of education: on the one hand, those parents who want their
children to be educated in the Hungarian language (70%) are willing to preserve their children’s Hungarian
identity (71% of them) by even providing them with future job opportunities in Hungary (18% of them); on the
other hand, most parents are aware that schooling in the Ukrainian language would give their children better
opportunities, as 78% of the informants want their children to be fluent in Ukrainian.
A recent shift in language habits that emerges from our survey is the growing usage of the Russian language,
primarily to communicate with the Russophone IDP who fled the occupied territories and settled in Zakarpattya.
In sum, in our paper we will account for the current language shifts among the Hungarian Transcarpathians,
and how the war and the presence of IDP in Zakarpattya have affected this multilingual region.
References
Csernicskó, I. 2021. Languages in Conflict Situations in the Context of the Law of Ukraine “On Education” (2017).
In D. Müller and M. Wingender (eds), Language Politics, Language Situations and Conflicts in Multilingual So-
cieties: Case Studies from Contemporary Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (pp. 137-152), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz
Verlag.
IOM UN Migration-DTM Displacement Tracking Matrix. 2022 (19-30 Sept.). Area Baseline Assessment, Ukraine
– Round 13.
Vseukraïnskyi perepys naselennya 2001. http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/

595
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Has the war influenced the choice of the preposition: na


Ukraine or v Ukraine?

Panel contribution

Prof. Arto Mustajoki 1


1. University of Helsinki

Country-specific language varieties, such as American vs. British English, differ mostly in pronunciation,
spelling, or lexicon. Grammatical differences are less common. As to Russian, the existence of country-specific
varieties is controversial (Moser 2020), and some usage norms have gained political significance. One of the
most famous questions is whether to say na Ukraine or v Ukraine.
The Russian prepositions v and na correspond to similar pairs for instance in English (in/on) and German
(in/auf ). A certain inconsistency in the usage of v and na prevails: v universitete (in a university) but na fakul-
tete (in a faculty); v laboratorii (in a laboratory) but na zavode (in a factory). Sometimes both prepositions are
acceptable: v firme and na firme (in a firm).
When referring to a country or state, the usual preposition is v: v Italii (Italy), v Laose (Laos). Countries on
islands make exceptions—na Kube (Cuba); na Kipre (Cyprus)—but not systematically: v Japonii (Japan); v Novoj
Zelandii (New Zealand).
The case with na/v Ukraine became highly relevant after Ukraine’s independence declaration in the 1990s
(Krivoruchko 2008). Citizens of the new state felt that the phrase na Ukraine did not reflect the country’s in-
dependent status. The version na Ukraine was associated with na okraine (on the outskirts), which implied that
Ukraine was not regarded as a sovereign state. Russian’s answer to the demand of using v Ukraine was: “We are
not taking advice concerning the norm of Russian from people representing a country which is neglecting the
status of Russian.” Some Russian observers (e.g., Kalutskov 2017) argue that, in fact, the name Ukraine originally
referred to a borderland or far-away place. Such contrasting views have ignited a “language war.”
In this presentation, I provide data about the change in the use of na/v Ukraine after Russia’s February 2022
attack against Ukraine. My data come from the Integrum database, which covers a large number of Russian-
language media and internet sources in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries (Mustajoki 2006). Findings show
that after the beginning of the war, the share of the preposition na has increased in Russia while the share of
v has increased in Ukraine, indicating the political significance of the choice of the preposition. An interesting
additional point of view is to examine how Russian-language media of countries other than Russia and Ukraine
use these preposition in this context.
References
Kalutskov, V. N. 2017. Na Ukraine i v Ukraine: Vzgljad kul’turgeografa. Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, 19,
Lingvistika i mezhkultur’naja kommunikatsija 3, 79–88.
Krivoruchko, J. G. 2008. Prepositional wars: When ideology defines preposition. In Adpositions: Pragmatic,
Semantic and Syntactic Perspectives, edited by D. Kurzon, & S. Adler, 191–208. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Moser, M. A. 2020. Is a Ukrainian Standard of the Russian Language on the Agenda? Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities
Journal 7, 185–196.
Mustajoki, A. 2006. The Integrum database as a powerful tool in research on contemporary Russian. In Inte-
grum: Tocnye metody i gumanitarnye nauki, edited by G. Nikiporets-Takigava, 50–75. Moscow: Letnij sad.

596
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediated Receptive Multilingualism: a case study of


communication between Estonians and Ukrainians

Panel contribution

Ms. Anna Branets 1 , Prof. Anna Verschik 2


1. University of Tartu, 2. Tallinn University

In 2022, about 50,000 Ukrainian refugees ended up in Estonia, a country with a population of 1.3 million. This
creates new communicative situations and needs. As a rule, Ukrainians are proficient in Russian, and some Esto-
nians are as well. However, both sides may refrain from using Russian because of its symbolism and association
with the aggressor. All Ukrainian refugees learn Estonian, but it would also be reasonable for Estonians to ac-
quire some proficiency in Ukrainian. The current study demonstrates that this is possible in the framework of
Receptive Multilingualism (RM). In this mode of communication, interlocutors can still understand one another
even though they speak in their own native languages (Rehbein et al. 2012). Since Estonian and Ukrainian
belong to different language families and there is no history of intensive contacts between speakers of these
languages, Estonians can learn to understand Ukrainian through already existing proficiency in Russian. This
mode is called mediated RM (Branets et al. 2020).
This study is based on an experimentally controlled design with forty participants (20 speakers of Estonian as
L1 and 20 speakers of Ukrainian as L1). All Estonian participants have proficiency in Russian at least at the B1
level and all Ukrainian participants have been learning Estonian. Participants were grouped into twenty pairs,
each pair consisting of one speaker of Estonian and one speaker of Ukrainian. Prior to the experiment, the par-
ticipants were given the questionnaire on biographical details and sociolinguistic background, the guidelines,
the two MapTasks (two sessions with the same complexity), and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) test on the
language attitudes toward Russian. Half of the Estonian participants received instructions about similarities
and differences between Ukrainian and Russian and the other half did not. The experiment was conducted
online and resembles a phone call (without using a video). The task had to be completed in 10 min.
The results showed that Estonians and Ukrainians can communicate with one another, using a mediated RM
mode. Inventories of the meta-communicative strategies the speakers and hearers used (vocabulary and other
linguistic features, discourse patterns, etc.) were established. As for the comparison between the two sessions
with different MapTasks, it came out that the same participants in the second session were more successful than
in the first one. The participants who had received instructions were also more successful than those who had
not. Communicative strategies (e.g., the use of other communicative modes such as code-switching) and meta-
communicative practices (such as explicit negotiation of meanings and form) are attested. Our study suggests
that there is a potential for learning and communication between Estonians and Ukrainians via the mode of
mediated Receptive Multilingualism.
Branets, Anna, Daria Bahtina, and Anna Verschik. 2020. Mediated receptive multilingualism: Estonian Russian-
Ukrainian case study. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10 (3), 380–411.
Rehbein, Jochen, Jan D. ten Thije, and Anna Verschik. 2012. Lingua receptiva (LaRa): Remarks on the
quintessence of receptive multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism 16 (3), 248–264.

597
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Plain Language in Ukraine: What War Does to Public


Communication

Panel contribution

Dr. Thomas Rosén 1


1. university of Gothenburg

Extreme situations such as armed conflicts or natural disasters put severe strain on society. Such circumstances
call for easy access to clear and understandable public information. Indeed, information may constitute the
difference between life and death. Therefore, governments around the world strive to use plain language in
order to reach their citizens.
The concept of plain language, as it is commonly understood today, was introduced in the Western hemisphere
in the 1970s. The U.S. federal plain language agency defines plain language as “communication your audience
can understand the first time they read or hear it.” (PLAIN 2022). Definitions in other Western countries more
or less echo this definition: Plain language is “language that is neat, simple and comprehensible.” In Swedish
this translates to “språk som är vårdat, enkelt och begripligt” (ISOF 2022).
In Ukraine, the concept of plain language does not appear to have caught on, although the topic is being studied
(Barovska 2016). Discussions have taken place among specialists concerning what an appropriate rendering
of the term plain language could be. Adjectives such as “легка” (easy), “проста” (simple), “ясна” (clear), and
“зрозуміла” (comprehensible) have been suggested, but thus far no legislation has been passed that regulates
the use of plain language by the Ukrainian state (Khemiy 2021). The conclusion that plain language has yet to
permeate the Ukrainian public administration is supported by the fact that handbooks on bureaucratic language
appear continuously (Katsavetsʹ 2017; Shevchuk 2022).
In many countries, state agencies have formulated guidelines for plain language. They often include guiding
principles such asreader focus, emphasis on major points, simplicity of structure, economy of expression, and
straightforward syntax (cf., e.g., NARA 2019). Such guidelines may also function as tools for analyzing texts in
order to determine whether or not their language can be considered “plain”.
During this presentation, results from content analyses of Ukrainian public information will be presented. Using
a broad selection of information taken from Ukrainian state-controlled websites during 2022, this investigation
aims to ascertain if and how the invasion by Russia has affected the use of plain language in public information
in Ukraine.
References
Anastasia Barovsʹka (2016). Vprovadzhennia kontseptsii “zrozumila mova” v diialnosti orhaniv vlady: dosvid
Shvetsii ta Kanady. Naukovi zapysky Instytutu zakonodavstva Verkhovnoi Rady Ukraini 6: 112–122.
ISOF (2022). Klarspråk. Institutet för språk och folkminnen. Accessed November 1, 2022.
https://www.isof.se/vart-uppdrag/expertomraden/klarsprak
Marʹiana Khemiy (2021) Інклюзивна комунікація: що таке “легка мова” і чому важливо бути зрозумілими
для всіх. Accessed November 2, 2022. https://bazilik.media/inkliuzyvna-komunikatsiia-shcho-take-lehka-mova-
i-chomu-vazhlyvo-buty-zrozumilymy-dlia-vsikh/
NARA (2019). Top 10 Principles for Plain Language. Open Government at the National Archives. Accessed Novem-
ber 2, 2022. https://www.archives.gov/open/plain-writing/10-principles.html
PLAIN (2022). What is plain language? Plainlanguage.gov. Accessed November 1, 2022.
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/about/definitions/
Ruslan Katsavetsʹ (2017). Mova derzhavnykh sluzhbovtsiv: navchalʹnyj posibnyk [The Language of Civil Servants:
A Handbook]. Kyiv: Alerta.
Svitlana Shevchuk (2022).Ukrainsʹka mova dlia derzhavnykh sluzhbovtsiv: kurs dlia pidhotovy do atestatsii.

598
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Navchalʹnyj posibnyk. Kyiv: Alerta.

599
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Shifts in attitudes toward the Russian language during the


Russian-Ukrainian conflict

Panel contribution

Ms. Hannah Ackerman 1 , Dr. Lisa Johnson 1


1. Brigham Young University

In recent years, Vladimir Putin has weaponized the Russian language to justify aggression in Ukraine (e.g.,
Machado, 2020; Motyl, 2022). Reports in international media indicate that Ukrainians have staged a linguistic
response, with Russian speakers shifting to Ukrainian in a show of defiance (e.g., Bilewicz, 2022; Davlashyan,
2022; Stern et al., 2022).

Has there been a similar shift among Russian speakers in diaspora, those geographically removed from the con-
flict but connected through linguistic, political, and personal history? Anecdotal reports suggest that Russian
speakers living abroad have changed linguistic practice (Kaminsky, 2022), though the extent of this shift is un-
known. The purpose of this study is to investigate potential changes in attitudes toward the Russian language
during the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Focused primarily on members of the private Facebook group Russian Insider, the study investigates attitudes
toward written and spoken Russian in online and in-person contexts before and after Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The 17,700+ Russian American members of Russian Insider use the group to
share—in either English or Russian—local news, issues, and other topics that concern their community.
The survey, available in both English and Russian, collects participant information including demographics,
connection to the Russian language, and attitudes toward the language both before and during the 2022 conflict.
We hypothesize that attitudes toward the Russian language have shifted from generally neutral to generally
negative over the course of the conflict, predicting that individuals with close connections to the conflict will
identify a complex struggle between their language use, their nationality, and their identity.
References:
Bilewicz, M. 2022. Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians don’t want to be evacuated to Russia or Belarus. The
Washington Post, March 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/07/ukraine-russian-speakers/
Davlashyan, N. 2022. How locals in Kharkiv are switching to Ukrainian language amid the terror of Russian
bombing. EuroNews, March 8. https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/08/how-locals-in-kharkiv-are-switching-to-
ukrainian-language-amid-the-terror-of-russian-bombi
Kaminsky, I. 2022. Ilya Kaminsky on Ukrainian, Russian, and the Language of War. Literary Hub, February 28.
https://lithub.com/ilya-kaminsky-on-ukrainian-russian-and-the-language-of-war/
Machado, A. O. 2020. The instrumentalization of language in Putin’s Russia. University of Washington Jackson
School of International Studies.
Motyl, A. J. 2022. The language of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Foreign Policy, March 13.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/13/putin-ukraine-russia-war-language-shibboleth-palyanitsya/
Stern, D. L., R. Klemko, and R. Dixon. 2022. War impels many in Ukraine to abandon Russian language and cul-
ture. The Washington Post, April 12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/12/ukrainians-abandon-
russian-language

600
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Wartime language preferences: The shift in language use in


Odessan online media

Panel contribution

Mrs. Inna Kabanen 1 , Mr. Francesco Bressan 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Verona

The city of Odessa has always had a special status both geopolitically and linguistically. The ‘language of Odessa’
(Одесский язык) is known to be a unique phenomenon in the linguistic landscape, being a mix of various
languages with a Russian superstrate. Statistically, the city’s population is prevalently Russian-speaking, the
fact prominently reflected in online communication (websites, online news media, social media) regarding the
city. However, since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, this has drastically changed.
Using Odessan online media content (vgorode.ua – Odesa, related Facebook pages, and users’ comments) as pri-
mary research material, this study illustrates how the discourse and language use (Russian vs. Ukrainian) have
changed following the crisis. We focus on this particular web content because it has been subject to our analysis
and observations over an extended period of time in the framework of a research project that concentrated on
the language of Odessa. Thus, the comparison between the current and the past situation is made possible.
Over the past years, the content published by vgorode.ua – Odesa (including the users’ comments) has been
prevalently in Russian, but since February 2022, the use of Ukrainian language has increased significantly.
The study is ongoing, and its goal is (1) to demonstrate a possible correlation between the type of online content
and the preferred language (Russian or Ukrainian) and (2) to analyse whether the overall shift in language use
has taken place in all types of content in a similar way. Furthermore, we aim to illustrate the use of the language
of Odessa in this context.

601
Language creativity in
everyday Japanese
discourse (organized by
Andrew Barke, Momoyo
Shimazu)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Creating Public Discourses with Personal Expressions in


Japanese Linguistic Landscapes

Panel contribution

Prof. Momoyo Shimazu 1 , Prof. Andrew Barke 1


1. Kansai University

Over the past few decades, linguistic landscapes have got more attentions from researchers in pragmatics in re-
lation to the features of messages they convey (Backhaus, 2007; Cenoz & Gorter, 2006; Landry & Bourhis, 1997;
Long, 2014). For example, Long (2014: 1-2) defines linguistic landscapes in Japan as visual messages in written
languages and identifies their pragmatic functions. In his study, Long assumes that linguistic landscapes are
addressed to an unspecified number of people in public and their purpose is not aimed for private communica-
tion with a specific individual. However, visual messages on linguistic landscapes, when placed in a particular
location, can also be considered as “subjective representations rather than objective physical environment”
(Leeman & Modan, 2009: 2).
This study examines “warning signs” among linguistic landscapes in Japan - handwritten notes that have been
left in public places, with a specific focus on the creative use of warning signs in a more personal communicative
style. Such signs create public discourses. Since the meaning of expressions employed by speakers is constructed
with the audience in the “here and now” of actual communication (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73), handwritten
notes left in public places become a mutual interaction and cooperative constructive activity with invisible and
unspecified recipients. Those exchanges sustain the public space beyond time and they would have some kind
of effect on the recipients, or people who read them.
In this study, we will qualitatively analyze and describe specific examples of warning signs, in order to highlight
the diversity of warning signs and bring the linguistic landscape picture into focus as a whole. The results of
the study reveal that such discourses of warning appear to allow the creators of the notes to 1) include their
own personal feelings in addition to the direct warning itself, 2) convey consideration, politeness, humor, per-
ception, beliefs, stories, etc., to readers through these personal messages and 3) reveal their own behavioral
characteristics and attitudes as an active participant in Japanese society. The findings clearly suggest that lin-
guistic landscapes serve as a way of making us aware of, and understanding public discourses, and offer an
alternative method of creating different kinds of relationships and interactions with others.
References:
Backhaus, P. (2007). Linguistic landscapes: Comparative study of urban multilingualism in Tokyo. Multilingual
Matters.
Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. L. (1990). Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social
Life. Annual review of anthropology, 19(1): 59–88.
Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2006). Linguistic landscape and minority languages. International Journal of Multilin-
gualism, 3: 67–80.
Landry, R. and Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Jour-
nal of Language and Social Psychology, 16: 23–49.
Leeman, J. & Modan, G. (2009). Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic
landscape. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(3): 332–362.
Long, D. (2014). Hibogowasha kara mita nihongo no kanban no goyōronteki mondai: Nihongo kyōiku ni okeru
“Gengo Keikan” no ōyō. Jinbungakuhou, 488: 1-22.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Creative language use during interpersonal talk and


storytelling: Accounts from a Japanese izakaya

Panel contribution

Dr. Todd Allen 1


1. Kansai University

Izakayas (‘pubs’) are ubiquitous in Japan and serve as a place for people to consume food and beverages. Cus-
tomers also use these social spaces to mitigate loneliness, foster relations with others in the community, and of-
ten serve as a ‘home away from home’ (Futamura & Sugiyama, 2017; Ohnishi et al., 2012). Language behaviours
performed in such contexts are both routine (e.g., greetings, ordering) and creative (e.g., interpersonal talk).
Although these places are critical to the community, limited research is available that has focused on the soci-
olinguistic activities that occur in these spaces. As a result, in this study, I examined instances of interpersonal
talk and storytelling that frequently occur in the drama series Shin’ya Shokudō (‘Midnight Diner’). Specifically,
using a sociopragmatic approach, I examined these social activities from micro, meso, and macro perspectives
as representations of everyday talk in a specific context (Haugh, Kádár, and Terkourafi, 2021). The results show
that interlocutors use a variety of strategies to be creative with their language use. For example, when telling
a joke, a male interlocutor used masculine forms of speech and deliberately changed his voice qualities to en-
act different characters in the anecdote. Furthermore, during moments of interpersonal talk, an interlocutor
used mockery to maintain their identity and protect themselves during a conflict (e.g., name-calling). Moreover,
interlocutors used different linguistic forms of speech at various times due to the relationship they share and
the topic of talk (e.g., shifts from polite to casual forms of speech). Overall, the study demonstrates the var-
ied forms of interactions that take place within an izakaya, and how interlocutors use language creatively to
achieve interactional goals (e.g., build rapport, reinforce identity, be humorous) in a specific context.
Futamura, T., & Sugiyama, K. (2018). The dark side of the nightscape: the growth of izakaya chains and the
changing landscapes of evening eateries in Japanese cities. Food, Culture & Society, 21(1), 101-117.
Haugh, M., Kádár, D. Z., & Terkourafi, M. (2021). The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ohnishi, M., Nakao, R., Kawasaki, R., Nitta, A., Hamada, Y., & Nakane, H. (2012). Utilization of bar and izakaya-
pub establishments among middle-aged and elderly Japanese men to mitigate stress. BMC Public Health, 12(1),
1-9.

604
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hard jacket with soft scarf: The language of Japan’s female


political leader Koike Yuriko

Panel contribution

Dr. Yoko Yonezawa 1


1. The University of Sydney

On 31 July 2016, Yuriko Koike was elected the Governor of Tokyo and became the first woman to lead Japan’s
capital. Since then, Koike has been described in numerous different ways, often with a combination of dis-
tinct attributes that indicate her capacity for hard and provocative argument while giving a soft and feminine
impression, such as ‘dressed as a woman but a hawkish man’ (BBC News 2016). Koike continues to portray her-
self as one who works in a ‘hard’ political arena, having previously experienced the role of Defence Minister,
but as having a ‘soft’ and ‘feminine’ character. Fashion journalists describe her fashion choices as ‘strategies’,
for example ‘wearing a hard jacket but making a soft impression with a coloured scarf and skirt’ (Gunchi 2017).
Readers of a women’s magazine describe Koike as miryokuteki ‘attractive’, shitashimiyasui noni oora ga kookyuu
‘(has a ) friendly but classy aura’ and ochitsuita shaberikata ‘(has a) calm way of speaking’.
Koike’s self-presentation is strongly supported by her language forms and structures. This study analyses Koike’s
authentic speech data, which are drawn from the Minutes of the National Diet Committee Meetings (cross-
referenced to the relevant videos to ensure verbatim speech), and recordings of her press conferences, both
quantitatively and qualitatively. The study investigates the speech strategies Koike uses to construct her public
persona which matches the way the public sees her.
The most intriguing findings of this study relate to Koike’s creative use of honorific forms. The result of a prelim-
inary analysis shows that Koike uses highly elaborate, multiple layers of addressee and referent honorific forms
in the same predicate, which sometimes involve so-called ‘incorrect’ combinations (see Shibamoto-Smith 2011).
This also involves the creative use of an ‘extra’ (syntactically unnecessary) accusative case particle o in pro-
ductive ‘humble’ referent honorific forms to make additional room for elaboration. She uses the ‘hyper-polite’
copula de-gozaru with the addressee honorifics -masu suffix much more often compared to male politicians in
the data (e.g., more than twice as often as Shinzo Abe and three times as often as Yoshihiko Noda).
In many ways, Koike’s speech style evokes the ongoing legacy of what is ideologically constructed as Japanese
women’s language (e.g., Nakamura 2014). In this sense, Koike enacts the macro-level demographic category
‘female’ (Bucholtz & Hall 2005: 585). At the same time, she also skillfully creates her public persona to present
herself as someone with a ‘demeanour’, ‘classy aura’ and ‘calm way of speaking’ while she talks about ‘hard’
content.
References
BBC News. 2016. Tokyo elects Yuriko Koike as first female governor. 01/08/2016. London.
Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse
Studies 7(4-5). 585-614.
Gunchi, Sayumi. 2017. Kioike Yuriko kikonashi no oogon ruuru. Tokyo: Fusosha.
Nakamura, Momoko. 2014. Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women’s language. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Shibamoto-Smith, Janet. 2011. Honorifics, “politeness,” and power in Japanese political debate. Journal of Prag-
matics 43(15). 3707-3719

605
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Japanese usernames on the internet: Creativity and


self-characterisation

Panel contribution

Dr. Xiangdong Liu 1


1. Western Sydney University

This paper examines Japanese naming practices on the internet. The data used for this study are usernames and
internet users’ comments collected from a Japanese news site – “Yahoo! Japan News”. While online communi-
cation has attracted considerable attention among linguists, most research so far has focused on what people
wrote on the internet when discussing creative language use (North, 2007) and identity construction (Matsuda,
2002). The study of how internet users name themselves is still scarce.
This study observed an eye-catching variety in Japanese usernames, many of which completely flout normal
cultural conventions for naming (Unser-Schutz, 2016). The usernames in the data present all the common pro-
cesses of new word formation in Japanese (Barešová & Zawiszová, 2013) and many go far beyond. For instance,
some contain only a single symbol/emoji or an adverb/adjective (e.g., モフモフ “fluffy”); some play with homo-
phonic Chinese characters (e.g., ⾼貴⾹麗者, literally meaning “a noble, sweet and beautiful person”, but sharing
the identical reading with 後期⾼齢者, literally meaning “later-stages elderly person”, a term used in Japan re-
ferring to people aged 75 and over); and some consist of a sentence (or more) (e.g., 酒だ��もってこい� “Sake!
Give me some sake!”).
Names reflect the naming person’s attitude or affective stance (Unser-Schutz, 2012) and can affect the named
person’s identity and personality (Harder, 1989). A username could mean more to and about the person than
his/her real name, since internet users normally name themselves. A username can become even more in-
formative when we examine, at the same time, what s/he posts. This study confirms that while people with
“softer” usernames are more likely to show sympathy or understanding toward the issue/person of concern
and to use polite language, people with “powerful” usernames tend to be more critical and aggressive and often
use impolite language.
This study concludes that Japanese usernames on the internet demonstrate the internet users’ knowledge level,
language creativity, and/or attitudes towards online communication and issues in their daily life. In other words,
usernames are indicators of self-image and self-characterization. Naming practices on the internet play an
important role in identity construction and indication.
References
Barešová, I., & Zawiszová, H. (2013). Creativity and Innovation in Word Formation by Japanese Young People.
Language Use and Linguistic Structure: Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistcs Colloquium, 3, 157-170.
Harder, K. B. (1989). Review “Naming and Identity: A Cross-Cultural Study of Personal Naming Practices by
Richard A. Alford”. American Anthropologist, 91, 473-474.
Matsuda, P. K. (2002). Negotiation of identity and power in a Japanese online discourse community. Computers
and Composition, 19, 39-55.
North, S. (2007). ‘The Voices, the Voices’: Creativity in Online Conversation. Applied Linguistics, 28(4), 538-555.
Unser-Schutz, G. (2016). Current trends in Japanese naming practices. The journal of psychology Rissho Univer-
sity, 16, 89-99.
Unser-Schutz, G. (2012). Interpreting names as values: Observing parents desires for children through names.
The journal of psychology Rissho University, 10, 1-8.

606
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Language creativity in business Japanese discourse between


native and non-native Japanese speakers

Panel contribution

Dr. Yun Meng 1


1. Niigata University

This presentation focuses on how linguistic resources are selectively chosen and utilized by native and non-
native Japanese speakers in creative and dynamic ways in their business workplace discourses (e.g., Drew and
John, 1992; Ikeda, 2005). The study investigates the challenges experienced by multinational subordinates in
making suggestions for improvement to their Japanese supervisors (formal style) and participating in small talk
with their Japanese supervisors (informal style). Formal and informal styles in business Japanese discourses
were compared and business Japanese interactions between native and non-native Japanese speakers in role-
playing conversational data were analysed (e.g., Coupland, 2000; Murata, 2014).
The results of the qualitative analysis are as follows:

• More instances of language creativity were observed in the informal style than the formal style, e.g.,
topic change, reconfiguring or reshaping social relationships (e.g., Nakayama, 2008; Murata, 2015).
• Non-native Japanese speakers (multinational subordinates) had more difficulties than native speakers
(Japanese supervisors) in linguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural competencies (e.g., Pomerantz and
Jenny, 2005). Nevertheless, both groups displayed the influence of the sociocultural norms of their native
country and language.
• Non-native Japanese speakers (multinational subordinates) revealed that they faced several challenges
while responding to chitchat.
• Adjustments by native Japanese speakers (Japanese supervisors) were found to be important for facili-
tating smooth interaction.

The results of this study suggest that special attention should be paid to the difficulties and problems encoun-
tered by international workers in linguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural competencies, in the field of sup-
port for career formation and job hunting. In addition, it is important to utilize animations and conversational
examples, or similar ones used in this research in classroom activities (e.g., Okada, 2013). Furthermore, we sug-
gest that considering the influence of multinational sociocultural norms and the conversational adjustments
made by Japanese superiors can be used as concrete examples to improve the working environment in the field
of cross-cultural management and communication training. Further details will be discussed in the presenta-
tion. (318 words)
References:
Coupland, Justine. (ed.) (2000) Small Talk. London: Longman
Drew, Paul and John, Heritage. (eds.) (1992) Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Setting. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ikeda, Tomoko. (2005). The interactional achievement of being “native” and “non-native” speakers: An analysis
of multiparty interactions between Japanese and international students. Crossroads of Language, Interaction
and Culture 6: pp.60-79.
Murata, Kazuyo. (2014) An empirical cross-cultural study of humour in business meetings in New Zealand and
Japan.
Journal of Pragmatics 60: pp.251-265.
Murata, Kazuyo. (2015) Relational Practice in Meeting Discourse in New Zealand and Japan. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.
Nakayama, Akiko. (2008) The Communication of Closeness in Japanese. Tokyo: Kuroshio Publishers.

607
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Okada, Yusuke. (2013). Prioritization: A formulation practice and its relevance for interaction in teaching and
testing contexts. Pragmatics and Language Learning 13: pp.55-77
Pomerantz, Anita. and Jenny Mandelbaum. (2005). Conversation analytic approaches to the relevance and uses
of relationship categories in interaction. In Kristen L. Fitch and Robert E. Sanders(eds.) Handbook of Language
and Social Interaction, pp.149-171. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

608
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“With reluctance, I humbly venture to say one thing”:


Creative use of Japanese honorifics in the performance of
linguistic rituals and Face Threatening Acts

Panel contribution

Prof. Andrew Barke 1 , Prof. Momoyo Shimazu 1


1. Kansai University

The assumption of a direct one-to-one mapping between honorific forms and the conveyance of politeness is
widespread and pervasive. However, a growing number of studies (e.g. Cook, 2011) have begun to provide
evidence that casts doubt on such ideologically based assumptions, arguing instead that patterns of use of hon-
orifics in real-world interactions suggest speaker motivations are much more varied and complex than tradi-
tional explanations have claimed.
To account for instances of honorific use that appear to have little direct connection with the conveyance of
politeness, this study assumes a social-constructivist perspective in which interlocutor creativity plays a crucial
role in the construction of social reality (Archakis & Papazachariou, 2008). Examples sourced from both ‘nat-
ural’ and dramatic representations of natural interactions among Japanese speakers are presented that show
evidence of referential and addressee honorific forms being used in creative and socio-pragmatically marked
ways for interactional functions other than the conveyance of politeness and/or respect. ‘Creativity,’ is described
by Boden (2001) as the “ability to come up with new ideas that are surprising yet intelligible, and also valuable in
some way” (p.95) and in relation to language use, it has the potential to play an important role in the reshaping
of relationships in dynamic ways (Jones 2016). The focus of this study is on the creative use of honorific forms
in two key aspects of relational work: the linguistic performance of relational rituals (Kádár 2017) and FTAs or
Face Threatening Acts.
Results of the study include the following:

• Non-adherence to linguistic norms concerning the ritualistic exchange of greetings that include honorific
forms traditionally associated with negative politeness was found to be used as a strategy to reduce social
distance rather than maintain or increase it between interlocutors;
• Addressee honorific shifts among intimates were found to mark shifts in stance rather than the expres-
sion of politeness, and led to the addressee to interpret them as being an indirect attempt to modify the
addressee’s behaviour;
• Instances of sonkeigo ‘respect forms’ and kenjōgo ‘humble forms’ were found to be used as a strategy to
strengthen rather than redress the force of Face Threatening Acts.

These results offer further evidence that speakers make use of linguistic forms in a variety of creative and
dynamic ways as they attempt to negotiate and transform the relationships they have with others, and Japanese
honorific forms are one of the tools speakers use in this creative process.
References:
Archakis, A., & Papazachariou, D. (2008). Prosodic cues of identity construction: Intensity in Greek young
women’s conversational narratives 1. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(5), 627-647.
Boden, M. A. (2001). ‘Creativity and knowledge’ in A. Craft, B. Jeffrey, and M. Leibling (eds.). Creativity in Edu-
cation. London: Continuum.
Cook, H. M. (2011). Are honorifics polite? Uses of referent honorifics in a Japanese committee meeting. Journal
of Pragmatics, 43(15), 3655-3672.
Jones, R. H. (2016). ‘Creativity and discourse analysis.’ In Jones, R. H. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language
and Creativity. Routledge (pp.61-77).

609
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Politeness, impoliteness and ritual. Cambridge University Press.

610
Language diversity and
homogeneity (organized
by Kazuko Tanabe, Yuko
Iwata)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Crossing, gender, and identity

Panel contribution

Dr. Yuko Iwata 1


1. Meiji University

The term ‘language crossing’ (or ‘code-crossing) refers to “the use of a language which isn’t generally thought to
‘belong’ to the speaker” (Rampton, 2019, p. 287). “Language crossing involves code alternation by people who
are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language that they are using (code-switching
into varieties that are not generally thought to belong to them)” (Rampton, 1995, p. 485). For example, London
teenagers from families who came to England from Pakistan or Jamaica speak Panjabi or Jamaican Creole in
addition to various varieties of English. They use all these codes in various ways within multiethnic social
networks to index various stances and identities (Rampton, 1995).
Unlike teenagers in big cities in Europe, language crossing is not a common phenomenon yet in Japan except for
those who have grown up using two or multiple languages since the number of immigrants whom the Japanese
government legally accepts is notoriously tiny. However, there exist people who ‘cross’ gender using onee ko-
toba, hyper-feminine language, or non-normative gendered speech in Japanese. They are gender-queer male
personalities. Onee kotoba is literally translated as ‘big sister’s speech/language’ (Maree, 2013) or defined as ef-
feminate speech variety (Maynard, 2016). The image of the trans-gendered onee has become a central character
in variety television programs and print media since the turn of this century.
This study investigates how gender-queer male personalities on Japanese TV programs ‘cross’ gender by using
onee kotoba to index their identities and stances. A discourse analysis was conducted to analyze conversational
data collected from Japanese variety television programs and written data from print media. The data analy-
sis demonstrates that gender-queer male personalities on TV programs have managed to construct a synthetic
sisterhood (Talbot, 1995) and that they often position themselves as women’s trusted advisor by linguistically
constructing a sense of ‘we-ness’ (Maree, 2013) through onee kotoba. Using onee kotoba helps them to evoke
a sense of gender for entertainment purposes. Furthermore, gender-queer male personalities often position
themselves as ‘others’, in other words, as those failing in both femininity and masculinity in Japanese society.
This positioning enables them to make their ‘sharp criticism’ attitude and harsh-tongued comments more ac-
ceptable.

612
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Diversification and leveling in the end of sentence expression


-ssu as a new honorific in Japanese

Panel contribution

Dr. Kazuko Tanabe 1


1. Japan Women’s University

This study sought to determine the extent to which the end-of-sentence expression -ssu, which has been noted
as a recent change in the Japanese language of young people, is spreading in general society by grammatical
item, gender, and age. Subsequently, aspects of whether the emergence of this -ssu constitutes diversification
or levelling in linguistic change in Japanese were analyzed.
Ssu is an abbreviation of the Japanese polite form ‘noun or adjective + desu’ (e.g. kore wa ringo desu ‘This is
an apple’), and was first used in university athletic clubs in the 1960s (Kuramochi: 2009). Nowadays, it is used
mainly by men, as well as for seniors in the workplace and university sports clubs. The range of use has been
expanded to include verbs. In this way, the polite form serves the function of conveying respect in a casual
atmosphere (Nakamura: 2020).
In this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted in 2021 on the usage of ssu, desu, and masu. The participants
were men and women in their 20s to 50s (250 people of each gender, 500 people in total) from all over Japan.
The questionnaire comprised 20 questions.
Below is an example of the questions (adjective + ssu).
What do you think about the underlined wording in the conversation below? ‘whether you use it or not’ in daily
life, please select one of the four options.
College Senior: ‘Oi, Nakamura, raigetsu atari sakkā dōkōkai no nomikai shinaika (Hey, Nakamura, why don’t we
have a soccer club drinking party next month)?’
Nakamura: ‘Sore wa ii-ssu-ne (That sounds good).’
(1) often use it (2) sometimes use it (3) hardly use it (4) never use it
Regarding desu, we asked about non-grammatical usages such as iku-desu, katta-desu, and kowareteiru- desu.
Among the results of this survey, those where two-way analysis of variance identified differences in acceptabil-
ity for each usage depending on age, gender, or a combination of both (interaction) are reported. The overall
trend is that the acceptability for men was generally higher than that for women in their 20s to 40s. Among
men, the acceptability for men in their 20s was higher than that for men in their 50s. This tendency was espe-
cially strong for non-grammatical forms such as tabeta-ssu-yo, nusumareta-ssu, iku-desu. The most prominent
of these in acceptability among men in their 20s was iku-desu, showing a large difference from women in their
20s and men in their 50s, indicating a notably higher level of acceptability in this group.
Based on the above, the use and acceptability of -ssu can be considered as resulting from a combination of
two contradictory linguistic changes: the emergence of new language of the youth)as part of the diversification
of the Japanese language versus a general process of levelling in the Japanese language from masu to desu, as
attested in the numerous examples of the ‘verb + desu’ form in materials from the Edo (1603~1867) and Meiji
(1868~1912) periods (Tanaka: 2008).

613
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring what are atypical and typical in modern Japanese:


Newspaper imperial honorifics and language policies

Panel contribution

Dr. Noriko Sugimori 1


1. Kalamazoo College

This presentation explores the fluidity of being typical and atypical in the Japanese language using newspaper
honorifics as a case. For this purpose, building on past studies (Sugimori 2010, 2016), the presentation examines
the diachronic change in honorific policies at the newspaper and national levels as well as the use of Japanese
imperial honorifics in newspapers representing different political slants in modern Japan.
A still-dominant discourse about the change in newspaper imperial honorifics is that special Chinese vocabulary
was used in Japanese newspapers for the imperial family members as honorifics until the end of World War
II, but that these imperial honorifics were replaced with simpler common alternatives in the postwar period
(Shimbun Kyokai 1947, Monbusho 1952). Although the simplification took place during the Allied Occupation of
Japan, the period of Japan’s unprecedented intense contacts with non-Japanese, the Occupation’s involvement
with this policy has not been explored deeply.
Language policies behind the simplification are found in Newspaper Publishers’ and Editors’ Association’s impe-
rial honorific simplification policy (Tsuda 1947) and the National Language Council’s Korekara no keigo [Forth-
coming Honorifics] (1952). This simplification is aligned with a broader process of homogenization and leveling
(Fischer 1999) of the Japanese language. However, various misrepresentations were found in these policy doc-
uments (Sugimori 2006, 2010, 2016): the policy documents referred to the more conservative honorific use as
simplification, suppressing more radical simplification of imperial honorifics by reporters that had taken place
in the aftermath of World War II. Grammarians who spread the discourse of simplified imperial honorifics made
the generalization of the use of imperial honorifics in newspapers based on their observation of several “typical”
reports of the emperor from the major national dailies such as The Asahi and The Yomiuri only (Nishida 1998),
of which the political slants tend to be neutral. Therefore, based on the understanding that language change
is driven by conflicting forces, more atypical newspapers with different political slants and national language
policies need to be incorporated into the diachronic analysis. For this reason, this presentation juxtaposes the
diachronic change in the use of imperial honorifics in national newspapers with two newspapers with political
slants in the extreme ends: The Jinja Shimpo [Shrine News Report], the organ of the Shinto community that aims
to maintain and spread the traditional language use, and The Akahata, which is the organ of the Japanese Com-
munist Party. Their honorific uses will be tested against the related national language policies. Furthermore,
the Occupation’s involvement is also examined by policy documents and memoirs by newspaper reporters.
Despite the fact that using honorifics for the imperial family is ubiquitous, the efforts to incorporate them in
historical sociolinguistic research in the postwar period were limited, with some exceptions (Satoh 2001, Azuma
2006, Sugimori 2010, 2011, 2016). However, the royal family system has been maintained in more than twenty
countries worldwide, influencing people’s perception and uses of hierarchical language use, and this research
deepens the understanding of language diversification and homogenization.

614
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender bias in teachers’ use of address terms across cultures,


languages, and educational contexts

Panel contribution

Ms. Aviv Orner 1 , Dr. Hadar Netz 2


1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. Tel Aviv University

Studies show that classroom discourse is saturated with gender biases, which affect students’ learning experi-
ences and shape their identities. Address terms are highly influenced by changes in social norms and are there-
fore useful for exposing gender biases (Phillips, 1990). In class, address terms are used by teachers not only
for designating speakers but also for additional instructional purposes, such as creating a friendly atmosphere
or managing discipline (Parkinson, 2020; Tainio, 2011). Previous studies mainly focused on terms addressed
to groups of students (e.g., ‘boys’), whereas individualized address terms and their contribution to gender con-
struction were rarely explored. Furthermore, most previous studies examined address terms in English, i.e., a
‘natural gender language’ (Stahlberg et al., 2007), whereas less is known about address terms in ‘grammatical
gender languages’ (ibid.), such as Hebrew. The current study addresses these gaps.
We analyze two corpora drawn from two different cultural and educational settings: 15 hours of English Lan-
guage Arts lessons in gifted classes in the US, and 30 hours of Hebrew Language Arts lessons in mainstream
classes in Israel. Data analysis reveals different frequencies in teachers’ use of address terms in the two cor-
pora: 1.6 address terms per hour in the US classes, vs. 3.3 terms per hour in the Israeli classes. Furthermore,
while in the US classes, boys and girls received address terms in similar frequencies, in the Israeli classes, boys
received significantly more address terms than girls. Interestingly, despite the apparent balance in the fre-
quency of terms addressed to girls and boys in the US, and despite the fact that English is a natural gender
language, gendered biases were actually found in both settings: In US classrooms, the most frequent address
term for boys was ‘sir’, which was used to express respect and appreciation, while girls were given diminutive
terms, such as ‘girl’ or ‘kiddo’. This finding may be indicative of a higher appraisal of gifted boys than of gifted
girls. In Israeli classes, boys were mostly called ‘cutie’, while girls were given a wider variety of terms, such
as ‘darling’ and ‘sweetie’. Importantly, ‘cutie’ was used mainly for managing discipline problems, which may
explain its high frequency specifically among Israeli boys.
In conclusion, the current analysis reveals that gender biases are present across diverse cultures, languages,
and educational settings. The reproduction of gender biases perpetuates educational gender inequality. The
findings of this study provide sociolinguistic and pragmatic evidence that the struggle for gender equality in
education is still underway and far from being complete.
References
Parkinson, J. (2020). On the use of the address terms guys and mate in an educational context. Journal of Prag-
matics, 161, 81-94.
Phillips, B. S. (1990). Nicknames and sex role stereotypes. Sex Roles, 23(5), 281-289.
Stahlberg, D., Braun, F., Irmen, L., & Sczesny, S. (2007). Representation of the sexes in language. Social commu-
nication, 163-187.
Tainio, L. (2011). Gendered address terms in reproach sequences in classroom interaction. Linguistics and
Education, 22(4), 330-347.

615
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘Face’-related Expressions in Historical Chinese Peking and


Teochew Opera Scripts

Panel contribution

Ms. Jiejun Chen 1 , Prof. Daniel Kadar 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3


1. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3.
University of Hamburg

In this study, we investigate the use of ‘face’-related expressions in historical Chinese data drawn from Peking
Opera and Teochew Opera scripts. Peking Opera is the most well-known type of Chinese opera, written in
variants of Mandarin spoken in Beijing and Hubei Province; Teochew Opera is a traditional drama written in
the Chinese Minnan Dialect. In a previous study (Chen et al., 2022), we found a significant difference between
‘face’-related expressions in the Minnan Dialect and Mandarin. On the basis of this result, we challenged the
long-held assumption of ‘face’ as a homogeneous concept in Chinese. We also pointed out that while in Mandarin
the expressions mian ⾯ and lian 脸 exist in a duality, there is only a single ‘face’-related expression, mian ⾯, in
the Minnan Dialect.
In the current paper, we started from the hypothesis that our previous outcome also applies to how ‘face’-related
expressions are used in historical Mandarin and Minnan corpora. To investigate this hypothesis, we collected
and categorised ‘face’-related expressions from 19 Peking Opera scripts and 19 Teochew Opera scripts, mainly
compiled during the Ming and Qing periods (1368–1912). The results of our investigation were consistent with
our previous research in that we found remarkable differences between ‘face’-related expressions in our his-
torical Mandarin and the Minnan Dialect corpora. However, our hypothesis was disconfirmed: we found that
in historical Minnan texts mian is used in a duality with another ‘face’-related expression, just like its Mandarin
counterpart: mian in historical Minnan co-exists with yan 颜, an expression which was found to convention-
ally describe physical face only in previous research. This outcome shows that ‘face’-related expressions can
significantly vary not only among various dialects of Chinese, but also diachronically. Furthermore, our re-
sults reveal that it may be worth investigating ‘face’-related expressions in historical data because historical
pragmatics provides new insights into the use of such expressions.

616
Learning and teaching
Chinese as a foreign
language: A
cross-cultural pragmatic
perspective (organized by
Fengguang Liu, Daniel
Kadar, Juliane House)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A contrastive study of speech act realisation between CFL


learners and Chinese native speakers

Panel contribution

Ms. Puyu Ning 1


1. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

A surge of research has been focusing on Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in recent years; however, little
attention has been given to the development of learners’ pragmatic competence. The current research aims to
explore the development of CFL learners’ ability to realise the speech acts of Apologise and Request (Edmondson
and House, 1981; Edmondson et al., 2022). I adopt a contrastive pragmatic perspective to examine the similarity
and difference in the speech act performance between young CFL learners and Chinese native speakers in a
similar age group.
The study is based on the data collected from CFL learners who are in their eighth grade at a Chinese-Hungarian
bilingual public school. The young CFL learners completed a perception assessment test and a discourse com-
pletion task. I compare these test results with the parallel data produced by a comparable group of Chinese
students in Beijing, who completed the same tests. The data are coded according to the Apologise and Request
realisation strategies drawn from the Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP; Blum-
Kulka et al., 1989). I find that CFL learners perceive less necessity in performing the speech acts under certain
circumstances than Chinese native speakers. The statistics show that young native speakers use slightly more
strategies in realising the speech acts than the CFL learners. However, young native speakers use significantly
more address terms and more diverse strategies in the performance of the speech acts. The findings not only
identify the most salient linguistic features of the Apologise and Request among the young speakers, but also
have strong implications for CFL education.
Keywords: Chinese as a foreign language; discourse completion task; Apologise; Request; young learners
Reference:
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Edmondson, W., & House, J. (1981). Let’s talk, and talk about it: A pedagogic interactional grammar of English.
Baltimore: Urban and Schwarzenberg.
Edmondson, Willis, Juliane House, and Dániel Z Kádár. 2022. Expressions, Speech Acts and Discourse: An Inter-
actional Pedagogic Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

618
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Preliminary Study on Footing Selection and Ritualised


Context Determination

Panel contribution

Dr. Song Yulong 1


1. Nanjing University

In recent years, using ritual theory to explore the phenomenon of linguistic politeness has gained more and
more attention. However, current research tends to default to the fact that the data analysed occurred in rit-
ualised contexts while pays little attention to the problem of determining the ritualized contexts. With data
collected from diplomatic notes between China (the Qing Regime) and United States in 19th century, this pa-
per explores the functions of “footing” in determining ritualised contexts and the pragmatic rationale behind
it through the lens of historical pragmatics. The inquiry reveals that in the dyadic context of diplomatic notes,
where both the speaker and the hearer are explicit, there is a clear “shift” of footing through the address terms
used by the interlocutors to refer to themselves and others. The study concludes that footing plays an impor-
tant role in determining whether a context is ‘ritualsed’ or not. By investigating the pragmatic rational behind
the relationship between footing and ritualised context, this paper intends to increase the operability of ritual
theory in practice.

619
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Chinese as a Foreign Language – A New Pragmatic Pathway

Panel contribution

Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Daniel Z. Kadar 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3


1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 3.
University of Hamburg

In this lecture, we present an alternative view on Chinese as a foreign language, which allows us both to in-
vigorate the field of Chinese as foreign language and provide innovative insights into intercultural pragmatics.
We introduce a methodological take through which one can identify often unnoticed pragmatic failures in the
Chinese classroom, which is difficult to capture with traditional methodologies of foreign language learning
and teaching. This methodological take also allows us to view intercultural interaction in the global Chinese
classroom beyond sweeping overgeneralisations, such as “Chinese speakers are face-sensitive”, i.e. in a bottom-
up and language anchored way. By way of illustration, we report on both a major applied linguistic project
conducted at Dalian University of Foreign Languages under the lead of the first speaker, as well as a new book
project of the second and third speaker (House and Kádár, 2023). As a case study, we will present a recent
empirical research dedicated to the interactional act of disciplinary critcising in Chinese classroom.
Reference
House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2023. Contrastive Pragmatics and Language Learning. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press.

620
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Criticising in Chinese and English Classroom Contexts: A


Contrastive Pragmatic Inquiry

Panel contribution

Mrs. Wenrui Shi 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Abstract: In the research presented in this talk, we examine how criticising is conventionally realised in class-
room contexts in the typologically distant Chinese and U.S. American English linguacultures. We believe that
this comparison is of particular interest because studying realisation patterns of critcising allows us to unearth
deep-seated differences between the ways in which speakers of Chinese and U.S. American English produce
and perceive this face-threatening act. We devote special attention to instances of disciplinary criticising in
classroom setting, i.e. cases when a lecturer restores the order of a classroom after a breach of appropriate
behaviour.
We propose a new bottom-up and speech act-anchored approach for the study of critcising. While a body of
previous studies defined criticising as a speech act, we ourselves define criticising as an interactional move,
in the spirit of of Edmondson (1981) and Edmondson and House (1981). Our research builds on a previous
study (Liu et al. forthcoming), which has shown that instances of Chinese disciplinary criticising are difficult
for foreign learners of Chinese to recognise.

621
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sympathise in Chinese: A Contrastive Pragmatic Inquiry

Panel contribution

Ms. He Cang 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

In this talk we examine how the speech act Sympathise is realised by foreign learners of Chinese and native
Chinese speakers. We interpret the speech act Sympathise by following Edmondson et al. (2023) as a speech act
used when hearing that something unfortunate has happened to the addressee. Symphatise is an attitudinal
non-future-related speech act, which often manifests itself in ritual forms. This highly ritualised and formulaic
nature of Symphatise can make it difficult for learners of a foreign language to realise this speech act. This
is all the more so because realisations of this speech act often manifest themselves in the form of expressions
popularly associated with other speech acts, such as so-called ‘apology formulae’ in English. Considering that
Symphatise in Chinese has not received sufficient attention, the present study will fill a knowledge gap, by
focusing on the L2 implications of this topic.
Reference
Edmondson, W., House, J., Kádár, D.Z. 2023. Expressions, Speech Acts and Discourse: A Pedagogic Interactional
Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

622
Let the face respond:
Conversational functions
of facial gestures in
turn-beginnings of
responsive actions
(organized by Alexandra
Groß, Carolin Dix)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A computational approach to embodied responsive actions in


multimodal video analysis

Panel contribution

Ms. Clara Lachenmaier 1 , Dr. Kathrin Weber 2


1. Universität Bielefeld, 2. Friedrich Schiller University Jena

In recent years, conversation analytic research has been pervasively affected by the “embodied turn” (Nevile
2015; Mondada 2019). In this framework, participants organize linguistic practices not only through language
but through the mobilization of a range of resources including gestures and other aspects of bodily conduct,
e.g., body postures or movements, in so-called “multimodal packages” (Hayashi 2005). The interest in how
social interaction works multimodally has prompted the study of video recordings of naturally occurring ac-
tivities, aimed at understanding how participants achieve the complex coordination of their actions (Mondada
2006). Methodologically, conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis frameworks remain pre-
dominantly qualitative research fields. Thereby, embodied practices are analyzed based on the basis of indi-
vidual examples at great expense. Quantitative analyses are not yet feasible due to the lack of automatization
of gesture and facial resources. Moreover, due to the predominantly manual annotation in this field, the re-
searcher has a high impact on how gestures are defined and tagged.
Attempts have been made to recognize facial gestures using supervised Machine Learning. Cohen et al. (2003)
used facial landmarks as features to predict facial emotion expressions. In our talk, we would like to present
a computational approach on automatically tagging data for multimodal resources in interactional video data.
In particular, we look at how facial gestures like eyebrow raisings can be tagged automatically in order to en-
able the analysis of embodied conduct in larger corpora. To this end, we apply Mediapipe, an end-to-end neural
network-based model for inferring an approximate 3D mesh representation of a human face from a single
camera input (Kartynnik et al. 2019). We hope to show that computational approaches can support qualita-
tive analysis in the methodological preparation of data through precise measurements of the eyebrow position
and the application of Machine Learning algorithms. On the other hand, we also discuss the limitations of the
technology when it comes to fine-grained analysis of interactional functions.
References
Cohen, Ira; Sebe, Nicu; Garg, Ashutosh; Chen, Lawrence. S. & Huang, Thomas S. (2003). Facial expression recog-
nition from video sequences: temporal and static modeling. In Computer Vision and image understanding, 91(1-
2), 160-187.
Hayashi, Makoto (2005): Joint turn construction through language and the body: Notes on embodiment in co-
ordinated participation in situated activities.In Semiotica 156, 21-53.
Kartynnik, Yury; Ablavatski, Artsiom; Grishchenko, Ivan, & Grundmann, Matthias (2019): Real-time facial sur-
face geometry from monocular video on mobile GPUs. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06724; last access 22/10/2022]
Mondada, Lorenza (2006): Video recording as the reflexive preservation and configuration of phenomenal fea-
tures for analysis. In: Knoblauch, H., Raab, J., Soeffner, H.-G., Schnettler, B. (eds.). Video Analysis. Bern: Lang,
51-68.
Mondada, Lorenza (2019): Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multi-
modality and multisensoriality in social interaction. In Journal of Pragmatics 145: 47-62.
Nevile, Maurice (2015): The embodied turn in research on language and social interaction.In Research on Lan-
guage and Social Interaction 48.2: 121-151.

624
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Facial gestures in multimodal feedback signals: Comparing


response tokens in spoken and signed conversation

Panel contribution

Dr. Jana Hosemann 1 , Dr. Anastasia Bauer 1 , Dr. Sonja Gipper 1 , Mr. Tobias-Alexander Herrmann 1
1. University of Cologne

Feedback is omnipresent in human interaction and reflects interlocutors’ perception and monitoring of the
success (or potential failure) of communication. Feedback signals – for instance, in the form of response to-
kens (Gardner 2001) such as English yeah or mhm – serve to coordinate interaction, direct the advancement of
narrative, manage attention and establish common ground (e.g., Tolins & Fox Tree 2014). While there is a consid-
erable amount of literature on response tokens in spoken languages (e.g. Dingemanse & Floyd 2014; Knudsen
et al. 2020), research on response tokens in sign languages (Coates & Sutton-Spence 2001; Mesch 2016) is ex-
tremely sparse to date. Moreover, both signers and speakers may demonstrate forms of engagement through
visible cues (e.g., gaze, body orientation, facial gestures) with or without providing vocal feedback, an area that
is less well studied.
We aim to take a first step at filling this gap in this paper by comparing the use of facial gestures constituting or
accompanying response tokens in the discourse of speakers and signers in corpora representing four different
languages and lingua-cultures: spoken German, spoken Russian, German Sign Language (DGS) and Russian Sign
Language (RSL). We use data from the German Sign Language (DGS) Corpus (Hanke et al. 2020), Russian Sign
Language (RSL) Corpus (Burkova 2015), multimodal video corpus of spoken Russian (Kibrik & Fedorova 2018)
and a video corpus of spoken German (unpublished).
The current study provides a first cross-modal and cross-linguistic look at feedback mechanisms in signed and
spoken languages. With this study we call the linguists’ attention to the multimodal nature of feedback signals
as a crucial tool for monitoring mutual understanding.
References
Burkova, S. 2015. Russian Sign Language Corpus. [http://rsl.nstu.ru/] (accessed 27 May 2022).
Coates, J. & R. Sutton-Spence. 2001. Turn-taking patterns in deaf conversation. J. Socioling. 5, 507–529.
Dingemanse, M. & S. Floyd. 2014. Conversation across cultures. In N. J. Enfield, P. Kockelman & J. Sidnell (Eds.),
Cambridge handbook of linguistic anthropology, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 434-464.
Gardner, R. 2001. When listeners talk: Response tokens and listener stance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hanke, T., Schulder, M. Konrad, R. & E. Jahn 2020. Extending the Public DGS Corpus in Size and Depth. In Pro-
ceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language
Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives. Mar-
seille: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 75-82.
Kibrik А. & Fedorova О. 2018. An empirical study of multichannel communication: Russian Pear Chats and
Stories // Psihologija. Žurnal vysšej školy ekonomiki 15(2), 191–200.
Knudsen B, Creemers A. & A.S. Meyer. 2020. Forgotten little words: How backchannels and particles may facil-
itate speech planning in conversation? Front. Psychol. 11, 593671.
Mesch J. 2016. Manual backchannel responses in signers’ conversations in Swedish Sign Language. Language
& Communication 50, 22–41.
Tolins, J. & J. E. Fox Tree. 2014. Addressee backchannels steer narrative development. Journal of Pragmatics 70,
152–64.

625
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal responsive actions: Turn-initial particles and


raised eyebrows in video-mediated interaction

Panel contribution

Mrs. Marina Reis de Souza 1


1. Hildesheim University

This paper addresses the role of facial gestures in social interaction and how they are accompanied by vocal
conduct at the beginning of responsive actions. Participants can mobilize one or several multimodal resources
simultaneously to respond to a question. Previous studies have shown the significance of pre-turn or turn-
initial facial displays in responses (Kaukomaa et al., 2013, 2014). Likewise, turn-initial particles such as oh and
well have been widely investigated in responsive turns. Some turn-initial particles have been described as
being backward-looking, that is, they reveal information about the previous turn (Heritage, 1998, 2015, 2018;
Schegloff & Lerner, 2009). Nonetheless, the co-occurrence of turn-initial particles and facial gestures, such as
raised eyebrows in responsive actions is still understudied, particularly in video-mediated interaction (VMI).
In this type of setting, besides speech, the face is one of the main resources available to interactants, which
is defined as the “talking head” configuration (Licoppe & Morel, 2012). Therefore, I analyze how the face and
turn-initial particles are used as multimodal resources in responsive turns. The paper draws on Skype calls
taken from the corpus of video-mediated English as a Lingua Franca conversations (ViMELF, 2018). These calls
are dyadic interactions between university students of different nationalities. I adopt multimodal conversation
analysis to show how participants adjust to a video-mediated setting and to investigate how responsive actions
are designed as multimodal Gestalts (Mondada, 2016). My contribution focuses on a collection of cases in which
the turn-initial particle oh co-occurs with raised eyebrows to respond to “inapposite” questions (Heritage, 1998).
References
Heritage, J. (1998). Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society, 27(3), 291–334.
Heritage, J. (2015). Well -prefaced turns in English conversation: A conversation analytic perspective. Journal
of Pragmatics, 88, 88–104.
Heritage, J. (2018). Turn-initial particle in English: The cases of oh and well. In J. Heritage & M.-L. Sorjonen
(Eds.), Between Turn and Sequence: Turn-initial particles across languages (Vol. 31, pp. 155–189). John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Kaukomaa, T., Peräkylä, A., & Ruusuvuori, J. (2013). Turn-opening smiles: Facial expression constructing emo-
tional transition in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 21–42.
Kaukomaa, T., Peräkylä, A., & Ruusuvuori, J. (2014). Foreshadowing a problem: Turn-opening frowns in con-
versation. Journal of Pragmatics, 71, 132–147.
Licoppe, C., & Morel, J. (2012). Video-in-Interaction: “Talking Heads” and the Multimodal Organization of Mobile
and Skype Video Calls. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 45(4), 399–429.
Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Soci-
olinguistics, 20(3), 336–366.
Schegloff, E. A., & Lerner, G. H. (2009). Beginning to Respond: Well -Prefaced Responses to Wh -Questions.
Research on Language & Social Interaction, 42(2), 91–115.
ViMELF. (2018). Corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations. Birkenfeld: Trier Univer-
sity of Applied Sciences. Retrieved from: http://umwelt-campus.de/case/

626
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The use of silent mouth openings to show upcoming


intervention in triadic screen mediated gaming interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Lydia Heiden 1


1. ICAR Lab

The human face plays an important role in communication as facial expressions can convey various information
to frame the verbal turn they accompany, precede or follow. They can also display how a co-participant’s current
verbal turn (or other action) is perceived and/or understood (e.g. Gudmundsen & Svennevig, 2020). Facial
expressions also play a significant role in the systematics of turn taking (e.g. Duncan & Niederehe, 1974) but
have yet been far less analysed in detail than other bodily behaviour such as changes in posture and head
movements.
Our French data come from three party interactions in a collaborative digital game where the players can com-
municate via their webcam image representations. This ‘talking head’ format (Morel & Licoppe, 2009) gives
only partial access to a participant’s body. As the most visible part of the player is their head, mimics represent
a communication device that is accessible with the least possible effort (since the head is by default centred
in the webcam frame, whereas for example hand gestures have to be realised in a particular, and not always
natural, zone in order to make them visible for the other participants). In the context of this collaborative game,
the players need to jointly make decisions to achieve their shared goal. Thus, while discussing and arguing, they
constantly need to display their (dis)agreement. The triadic interaction is regularly organised around dyadic
exchange which the third participant has to find their ‘way back’ into.
In the present talk, I will show one particular way of ‘coming back into a discussion’ in which turn-initial facial
movements play an essential role: the player who tries to bring themselves into the discussion comes to a rather
neutral (relaxed) facial expression, which can express concentrated listening. Reacting to a prior turn, they
either ask for more information that is needed to be able to do a particular action and that had been expected to
be given by the co-participants, or they give additional information on a topic at hand which could influence the
decision to make on it. To prepare or announce their upcoming intervention, they open their mouth, sometimes
in combination with audible inbreath, but due to the screen mediated interaction context, breathing is not
always audible to the co-participants.
By conducting a sequential analysis of three examples, chosen from a corpus of six different groups of players, I
will show how this mouth opening followed by a speech fragment is sequentially treated and allows the player
to make themselves heard.
Duncan, S., & Niederehe, G. (1974). On Signalling That It’s Your Turn to Speak. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 10, 234–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(74)90070-5
Gudmundsen, J., & Svennevig, J. (2020). Multimodal displays of understanding in vocabulary-oriented se-
quences. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v3i2.114992
Morel, J., & Licoppe, C. (2009). La vidéocommunication sur téléphone mobile—Quelle mobilité pour quels
cadrages ? Réseaux, 4(n° 156), 165–201.

627
Magical speech acts
(organized by Carsten
Levisen, Nico
Nassenstein)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A hierarchy of supernatural languages: Structure, function,


and evolutionary dynamics

Panel contribution

Dr. Aritz Irurtzun 1


1. CNRS-IKER

Over the last decades intensive research has been done on language evolution and change, uncovering some of
the biases that humans act upon when acquiring their languages. Experimental work in this area is generally
done with the use of conlangs and the iterated learning paradigm (Kirby, 2017; Raviv et al., 2019). I propose
a characterization of supernatural ritual languages as ‘natural conlangs’, comparable to the ‘laboratory
conlangs’.
I present the Ritual Language DataBase (RLDB), which provides a typology of such languages around the
world. A comparative analysis of the RLDB uncovers patterns and the significant role of users, functions,
and alternate languages when shaping the structure of linguistic practices seeking the performance of a
supernatural/magical act (cf. Wheelock, 1982). The RLDB, which at the moment comprises data from over 270
linguistic practices related to supernatural rituals across the world, systematically documents 46 features of
each practice (the function; user type, use of an alternate language…). The variables display different degrees
of association showing that the linguistic features of ritual languages are not distributed randomly but tend
to cluster in patterned ways, which suggests the effect of universal biases. This is a remarkable fact, given
the fragmentary and uneven evidence reported in the ethnographical and linguistic records where these
languages are attested.

From this, a hierarchy of supernatural ritual languages can be established as a tension between the search for
Strangeness (the more the language employed departs from the normal human ‘norm’, the most plausible the
magical powers of the user look to the community) and Learnability (the more systematic and predictable a lan-
guage is, the easiest its replication by a next generation). On one extreme of the hierarchy we would have the
shamanic practices, archetypically represented by the Siberian shamans and their idiosyncratic speech which
constitutes a ‘theatre of strangeness’ (Eliade, 1951). They do not show clear patterns of grammaticalization (but
are full of extreme renderings with high pitch, falsettos, ventriloquism, animal sounds…), and the particulari-
ties of each linguistic practice typically die with the shaman. At the other extreme, we would have community-
based practices which alter the local language with special lexicons derived via transformation rules (e.g. the
antonymic patterns of the Tenda (Ferry, 1981)). In a middle point are the liturgical languages employed by desig-
nated individuals of established religious societies –priests, etc.– (Latin…) which require explicit teaching (with
L2 effects). As a matter of fact, ritual languages show again that ‘larger communities create more systematic
languages’ (Raviv et al., 2019).
References
Eliade, Mircea. 1951. Le chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase. Paris: Payot.
Ferry, M-P. 1981. Les ganles tecreses des Ndéta. Objets & mondes 21. 173–176.

Kirby, Simon. 2017. Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
24(1). 118–137.

Raviv, Limor, Antje Meyer & Shiri Lev-Ari. 2019. Larger communities create more systematic languages.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286(1907). 20191262.

629
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Wheelock, Wade T. 1982. The problem of ritual language: From information to situation. Journal of the Ameri-
can Academy of Religion L(1). 49–72.

630
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Bata blessings: Ancestors’ words in Kazakh cultural world

Panel contribution

Dr. Eva-Marie Dubuisson 1


1. Nazarbayev University

The bata tradition in Central Asia is one where older relatives pass along their blessings and wishes to the
younger generation. Bata blessings may be given in a wide variety of social contexts, ranging from a daily
family meal, to life-cycle ritual gatherings or events (toi). Bata blessings take the form of statements in the
grammatical third person imperative, where the English language equivalent might read, “Let it be so.”
Blessings might be one short line, such as “Zholyng bolsyn” (may your road be [good]) when a relative departs
on a journey. They may also be poems constructed of many stanzas, such as the blessings pilgrims receive
from shrine caretakers at sacred sites throughout the region, where the prophecy of a saint is shared by an
intermediary to his or her many ‘descendants’. In this paper, I present bata as an oral tradition of a cultural
world, where the blessings of ancestors and living relatives are passed to families and loved ones, in order to
provide support and care, as well as a proper upbringing (tarbiye).

In this paper I will explain the tradition as a whole in the context of Kazakhstan, giving several examples from
various cultural contexts ranging from home, to life cycle celebration, and pilgrimage. I will also take exam-
ples from broader national and social media contexts, where bata is shared and discussed by contemporary
musicians, artists, and cultural or political leaders. I argue that the performative efficacy of these ‘words of the
ancestors’ should be seen not only in individual contexts; rather, it is the pragmatics of the tradition as a whole
that matters. Ancestors’ words contain a valuable repository of wisdom and care, which remains necessary in
the fractured post-socialist and semi-authoritarian environment of Post-Soviet Kazakhstan, where the dynam-
ics of power and authority can be volatile, and where maintaining a shared sense of the proper ‘way forward’
across this cultural world seems urgent. The bata tradition of blessings and wishes is a canonical – and in the
tradition of Malinowski’s gardens, perhaps even magical - way in which words can truly shape the world.
The context for this paper is based on many years of research on Kazakh culture and oral traditions in over
six different regions of Kazakhstan (2016-2018 supported as part of a Marie Curie CIG grant from the European
Commission, and 2019-2020 sponsored by a Social Policy Research Grant from Nazarbayev University). Social
text examples presented here come from a current and ongoing collaborative project with a team of doctoral
students and undergraduate research assistants at Nazarbayev University.

631
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Central Himalayan Ritual as Magical Speech

Panel contribution

Dr. John Leavitt 1


1. Université de Montréal

A fundamental aspect of human language is the ability, or necessity, to refer to states of affairs that are not
empirically perceived, and perhaps have never been empirically perceived. This is the fifth of Charles Hockett’s
design features of human language, which he labels “displacement”. J.R.R. Tolkien proposes that since the lin-
guistic isolation of aspects of the world dissociates qualities from their bearers, mere recombination of words
creates new virtualities: “The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic
that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift
water. If it could do the one it could do the other; it invariably did both.” Once situations and beings outside
the empirical have been posited, by language and/or another sign system, language can be used to interact with
these virtualities “as if” they were perceived actualities; for serious participants, they are perceived actualities.
It could be argued that much of what we think we recognize as “ritual” is the effort toward such interaction,
through movement, ostension, and words.
Much of the literature on magical language has concentrated on specifically performative, indeed illocution-
ary, instances, as Roman Jakobson’s exemplification of the “magic, incantatory function” with a third-person
imperative: “May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu.” But as he himself states, this is a means of operating “some kind
of conversion of an absent or inanimate ‘third person’ into an addressee of a conative message.” Here I will
argue that such conversion depends less on the specific linguistic form than on the total situation of speaking.
It can involve what are linguistically perfectly ordinary third-person narration, second-person address, and
first-person expression.
The Central Himalayan region of northern India offers particularly transparent and clearly articulated rituals
of interaction with virtual beings to whom is attributed the ability to help and to harm human projects. The
ritual progresses through clearly marked stages: the virtual landscape and chronotope are put in place and the
regional gods invited to be present, provoking their apparent presence; stories of high and ancient gods are
then told to these local gods in the third person; local gods’ own stories are told to them in the second person;
and finally they respond in the first person, allowing a direct dialogue with otherwise occult forces. This whole
process is part of transforming the emotions of these beings, making them happy; their happiness in turn has
effects in the perceived world.

632
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Divine punishment and magic in Japan - an analysis of


tenbatsu and kami -

Panel contribution

Dr. Yuko Asano-Cavanagh 1 , Prof. Robert Cavanagh 1


1. Curtin University

In times of global uncertainty, people can experience powerlessness. This is exacerbated by calamities such as
pandemics, earthquakes, floods, bush fires, and wars. For some, these unfavourable events and incidents seem
unpredictable and uncontrollable. In contrast, others seek to identify causes and reasons.
In the case of Japan, when people face misfortunes, it is common for them to say tenbatu ga kudatta. This expres-
sion can be roughly translated as ‘we are being divinely punished’. In using the phrase, people are reflecting
on their past and accepting the negative incident as punishment. The phrase can lead to people correcting their
actions and behaviours. For example, parents use the expression when disciplining children. Tenbatsu can be
roughly translated as ‘divine punishment’, and cultural outsiders may approximate the meaning. However, the
problem of lack of precision in translation remains, including the source of the divine punishment. In Japan,
the divine entities who are responsible for administering the punishment are called kami. According to bilin-
gual dictionaries, the translation of kami is typically God. However, God is rooted in Christianity, while kami
originated from Shintō. Additionally, Japanese people believe that there are as many as eight million kami who
govern people’s lives by helping people and sometimes by punishing them. Unsurprisingly, the meaning of
kami is not the same as that assigned to the monotheistic God which is generally understood as single entity by
English speakers.
This paper investigates the meaning of kami and tenbatsu ga kudaru using the reductive paraphrase method-
ology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. The study directs attention to the religious life of the
Japanese and discusses the semantic and pragmatic differences between the Western understanding of God and
its Japanese counterpart: kami. The corpus of naturally occurring examples illuminates the polytheistic nature
of kami. The study also shows that the phrase tenbatsu ga kudaru is one of the powerful magical speech act
verbs which control and discipline Japanese people’s daily lives.

633
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emoji spells as speech acts

Panel contribution

Prof. Ellen Hurst 1


1. University of Cape Town

The phenomenon of emoji spells is a relatively recent development among modern followers of paganism. A
digital practice, it involves the creation of a string of emojis to cast a spell, and is utilised on digital platforms
such as blogs and messaging apps. The spells include the use of specific emojis such as the crystal ball or a girl
with a raised hand to signal the magical intention. Sharing the spell with a community is intended to cement
the intention. Users argue that the use of emoji spells can ‘act as a powerful manifestation of shared thoughts
and emotional energy’ (https://zoealderton.medium.com/emoji-spells-as-modern-witchcraft-bec126abfed0), or
alternatively the practice can be seen as simply having fun with a ‘cheerful visual lexicon’ (ibid).
This paper firstly introduces the phenomenon of emoji spells, presenting examples from a dataset gathered from
online sources to demonstrate the typical structure of the spells and some commonly used symbols. The analysis
then applies speech act theory to the dataset to examine the range of illocutionary acts being undertaken.
The analysis shows how the majority of the emoji spells act as requests, directed at an external force (the uni-
verse), and appear to be expressed externally to achieve actual change in the reality of the spell caster. De-
veloped as a community practice within an online community, the shared symbols and structure of the emoji
spells mean that each illocutionary act is understood as intended by other members of the community. The
discussion considers how emoji spells may therefore function as a ritual to change the world through the magic
of intention.

634
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Love charms and curses at the beach: Approaching Mijikenda


verbal magic in a Kenyan mass tourism context

Panel contribution

Dr. Nico Nassenstein 1


1. JGU Mainz

Kenyan beaches are known as a popular site for sex tourism, especially for European women, an essential
component of what Meiu (2017) calls powerful “ethno-erotic economies.” While the sociolinguistic context
of this environment is well researched, little to nothing has been said about the power of verbal expressions
in bonding strategies on the coast. Between hotel castles and all-inclusive packages, young men (often
disparagingly referred to as “beach boys”) attempt to attract the attention of potential clients, using love spells
to secure a woman’s interest or spells and curses to inflict harm or retain clients. An interview excerpt in
Omondi & Ryan (2017: 222) summarizes this as, “You can’t attract a tourist with nothing! You have to have
some spells to help you lure him in and confuse him into bringing money.” These common charms and
spells require regular visits to a mganga (sorcerer) and include artifacts such as amulets, aphrodisiacs, bodily
substances, empty bottles hung from trees - but also spoken words in certain contexts attributed with the
power to strengthen relationships between client and sex worker. In this presentation, I focus on “magical
speech acts” aspired to and performed by Mijikenda men (an umbrella term for various coastal ethnic groups
such as Digo, Rabai, Ribe, Giryama) and analyze ritualized language and its functions. Drawing on several
months of ethnographic research on the Kenyan coast since 2015, I analyze and compare love spells and
charms in the mass tourism sector through an ethnolinguistic lens, focusing on multilingual adaptations and
pragmatic (re)contextualization of Mijikenda magical utterances and familiar spells in languages such as Rabai
and Digo. I am interested in how these have been adapted to tourist encounters and whether similar speech
acts are associated with the same performative and transformative power as in surrounding villages. This
presentation is based on ongoing field research in the Rabai community conducted in collaboration with Laura
Seel (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Dennis Jira (Rabai Mpya, Krapf Museum).

References
Meiu, George Paul. 2017. Ethno-erotic economies: Sexuality, money, and belonging in Kenya. Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Nassenstein, Nico. 2022. Marginality, subversive language and sex tourism: Multilingual practices at the Kenyan
coast. Multilingual Margins 9,1: 101-116.
Omondi, Rose Kisia & Chris Ryan. 2017. Sex tourism: Romantic safaris, prayers and witchcraft at the Kenyan
coast. Tourism Management 58: 217-227.

635
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Magic as Real Virtuality?

Panel contribution

Prof. Adam Głaz 1


1. Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS), Lublin, Poland

In what is now a classic work, Malinowski (1923) frames the language of ritual magic in terms of Ogden and
Richards‘ semiotic triangle, whereby the linguistic symbol is linked with the referent through an activation of
a ritual, based on traditional belief. That ritual-and-belief sphere is hypothesized in this study to be a virtual
space as defined below.
Virtuality is understood here, not as virtual reality (i.e., an ”almost“ reality, a simulacrum) but as real virtuality,
a positive notion deriving from virtus ‘power to produce form or create a notion in the mind’ (cf. virtu or
virtue, both positive). The idea has been developed by Deleuze (2004) or Žižek (c. Wright 2004): virtuality is
felt, perceived, or taken as real as long as it remains virtual, or unactualized. This idea is considered here in
the context of contemporary cognitive linguistics: according to Langacker (2009), several categories of language
use, including metaphor, fictive motion, or perceived (vs. actual) change, are said to be virtual.
Analogy can thus perhaps be recognized between magical formulas and language use of the kinds listed by
Langacker, both operating within real virtuality. As examples I will use folk Polish magical incantations believed
to augment the growth and harvest of green peas and cabbage (Prorok 2017). For the incantations to be truly
magical, they have to virtual, located in what Malinowski identifies as ritual-and-belief and what is called here
virtual space. Similarly, virtual space is activated in non-magical language use, as in The telegraph poles get
taller through the valley (perceived change), where a certain non-actual status quo is taken as real by speakers.
Thus, both magical and non-magical instances of language use can be taken as real (they ”feel“ real), not despite
but because of the fact that they are located in virtual space (recall the positive sense of virtus as potentiality).
Malinowski’s account of magic and contemporary cognitivist account of non-magical linguistic symbolization
can both be captured in terms of virtuality. Does that mean that magic sends echoes even through non-magical
uses of language? Such claim is not being forcefuly made here but the panel participants are welcome to con-
sider it.
References:
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923. The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In The Meaning of Meaning, ed.
C.K. Ogden and A.I. Richards. 296–336. London: International library of psychology, philosophy and scientific
method.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Prorok, Katarzyna. 2017. Folk ways of augmenting the fecundity of plants. Green peas and cabbage. Ethnolin-
guistics 28: 225–244. doi: 10.17951/et.2016.28.227
Wright, Ben (dir.) 2004. Slavoj Žižek: The Reality of the Virtual. Documentary. Ben Wright Film Productions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnTQhIRcrno.

636
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Magical Affirmations – Affirmative Statements in the Pick-up


Artist Paradigm

Panel contribution

Prof. Daria Dayter 1 , Dr. Sofia Rüdiger 2


1. Tampere University, 2. University of Bayreuth

This study looks at the language of self-proclaimed seduction experts, the ‘pick up artists’ (PUA) – a community
that learns and practices speed-seduction for short-term mating. PUA belong to the less extreme fraction of the
‘manosphere’ and encourage men to use manipulative strategies to select, pursue and sexually conquer women.
Complementing our earlier work on linguistic pragmatics of a variety of PUA genres – in-field conversations
with women, educational events, forum posts – in this study we focus on another key genre of the community,
the confidence affirmations. Affirmations are positive statements that are meant to build confidence and self-
esteem, for example, “I feel proud” or “I feel like a successful individual”. There exists research in well-being
studies and positive psychology that demonstrates the value of positive self-affirmations, which may promote
adaptive functioning, for example, adherence to the drug regimen (Howell 2017, Jaser et al. 2014).
Affirmations are wide-spread in the PUA community and can be found, for example, in the form of YouTube
videos where the PUA ‘guru’ or a seductive female voice repeat affirmative statements on an hours-long loop.
In contrast to the practices tested in experimental psychology, these affirmations are meant to be listened to
during sleep, as background noise during daily activities, or are used as chants at group events. PUAs orient to
the affirmations as a magical artefact that has a direct impact on the achievement of their seduction aims rather
than as a tool of promoting self-integrity.
In our study, we look at a sample of 50 PUA affirmations collected from the YouTube channels of a popular PUA
guru. We classify them according to their locutionary, illocutionary and desired perlocutionary effect. While
according to the classic pragmatics framework the affirmations are representative speech acts, PUAs treat them
as declaratives. We also identify the linguistic elements that serve as contextualisation cues for affirmations, for
example, the modifier “naturally” which can be found in the majority of examples. Statements modified with
“naturally”, for instance, “Women are naturally drawn to me” invoke an existing state of affairs (i.e., “I have
always been attractive to women”), as opposed to a change to be brought about by affirmations. Finally, when
comparing the PUA affirmations to the self-affirmations attested in positive psychology experiments, we find a
difference in the social actors figuring in the affirmations: while affirmative statements in psychological inter-
ventions primarily involve the self (evident in the high frequency of the 1st person singular pronoun relative to
other categories), PUA affirmations involve a broad variety of other actors. This reflects the magical thinking
behind the affirmations, showing that PUAs see them as capable of having an effect on third party feelings and
actions.
Howell, A.J. 2017. Self-Affirmation Theory and the Science of Well-Being. J Happiness Stud, 18, 293–311.
Jaser SS, Patel N, Rothman RL, Choi L, Whittemore R. 2014. Check It!: A Randomized Pilot of a Positive Psychology
Intervention to Improve Adherence in Adolescents With Type 1 Diabetes. The Diabetes Educator, 40(5):659-667.

637
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rationality and magic

Panel contribution

Dr. Katja Jasinskaja 1


1. University of Cologne

Magical speech acts do not fit comfortably into classical speech act theory because of its focus on conventional
effects of illocutionary acts (cf. Austin, 1962). In a world where people believe in supernatural powers, the
relation between a magical speech act and its effect is (believed to be) causal, and the function of the speech act
is best understood in terms of its perlocutionary object. The present paper develops a mathematical model that
predicts that whenever the speaker holds the (perhaps irrational) belief of being able to directly affect the state
of the world by their words alone it is absolutely rational to perform magical speech acts.
The basic assumption of probabilistic decision theory that constitutes the core of Rational Speech Act Model
(Frank and Goodman, 2012) is that a rational agent always chooses an action A with the highest expected utility
EU (A), for which I adopt Skyrms’ (1982) definition in (1). Applied to (2), A stands for the speech act, i.e. the
proposition ‘the speaker utters (2)’, O stands for the perlocutionary outcome, i.e. the proposition ‘there will be
light’. P (O|A) stands for the conditional probability of the outcome given the action and reflects the strength
of the causal connection between A and O. The utility of the action-outcome combination U (A ∩ O) reflects the
combined effect of the action cost and the desirability of the outcome O.
(1) EU (A) = Σ P (O|A) × U (A ∩ O)
(2) Ancient Greek:
Γενη-θή-τω φω̃ς
be-AOR-IMP.3SG light
‘Let there be light!’
The probability distribution P reflects the speaker’s beliefs about causal connections between events in the
world. One can formally prove that in a world without magic, where words cannot directly affect the world, (2)
can only be uttered if the speaker indirectly intends to bring the hearer to do something about making light. I
argue that inferences of hearer involvement constitute the pragmatic pressure that shapes mood systems of the
languages of the world, making the second person the canonical form for imperatives, whereas third person
imperatives, or hortatives, like (2) are relatively less frequent and marked.
In a world or in a belief system that does have magic, speech acts like (2) do not give rise to an inference that
the hearer should act on it or that there even should be a hearer. This makes third person imperatives one in a
range of suitable linguistic forms for magical speech acts, which is historically attested (e.g. Kropp, 2009).
In sum, probabilistic decision theory allows to capture some crucial properties of both non-magical and magical
speech acts and makes non-trivial predictions with respect to tendencies in their linguistic realization.
Austin 1962. How to do things with words.
Frank & Goodman 2012. Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. Science 336.
Kropp 2009. How does magical language work? The spells and formulae of the Latin defixionum tabellae. In:
Simón & Gordon (eds.).
Skyrms 1982. Causal decision theory. The Journal of Philosophy 79.

638
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Siekopai Uja formulas as magical speech acts

Panel contribution

Dr. Jorge Gomez Rendon 1


1. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador

Siekopai are one of the fourteen Indian nations recognized by Ecuador’s intercultural and pluri-nation state.
Their language (Paikoka) is part of the Western Tucanoan language family. Siekopai live in the Amazon lowlands
along the Aguarico river in the province of Sucumbíos. One of the most salient genres of Siekopai verbal art is
known as uja, which has an equivocal meaning but may be translated as “advice”. The uja genre comprises a
set of formulas that fulfill different functions including protection from the jaguar in the forest and from the
big fish in the river, umbilical cord care, snake bite treatment, fishing efficiency, fertilization and sterilization
of women, among others. Nowadays, uja formulas are still known and used by a small number of male and
female elders who hoard them secretly. While their formulaic nature makes them relatively easy to learn, they
are not taught openly either in the family or in the school due to their magical efficacy which must be handled
responsibly.
Interestingly, the linguistic features of uja formulas are not very different from those of everyday language.
In this regard, Cipolletti insists that “the wording [of formulas and shamanic chants] can be understood by
any Secoya speaker, and that unintelligibility has to do mainly with semantics, since the text cannot be ‘read’
correctly, that is, decoded, without the intervention and information of the religious specialist” (1988: 11). Still,
a preliminary analysis of the corpus shows the occasional use of suffixes absent in common inflection and
derivation as well as the presence of ideophones, i.e., words which describe sensory images associated with
color, sound, action, state, or intensity (Dingemanse 2012: 25). The analysis suggests as well that most uja
formulas are recited with intonation patterns different to those of another associated Siekopai verbal genre
known as wiña, composed of chants used for human-nonhuman communication in shamanic contexts. Both
genres of Siekopai verbal art played a decisive role in the past as the most effective medium to teach spirituality
and values to Siekopai children, hence their importance today as a source of traditional wisdom.
The first linguistic documentation of uja formulas – undertaken along with that of wiña chants – among the last
elders who know these genres is currently underway as part of a project oriented to safeguard this verbal art in
order to teach them in the framework of an ethno-education program. With this background, this contribution
has three objectives: 1) propose a functional typology of uja formulas; 2) describe the felicity conditions to be
fulfilled for an effective performance of uja formulas according to their type; 3) describe the contexts of teaching
and learning of uja formulas in the past and the present.
References
Cipolletti, Maria Susana (2000). “El animalito doméstico quedó hecho cenizas. Aspectos del lenguaje shamánico
Secoya”. In P. Bidou y M. Perrin (Eds.) Lenguaje y palabras chamánicas, 9-34. Ediciones Abya Yala.
Dingemanse, Mark (2012). “Advances in the Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones”, Language and Linguistic
Compass 6/10, 654 - 672.

639
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Metapragmatics of Black Magic: Cross-Cultural and


Postcolonial Perspectives

Panel contribution

Dr. Carsten Levisen 1


1. Roskilde University

This paper explores the discourse of “magic” in a cross-cultural and postcolonial-pragmatic perspective, focus-
ing on “black magic” and related concepts. The aim of the paper is threefold. Analytically, the paper seeks to
identify and articulate the cultural scripts that guide European and Eurocolonial conceptualizations of “black
magic” , including the role that the visual semantics and the tropes of “darkness” and “blackness” play for the
socio-spiritual and cosmological logics of meaning-making. Secondly, the paper aims to investigate how the
European conceptions of black magic have been adopted, reinvented or resisted in postcolonial linguacultures
in the Eurocolonial influence sphere. Employing cultural scripts theory (Goddard 2006; Ameka 2020), and in-
formed by research in postcolonial pragmatics (Anchimbe & Janney 2011; Levisen & Sippola 2020), the paper
seeks to contribute theoretically to the establishment of a post-universalist pragmatics, and especially to emerg-
ing cross-cultural and postcolonial frameworks.
To make progress on all these three fronts, the paper provides an in-depth case study on Bislama linguaculture.
Bislama is a contact-zone language spoken in the South Pacific (Vanuatu). Lexically, the majority of words of
Bislama has origin in English, but the pragmatic orientation of Bislama is “Pacific”, rather than “Anglo”. Compar-
ing key concepts in Bislama cosmology, including nakaemas and blakmajik, kastom and daknes, the case study
teases out the underlying cultural scripts of Bislama. Apart from being salient in discourse, these words also
act as metapragmatic pointers for understanding “magical speech acts”: Nakaemas, a word which is commonly
translated as ‘sorcery, witchcraft’, and blakmajik (from ‘black magic’) provide evidence for local understandings
of the specific workings of socio-spiritual practices (Levisen, forthc.) and as key constructs of sociality, kastom
(from ‘custom’) and daknes (from ‘darkness’) provide further metapragmatic evidence for local understand-
ings of cosmology, culture and change (Levisen & Priestley 2017). The case study on magic-related concepts,
and pragmatic tensions in the contact zone reveals some major gaps in universalist-pragmatic theorizing. This
leads us to consider how cross-cultural and postcolonial pragmatics can assist in the development of adequate
accounts of meaning-making in this area of discourse.
Ameka, Felix. 2020. I shit in your mouth: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa). In N. Nassen-
stein and A. Storch. Swearing and cursing: Contexts and Practices in a Critical Linguistic Perspective, 121-144.
Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Anchimbe, Eric A. and Janney, Philip W. 2011. Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics
43(6) 1451-1459.
Goddard, Cliff (red). 2006. Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context. Berlin: de Gruyter
Mouton.
Levisen, Carsten & Sophie Waters. 2017. How words to things with people. In C. Levisen and S. Waters. Cultural
Keywords in Discourse. 1-17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levisen, Carsten & Priestley, Carol (2017). Keywords in Postcolonial Melanesian Discourse : Kastom ‘traditional
culture’ and tumbuna ‘ancestors’. In Levisen C., and Waters, S., (eds.) Cultural Keywords in Discourse, 83–106.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levisen, Carsten and Sippola, Eeva. (eds.) (2020a). The Pragmatics of Place: Postcolonial Perspectives. Journal
of Postcolonial Linguistics, 2, Special issue.
Levisen, Carsten. Forthc. Postcolonial Semantics: Meaning and Metalanguage in a Multipolar World. Manuscript.

640
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What’s ‘magic’ about Tongan honorifics, speech preludes and


other taboo-related practices?

Panel contribution

Dr. Svenja Völkel 1


1. University of Mainz

The Polynesian languages and cultures, of which Tongan is a part, have not really been associated with the
word ‘magic’ so far. Nevertheless, within the realm of the traditional notion of mana (spiritual power) and
taboo, there are a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic practices that have many elements of ‘magic’. These
include formulaic speech elements, ritualized practices, words with attributed power, on-stage effects, feared
negative consequences in the case of improper handling of the invisible power, and so forth. Thus, words and
speech acts are powerful, and their use has desired consequences while their misuse entails hardly controllable
negative outcomes. These linguistic forms and practices go hand in hand with non-linguistic practices and are
to be seen in the overarching framework of the conceptual idea of an invisible power and its control.
This paper will present the concepts of mana and taboo and then analyse Tongan honorifics, speech preludes and
other taboo-related practices in terms of their magical elements. In Tongan culture, the idea of spiritual power
is linked to the social rank and status. Traditionally, the chiefly societies of Polynesian have a highly stratified
social structure. On the societal level, the sovereign as closest descendent of divine ancestry is ascribed the
most mana and their rank is higher than the rank of chiefs or commoners, and within the kāinga (extended
family), the mehekitanga (father’s sister) has special status and power ‘to curse or to cure’ (Douaire-Marsaudon
1996). There are verbal and physical taboo vis-à-vis people of higher rank and status; they are neither touched
physically nor verbally as the honorific vocabulary, the use of these registers, the use of their titles instead of
the given names, and the speech preludes demonstrate (Völkel 2021). These linguistic strategies are rather a
means to protect the power of mana items and to handle the danger they pose, while taboo-breaking behaviour
causes negative consequences (e.g., illness or misfortune), which can only be released by ritualised practices.
Thus, the ‘magical’ power of language becomes more evident in the nonconformist use of the circumnavigating
language strategies (e.g., cursing or offensive speech acts).
The consideration of language (words and speech acts) as well as artifacts and non-linguistic rituals as ‘magical’
depends on the power cultures attribute to them in causing certain effects. Thus, magic is ultimately anchored
in a particular worldview. As Tambiah (2017: 471–472) has described, we have to be careful from which per-
spective linguistic practices are considered as ‘magical’ or not – from an emic or a Western-centric perspective.
References:
Douaire- Marsaudon, Françoise. 1996. Neither black nor white. The father’s sister in Tonga, Journal of the
Polynesian Society, 105. 139–164.
Tambiah, Stanley. 2017 (reprint from 1973). Form and meaning of magical acts: A point of view, HAU: Journal
of Ethnographic Theory, 7 (3). 451–473.
Völkel, Svenja. 2021. Tongan honorifics and their underlying concepts of mana and tapu. A verbal taboo in its
emic sense, Pragmatics & Cognition, 28 (1). 25–56.

641
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I herein and hereby claim liberties”: Pseudolaw and Magical


Speech Acts

Panel contribution

Dr. David Griffin 1


1. Cardiff University

Law is a system of speech acts (DeLong 2015, p.82) and legal texts are frequently, if generally metaphorically,
compared to magic texts (e.g. Yelle 2006) or more broadly to a form of “social magic” (Bourdieu 1987, p.840).
Goodrich (1990, pp.140–141) has suggested that government’s historic opposition to magic practices has resulted
less from any lack of efficacy of those practices than it has from magic rivaling the law’s claim on being the ul-
timate expression of access to truth and power. This paper examines that contentious relationship between
law and magic by comparing the use of explicit performative speech acts in a corpus of courtroom filings writ-
ten by American attorneys to their use in a corpus of courtroom filings written by American members of the
Sovereign Citizen movement, a group of anti-government pseudolegal conspiracy theorists found around the
world (Berger 2016). Sovereign Citizens and members of related movements have been described as using fea-
tures of legal language in their own writings as if they were magic “words of power” (Wessinger 2000, p.160;
Dew 2015) whose use allows them to magically appropriate the authority of the legitimate legal system. By com-
paring the use of speech acts in these two corpora, this paper explores the intersection of pragmatics, secular
ritual, and imitative magic practices.
Berger, J.M. 2016. Without Prejudice: What Sovereign Citizens Be-
lieve. George Washington University Program on Extremism. Available at:
https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Occasional%20Paper_Berger.pdf.
Bourdieu, P. 1987. The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field. Hastings Law Journal 38(5), pp.
814–854.
DeLong, S.W. 2015. How to Do Legal Things With Words: The Contracts Scholarship of Peter Tiersma. In: Solan,
L. M., Ainsworth, J., and Shuy, R. W. eds. Speaking of Language and Law: Conversations on the Work of Peter
Tiersma. Oxford Studies in Language and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 82–84.
Dew, S. 2015. Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah: Counterfactual Religious Readings of the Law. Nova Religio: The
Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19(2), pp. 65–82.
Goodrich, P. 1990. Languages of law: from logics of memory to nomadic masks. London: Weidenfeld.
Wessinger, C. 2000. How the Millenium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate. New York: Seven
Bridges Press.
Yelle, R.A. 2006. Law’s Trouble with Images: Fetishism and Seduction from Athens and Jerusalem to Madison
Avenue. In: Wagner, A. and Pencak, W. eds. Images in law. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 267–279.

642
Meaning-making in the
family: Crossing methods
and disciplines
(organized by Luk Van
Mensel)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analyzing family instant messages through interactional


sociolinguistics and multimodality

Panel contribution

Dr. Hanwool Choe 1


1. School of English, University of Hong Kong

My study demonstrates how integrating interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982) and multimodality (espe-
cially text-image relations in Kress and van Leeuwen 2021[1996]) serves as a powerful methodology for studying
family instant messages where everyday photos and videos, along with language, are used as the major means
of communication. By using instant messages from 5 chatrooms of 5 Korean families(-in-law), or 17 adult par-
ticipants, on KakaoTalk, an instant messaging application popular in South Korea, I explore how family(-in-law)
members make meanings, create family, and maneuver power and solidarity through text (instant messages)
and audiovisuals (everyday photos and videos) in family chatrooms. Although the photo/video exchange is
commonly practiced in everyday family instant messages and greatly affects how family members talk about
prior experience, it is little understudied with a focus on intertextuality in interactional sociolinguistics (see
Tannen 2006 for intertextuality in interaction, or repetition of words and utterances in everyday life) and text-
image relations in multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021[1996]). Everyday photo-/video-sharing reveals
that family members, as senders and receivers, have different anticipation, expectation, and appreciation of
meaning-making. This not only allows them to use different strategies to take part in constructing meanings
of shared audiovisuals but also generates new forms of mutual participation. I show 1) that the ways in which
same everyday photos and videos are shared across chatrooms – create different intertextual trajectories of
making and interpreting meanings of shared audiovisuals; and 2) that everyday photos and videos are used as
interactional devices to manage and negotiate power and solidarity dynamics, especially between parents(-in-
law) and children(-in-law). My analysis highlights how family instant messaging is representative of family as
a discursive construct as well as a multimodal act. Addressing the gap in previous research on everyday family
discourse, primarily based on face-to-face spoken communication; Western family discourse; and parent-child
interaction (e.g., Tannen, Kendall, and Gordon 2007; Gordon 2009), my study also offers the wider spectrum of
family discourse analysis that ranges over various family discourse types from offline (e.g., family mealtime con-
versations) to online (e.g., family instant messages); from western family discourse to Asian family discourse;
and from nuclear family discourse of working parents and young children to extended family discourse of adult
family(-in-law) members. My study contributes to updating family discourse studies in light of our new digitally
mediated reality by interrogating how instant messages (re)present contemporary family discourse.
References
Herring, S. C. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis. In S. Barab, R. King, & J. Gray
(Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 338-376).
Cambridge University Press.
Gordon, C. (2009). Making meanings, creating family: Intertextuality and framing in family
interaction. Oxford University Press.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2021[1996]). Reading images: The grammar of visual design.
Routledge.
Tannen, D. (2006). Intertextuality in interaction: Reframing family arguments in public and private. Text&Talk
26 (4-5), pp. 597-617.
Tannen, D., Kendall, S., and Gordon, C. (2007). Eds. Family talk: Discourse and identity in four American families.
Oxford University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Enacting and negotiating family roles in multilingual


interactions: Insights from an ethnographic perspective

Panel contribution

Dr. Rafael Lomeu Gomes 1


1. UiT The Arctic University of Norway / University of Oslo

Studies on family multilingualism have recently foregrounded the role of emotions in everyday online and of-
fline family interactions (e.g. Curdt-Christiansen and Iwaniec 2022, Naborn et al. 2022, Lomeu Gomes 2022).
Contributing to these ongoing developments, in this paper I examine the discursive construction of familial
ties in multilingual family spoken discourse. While centring the analysis around the role of emotions as par-
ticipants discursively enact and negotiate subject positions in interactions, a particular focus is given to the
affordances and limitations of the employment of an ethnographic approach to the study of family discourse.
Resulting from a three-year project conducted in Norway, this paper examines how members of two Brazilian-
Norwegian families draw on their multilingual linguistic repertoires as they accomplish mundane tasks in the
home. A discursive analytical approach was employed to examine audio-recordings of interactions in the home
made by one of the parents of each family (i.e. around 15 hours of recordings in total). Conceiving of family talk
as a locus where meaning is interactionally negotiated, results indicate that three social actions are achieved in
parent-child interactions: (i) conveying parental value-laden aspirations of child-rearing, (ii) positioning chil-
dren according to expected social roles, and (iii) forging parent–child ties. The analysis is theoretically anchored
in the notions of linguistic repertoire (Busch 2017), affect (Clough 2007), and emotions (Ahmed 2004). Combining
this theoretical framework with language socialisation scholarship on the affective dimension of monolingual
parent–child interactions provides insights into affordances and limitations of an ethnographic approach to
multilingual family discourse.

645
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Everyday language practices in the family: ‘After the beep, say


a command’

Panel contribution

Prof. Luk Van Mensel 1


1. XJTLU

Drawing on interactional data from a study on multilingual families in Belgium, this presentation builds upon
previous work that investigates how family interactions may be studied in terms of a family language repertoire,
i.e. a set of shared multilingual practices within the family that play a significant role in creating and maintain-
ing family life (Van Mensel, 2018). In this view, a family’s everyday language practices can be regarded as a de
facto language policy (Shohamy, 2006), which is interactionally negotiated by all family members. The present
paper wishes to expand on the previous work by focusing on ‘the relationships between language practices
and tangible and intangible factors of everyday family life, such as artefacts, events and tasks,’ as suggested by
Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019, p.1).
The episode at the center of this presentation involves a father, his two children, and his daughter’s friend
driving home from music school in Brussels (Belgium). Their discussion (recorded by the father, researcher
absent) involves both French and Dutch, and all participants also engage in a bout of language play with the car’s
navigating system, the system’s posh British English pronunciation being the cause of great hilarity. The episode
not only illustrates how technical devices such as these have become part of this family’s linguistic environment,
thus providing particular semiotic affordances to the family repertoire; it also stresses that language practices
cannot be disentangled from social practice (the events and tasks at hand). In our example, we can observe
the participants drawing on the linguistic resources available in order to engage in a collective ‘game,’ namely
communicating with a navigating system (in English). The observations lead us to a critical discussion as to
what extent these language practices can be considered policy.

646
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal approaches to meaning-making in family dinners

Panel contribution

Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern 1 , Dr. Christophe Parisse 2 , Dr. Marion Blondel 3 , Dr. Stéphanie Caët 4 , Mrs.
Sophie de Pontonx 5 , Dr. Loulou Kosmala 6 , Dr. Charlotte Danino 1 , Dr. Camille Debras 7 , Dr. Pauline
Beaupoil-Hourdel 8 , Prof. Diane Bedoin 9
1. Sorbonne Nouvelle University, 2. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 3. CNRS, France, 4. University of Lille, 5.
CNRS-Paris Nanterre University, 6. Laboratoire PRISMES EA 4398 / EA 370 GReMLIN, Université Paris Nanterre, 7. Paris
Nanterre University, 8. INSPE-Sorbonne University, 9. University of Rouen

Family dinners grounded in commensality are a collective ritual that plays a key role in family members’ identity
and constitutes an inherent part of their cultural heritage. Those shared moments of everyday life present a
perfect opportunity to study how language and interactive practices are transmitted to and used by children
in order for them to construct meaning. Because the subtle interweaving of these practices while eating fully
engages the body, our study highlights the semiotic differences between hearing and deaf adults and children
using a spoken language, French, and a sign language, French sign language (LSF) respectively.
Our theoretical framework combines language socialization, cognitive grammar, interactive and multimodal
approaches to languaging (Linell, 2009: 274) expanding the term to include speaking, gesturing and signing.
We study how children’s socialization to a variety of modes of expression in their daily experiencing (Ochs,
2012) through dinners shapes their language development.
Ethnographic methods were used to collect dinnertime data with two standard cameras equipped with good
quality microphones, one 360° camera placed at the center of the table and one 360° sound recorder. We anno-
tated all participants’ actions, gaze, and languaging (Linell, 2009) throughout our data. We also coded the partic-
ipation framework (Goffman, 1981) to conduct comparisons between participants according to their modality
of expression and their age. Qualitative analyses were combined with quantitative methods based on manual
annotations in the software ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan).
We show how family members collaboratively manage the accomplishments of multiple streams of activity
and coordinate their temporal organizations through the embodied performances of dining and interacting.
Through family dinner conversations spiced with food and the company of loved ones, we aim to capture how
speaking and signing children become increasingly expert at orchestrating semiotic resources within the frame-
work of everyday experience. We uncover different profiles according to participants’ status in the interaction,
age and modality of expression. The hearing adults use the affordances of both the visual and vocal channels to
maintain the simultaneity of the two activities and the integration of all participants. The deaf adults skillfully
alternate smoothly between dining and interacting in a continuous flow. The deaf and hearing children mani-
fest how they develop their competence to progressively manage multi-activity, and multiparty conversations
according to their age, and the use of one versus two channels in their “inter-acting” and “inter-languaging”.
The goal of our participation in the panel Meaning-making in the family is to present not only some of our results,
but also the analytical framework and method that we use to annotate and study a corpus of natural multiparty
interactions in family dinner settings, our methodological challenges in data collection and coding, and the
importance of using mixed methods to analyze the data.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 124-159.
Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking Language, Mind and World dialogically: Interactional And Contextual Theories Of
Human Sense-Making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Ochs, E. (2012). Experiencing Language. Anthropological Theory 12(2): 142-160.

647
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Online heteroglossia as a resource for ethnicity and kinship in


mediatized Indian families

Panel contribution

Dr. Usha Kanoongo 1


1. The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur

This paper uses Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (1981) to explore how it serves as a resource for manifesting
ethnicity and kinship by a multilingual, multi-ethnic Indian family during their online socialization. It also
attempts to show how linguistic variability is constitutive of and is constituted during identity performance
and group work achievement by the members.
Digital media have penetrated the Indian socialscape enabling interaction, knowledge exchange, identity pro-
jection and community formation by the users. Online spaces have become sites of linguistic and discursive
heterogeneity as evidenced in orthographical, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical variability,
multilingualism, multi-semioticity and intertextuality in communicative exchanges.
The present study examines interactions of a WhatsApp group of 55 extended family members who hail from a
small town in western India. They are native speakers of a Rajasthani dialect and most of them have migrated to
different parts of the country. Qualitative analyses of this group’s text exchanges enriched with semiotic anal-
yses and ethnographic observations reveal how the family flexibly exploits the diverse lingua-communicative
affordances of the digital medium for celebrating ethnicity, maintaining culture and performing relationships
in the digital space. Findings reveal that practices of meaning-making via phonetic typing, innovative spelling,
Romanized transliteration, mixing of utterances from multiple varieties, multimodality like audio and video
and semiotic artifacts like emojis, gifs and memes etc., need to be viewed as heteroglossic moves by the group
members. The creativity and stylization are instrumental for them in double voicing, i.e., communicating the
stated meaning as well as the pragmatic one.
The clan’s online interactions are reflective of their offline lives which are an amalgam of three realities, viz.
immersion into the lingua-culture of their current inhabitation, exposure to popular culture, new media, and
technologies, and attempts to sustain their indigenous traditions.
Sociolinguistic studies generally use heteroglossia as a lens to investigate socially-diverse, multilingual com-
munities (Blackledge and Creese 2014). The present study is grounded on the idea that online communities
like WhatsApp family groups should be viewed as distinctive communities that are connected yet distant, cohe-
sive yet separated. They share common lingua-cultural roots but have acquired diversity over time and space.
In light of this, the study proposes that compositions of everyday interactions between their members offer a
fertile test bed for an analysis of heteroglossia. The framework of heteroglossia serves as an inclusive tool that
encompasses the translanguaging and trans-semiotizing practices during the textual, gestural and visual means
of social meaning-making within the digital environments.

648
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Playful approaches to take family language policy seriously,


one brick at a time-space

Panel contribution

Dr. Judith Purkarthofer 1


1. University Duisburg-Essen

Research on family language policy (FLP) has used many different approaches to capture language practices in
the family, to understand parental attitudes and to engage with child agency as a contributing factor of FLPs
(Lanza & Lomeu Gomes 2020). However, FLP proves to be a complex matter and it is hard to pin down the
specific moments that shape language repertoires and activities.
In this paper, I discuss a multimodal method that centers collaborative building activities to understand how
FLP came into being, is negotiated in everyday actions and is ultimately leading to expectations for the future
(Purkarthofer 2019, 2022). Drawing on research with Lego™ building blocks in use with multilingual families,
my aim is to discuss the advantages of playful approaches: Winnicott (2005) stresses the playful nature of
learning, calling for spaces of free development to be able to realize one’s potential and to advance to the
next step. Playing is in this respect characterized by a positive absence of consequences, thereby enabling
participants to explore options without the fear of bringing about immediate change to themselves and their
family. The ongoing negotiations between parents are thus set in a space of potential where several parallel
outcomes can be discussed. In therapy, methods like sandplay are used to foster a spirit of creation and to
experience the potential to design a person’s environment. These approaches have been discussed in language
learning (e.g. Gee 2004) but have been rarely explored in FLP research so far.

The results from my own research with six families in Norway and Austria demonstrate how the collaborative
nature of these approaches takes parents further in their reasoning and might help them to explore different
time-spaces and language policies. The playfulness of the encounter also sheds light on language ideologies
while at the same time saving face of speakers. In the interpretation of said data, the context of the interview,
the materiality of the resources and their imaginary potential have to be taken into account.
References:
Gee, James P. 2004. Situated Language and Learning. A critique of traditional schooling. Routledge.
Lanza, Elizabeth & Lomeu Gomes, Rafael. 2020. 8 Family language policy: Foundations, theoretical per-
spectives and critical approaches. In Andrea C. Schalley and Susana A. Eisenchlas, Handbook of Home
Language Maintenance and Development: Social and Affective Factors, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 153-173.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510175-008
Purkarthofer, Judith. 2019. Building expectations: Imagining family languages policy and heteroglossic social
spaces. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3), 724-739.
Purkarthofer Judith. 2022 Transnational families’ social spaces ‘in between’: Expectations, decision-
making and belonging in light of educational choices in Norway. European Educational Research Journal.
doi:10.1177/14749041221106846
Salters, Diane. 2013. Sandplay and Family Constellation: An Integration with Transactional Analysis Theory
and Practice. Transactional Analysis Journal 43(3) 224-239. DOI: 10.1177/0362153713509955
Winnicott, Donald. 2005. Playing and Reality. Routledge.

649
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Playfulness in (multilingual) family interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Ragni Vik Johnsen 1


1. UiT The Arctic University of Norway

During the past decade, research on family multilingualism and family language policy have received consid-
erable attention in sociolinguistic inquiry. Similarly, research on youth’s language practices in heterogeneous
contexts has been extensively studied, but primarily outside the family. This paper combines insights from
studies of children and youth’s linguistically hybrid and playful language practices with research on family
multilingualism and language socialization and investigate playful talk in family interactions with children and
parents. The paper shows examples of playful talk, which includes inter alia teasing, joking, mock speech (cf.
Lytra, 2017), and investigates how family members’ make use of and target each other’s multilingual repertoires
in these interactions. The data material comprises self-recorded interactions (ca 14 hours) from three multilin-
gual families in (Northern) Norway. The families have in common that one of the parents has emigrated from
Central- or Southern America, that they have at least one child in the age between 13-19, and that Spanish is
one of the linguistic resources the family members share, in addition to Norwegian. Drawing on the notion
of translingual family repertoires (Hiratsuka & Pennycook, 2019; Van Mensel, 2018) and research on language
socialization (Ochs, 1996), the analysis points to how family members use humor and playfulness to negotiate
social positions and generational hierarchies, display affective stances, and perform social identities. In sum,
the paper explores how a detailed, interactional sociolinguistic approach to playfulness in multilingual families,
can shed new light on family multilingualism by drawing attention to how affect, social identities and family
bonds are displayed, negotiated, and constructed with and through multilingual repertoires.
Hiratsuka, A., & Pennycook, A. (2019). Translingual family repertoires: ‘no, Morci is itaiitai panzita, amor’.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2019.1645145
Lytra, V. (2017). Playful Talk, Learners’ Play Frames, and the Construction of Identities. In S. Wortham,
D. Kim, & S. May (Eds.), Discourse and Education (pp. 161-172). Springer International Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02243-7_13
Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In Gumperz, J and Levinson, S. Rethinking Lin-
guistic Relativity. (1996) Cambridge University Press
Van Mensel, L. (2018). ‘Quiere koffie?’ The multilingual familylect of transcultural families. International Jour-
nal of Multilingualism, 15(3), 233-248. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2018.1477096

650
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The family home as unique opportunity to explore the


meaning of language varieties: A mixed-methods approach

Panel contribution

Ms. Freja Verachtert 1 , Prof. Eline Zenner 1 , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop 1
1. KU Leuven

The family environment provides a dynamic research context where phenomena such as parenting styles, lan-
guage socialization and parental feedback come together. Moreover, it offers a unique opportunity to further
our understanding of language use and variation. Within the local context of the family home, caregivers tend
to adjust their language when talking to their children according to what they deem appropriate in the macro
societal context. (Nardy et al., 2013). Therefore, studying the way in which family members interact provides
more insight into broader societal norms and expectations.
The focus of this paper is family language within the Dutch-speaking community of Belgium. This case is selected
because of its exoglossic norm, history of hyperstandardization and persisting standard language ideology. Self-
recorded dinner table conversations for eight Flemish families constitute a corpus of nearly 25,000 utterances
of spontaneous language production, which is complemented with semi-structured metalinguistic interviews
with the 16 caregivers separately.
The data is analyzed through a mixed-methods approach. First, we look at language production and assess the
variation that can be found in caregivers’ use of standard and non-standard variants in child-directed speech
as compared to adult-directed speech. Three sociolinguistic variables are considered that portray varying de-
grees of salience and anticipated awareness: pronouns of address (N=5269), adnominal flexion (N=2397) and
word-final t-deletion (N=9655). Multifactorial inferential analyses uncover style-shifting patterns that depend
in significance and extent on the speaker and hearer in question, and the salience of the variable. Next, we
complement these quantitative variational results with a qualitative analysis and examine how they relate to
caregivers’ explicitly voiced opinions on language variation as evidenced in the interviews.
The combination of these research traditions allows us to investigate to what extent data converge across meth-
ods and/or across families, and whether there are any recurring language profiles to be uncovered. Preliminary
results reveal both seemingly aligned as well as contradicting style-shift patterns and attitudes on variation. For
instance, some caregivers use significantly less vernacular variants in child-directed speech and explicitly ori-
ent towards standard language, while others show the same variation yet do not voice an opinion on the matter
whatsoever. It seems, then, that there are different underlying motives; the abiding standard language ideology
still being one of them.
Thus, our results confirm the potential of this mixed-methods approach to examine the meaning of language
varieties in society. They pave the way to dive further in family discourse and to explore language attitudes not
only through general style-shift patterns but also through specific speech events such as parental feedback and
repair.
References
Nardy, A., Chevrot, J. P., & Barbu, S. (2013). The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: Looking back and think-
ing ahead. Linguistics, 51(2), 255–284. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0011

651
Membership
categorisation and
interpersonal
relationships in social
interaction (organized by
Valeria Sinkeviciute,
Andrea Rodriguez)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Spontaneous Crowd of People or an Illegal Organised


Gathering? Identifying and Resisting the Omni Relevance
Device ‘Organised Event’ in the Sarah Everard Vigil.

Panel contribution

Terry Au-Yeung 1 , Prof. Richard Fitzgerald 2


1. Cardiff University, 2. University of Macau

On 13th March 2021, a vigil for Sarah Everard, who was abducted and killed by a serving police officer on March
3rd 2021, was to be organised at 6 pm at Clapham Common bandstand by a local activist group, Reclaim These
Streets (RTS). However, after the police declared the vigil unlawful and refused to facilitate the assembly under
the then-current Covid-19 lockdown rules, the group called off the event. Despite the Police warning and the
organisers’ cancellation, well over a thousand mourners came to the scheduled location and gathered around
a central bandstand but without a formal organiser being identified. Approaching the time when the now
cancelled event was supposed to take place, at 5:45 pm two individuals and a group one after another took the
bandstand delivering speeches to the gathered crowd. They each received different reactions from the crowd
and around the time of the third speech the police commander changed his assessment of the gathering’s nature
and subsequently ordered a police intervention to disband the gathering, leading to a controversial nationally
televised stand-off between the crowd and the Police.
In this paper we examine this event through the lens of omnirelevance (Sacks 1995) to explore how the partici-
pants actively navigated the categorial boundary of two competing omnirelevant devices ‘a legal spontaneous
crowd’ and ‘an illegal organised event’ and orient to presenting the former whilst avoiding the latter. Through
the analysis, we explore and expand upon the idea of omnirelevance by elucidating a hierarchy among the two
devices of ‘legal/illegal’ along with other contextual omnirelevant devices, and how participants invoked these
contextual devices to negotiate and re-negotiate the categorial boundaries of the devices. Focusing on the band-
stand at the centre of the vigil we examine how the three speakers address the crowd whilst orienting to the
boundary between the omnirelevant devices. In particular we are interested in how the participants around the
bandstand, both the speakers and the crowd, initially oriented to speaking to the crowd and not as speaking on
behalf of the crowd or even leading the crowd, but later used a novel mode of interaction, ‘mic-check’, to perform
speaking to the crowd in a way that produced a sense of solidarity in front of cameras. Arguably, the novel way
of speaking to the crowd led to a ‘categorisation disjuncture’ between the participating crowd and a category of
participating observer, i.e., the police. That is, whilst the gathering participants ongoingly resisted the alterna-
tive device ‘an organised event’ through speaking-to-the-crowd-but-not-on-behalf-of-the-crowd, as they navigated
the categorial boundary the police judged that at some point the gathering becoming ‘an organised event’ and
therefore policeable. We conclude by highlighting how the analysis offers a particular perspicuous insight into
crowd control and police action as well as further understanding of the dynamics of omni relevance.

653
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Age stereotyping and ageism in Belgian job interviews

Panel contribution

Ms. Melina De Dijn 1 , Ms. Federica Previtali 2 , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop 1
1. KU Leuven, 2. Tampere University

Because of the inference-rich nature of categories, categorizations are a crucial means for people to make sense
of the world and for instance gauge others’ anticipated beliefs or capabilities (Sacks, 1972). As such, category
work is ubiquitous in encounters between people who want to get acquainted efficiently, for instance in the
job interview (JI). However, due to the JI’s gatekeeping function, categorization work in this context may have
severe consequences.
To study this category work, researchers often draw on membership categorization analysis (MCA - see Stokoe,
2012). While this approach has been used to analyze interviews with candidates with migrant roots (e.g.
Tranekjær & Kappa, 2016; Van De Mieroop & De Dijn, 2021), there is a dearth of research on age categoriza-
tions in JIs (Previtali et al., 2022). This is surprising since age stereotypes are considered to influence recruiters’
decision-making processes and produce systematic discrimination in recruitment (Turek et al., 2022). Hence
in this presentation we investigate how age dynamics may shape the interactions between recruiters and job
applicants and how stages of life categorizations are made relevant during JIs.
In particular, we study a corpus of 81 JIs recorded in the Flemish part of Belgium between 2011 and 2021,
which we scrutinize using MCA to examine age-related category practices and their re-production of age norms
in organizations from an emic perspective. Our findings indicate that age categorizations appear in more than
10% of the JIs in our dataset. These categorizations can be initiated by recruiters, sometimes in problematic
ways, but are also talked into being by candidates who link age categories to negative and positive stereotypes -
disparaging outgroups and commending ingroups - to construct a ‘best candidate’ identity. By investigating how
these age categorizations are talked into being on a turn-by-turn basis, we can shed light on the stereotyping
processes associated with age which in their most extreme form can lead to exclusion of certain age groups in
the recruitment context.
References
Previtali, F., Nikander, P., & Ruusuvuori, J. (2022). Ageism in job interviews: Discreet ways of building co-
membership through age categorisation. Discourse Studies, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456221118770
Sacks, H. (1972). An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In D. Sudnow
(Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 31–74). Free Press.
Stokoe, E. (2012). Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis.
Discourse Studies, 14(3), 277–303.
Tranekjær, L., & Kappa, K. (2016). The interactional establishment of the membership category “nonnative
speaker” in gatekeeping encounters. International Conference of Pragmatics and Language Learning [Proceed-
ings], 93–124.
Turek, K., Oude Mulders, J., & Stypińska, J. (2022). Different Shades of Discriminatory Effects of Age Stereo-
types in the Workplace: A Multilevel and Dynamic Perspective on Organizational Behaviors. Work, Aging and
Retirement, 5, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1093/workar/waac019
Van De Mieroop, D., & De Dijn, M. (2021). A multimodal analysis of foreign national origin membership cate-
gories in Belgian blue collar job interviews with first generation immigrants. Language and Intercultural Com-
munication, 21(2), 237–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1850752

654
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Category relations and norms of feelings in children’s


performances of a boyfriend-girlfriend culture

Panel contribution

Mr. Fredrik Andreasson 1 , Prof. Ann-Carita Evaldsson 1


1. Department of Eucation, Uppsala University

This study explores how preteen children in everyday interaction mobilize relationship categories to negotiate
what counts as appropriate romantic feelings among peers. It draws on ethnographic research (by the first
author) of children’s everyday peer language practices in a multiethnic school setting in Sweden. The anal-
ysis is based on ethnomethodological work on membership categorization and conversation analysis, (Sacks,
1992; Stokoe, 2006; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2009) integrated with ethnographic knowledge of how children uti-
lize members’ categories, and evaluative commentaries, as resources for constructing social relationships with
peers (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011). Particular attention is given to how children in making playful evaluative
commentaries on other’s romantic performances enact, maintain and even resist membership in a particular
relationship category (that of boyfriend/girlfriend) (Pomerantz & Mandelbaum, 2005). Two interrelated aspects
of membership categorization analysis (the invocation of norms and the organization of social relations and
social order) are in focus in the analysis (Evaldsson, 2007; Goodwin, 2011). The sequential analysis shows how
category-based claims of “liking someone” and “being together”, indexing a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship,
are responded to with playful acts of resistance and denials. Categorical claims are also turned into public and
playful embodied performances of relational pairing invoking the normative character of romantic matchmak-
ing. The findings suggest that norms of feelings play a central role in how preteen children organize their social
relationships, and that category based claims serve as important cultural resources for children to address their
emergent concerns regarding peer group relationships (c.f. Simon, Eder & Evans, 1992).
Evaldsson, A.-C. (2007) Accounting for friendship: Moral ordering and categor membership in preadolescent
girls’ relational talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(4), pp. 377-404.
Housley W and Fitzgerald R (2009) Membership categorization, culture and norms in action. Discourse & Society
20(3): 345–362.
Goodwin MH (2011) Engendering children’s play: Person reference in children’s conflictual interaction. In:
Speer S and Stokoe E (eds) Conversation and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 250-271.
Goodwin M. H. & Kyratzis, A. (2011). Peer Language Socialization. In Duranti, A., Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (Eds.)
The Handbook of Language Socialization. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 509-528
Pomerantz, A, & J. Mandelbaum (2005) Conversation Analytic Approaches to the Relevance and Uses of Rela-
tionship Categories in Interaction. In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. K.L. Fitch and R.F. Sanders,
eds. Pp. 149-171. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Sacks H (1992) Lectures on conversation Volumes I & II. Oxford: Blackwell.
Simon R Eder D and Evans C (1992) The Development of Feeling Norms Underlying Romantic Love Among
Adolescent Females. Social Psychology Quarterly 55(1): 29–46.
Stokoe, E. (2006) On ethnomethodology, feminism and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-
interaction. The Sociological Review, 54(3), pp. 467- 494.

655
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How to Criticize an Authoritarian Regime without Getting


Caught: Practices of Mitigating Criticism in Letters to the
Editor in the GDR through Membership Categorization

Panel contribution

Dr. Maximilian Krug 1


1. University of Duisburg-Essen

In the authoritarian system of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949-1990), letters to the editor were
considered one of the few state-accepted forms of system criticism and took the position of a functional pivot
between state control of language in newspapers and suppressed individual communication.
However, writers in authoritarian regimes always take a risk when criticizing the system. Therefore, the anal-
ysis of these texts is of crucial importance since they convey, on the one hand, the methods with which writers
mitigate their criticism and, on the other hand, reveal what was considered criticizable in the GDR. In this con-
text, membership categories (Housley/Fitzgerald, 2015) are essential, as members construct identities behind
which they can hide or refer to people or groups of people they wish to criticize (Eglin/Hester, 1999). Mitigating
criticism is vital in the GDR, where the act of criticizing is a category-bound activity closely intertwined with
the category enemy of the state. Thus, writers need to formulate criticism in such a way that they do not risk
being associated with this category (which could have had severe consequences for the safety of the person
criticizing).
Letters to the editor can be seen as interactive elements in an otherwise monologic, one-way mass media process
of newspapers. Therefore, this paper examines criticizing practices primarily from an interactional perspective,
utilizing membership categorization analysis (Sacks, 1972). The data basis for the paper is the DFG-funded
newspaper portal, which includes three exemplary newspapers of the GDR (1945 - 1994). Thus, a total of 8,000
documents from 49 years can be accessed.
For the purposes of this paper, the analysis will focus on those letters to the editor in which the writers propose
an improvement of a governing practice and thus criticize the existing practice. The analysis shows that the
writers support themselves in their argumentation through family categories and categories of work colleagues,
which are both particularly important for the self-image of the workers’ state GDR. However, the analysis also
suggests that impersonal and indeterminate categories are used to avoid assignment of concrete responsibility.
Thus, to criticize the state, the writers use, on the one hand, those categories firmly anchored in the linguistic
repertoire of the GDR leadership. On the other hand, categorical gaps become apparent in which state leaders (as
addressees of the critique) are not
explicitly mentioned. By reproducing the state’s linguistic practices, the writers increase the chance that their
letters to the editor will be printed, but they also reduce the impact of their criticism.
Eglin, Peter; Hester, Stephen (1999): “You’re all a bunch of feminists:” Categorization and the politics of terror
in the Montreal Massacre. Human Studies 22 (2-4), 253–272.
Housley, William; Fitzgerald, Richard (2015): Introduction to Membership Categorisation Analysis. In Richard
Fitzgerald and William Housley (Eds.): Advances in membership categorisation analysis. London: Sage, 1-21.

Sacks, Harvey (1972): On the analyzability of stories by children. In John Gumperz (Eds.): Directions in soci-
olinguistics. The ethnography of communication. Oxford: Blackwell, S. 325–345.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Manifesting epistemic hierarchy in the doctor-patient


relationship: Self-answered questions as a resource for
membership categorization in German and Russian
oncological therapy consultations

Panel contribution

Ms. Valeria Schick 1


1. University of Hamburg

Regardless of a particular medical culture, doctor-patient interactions are characterized by a predetermined


participation framework (cf. Gofman 1981). Especially in oncological therapy consultations, it seems evident
that doctors (as medical experts) reflect epistemic authority (cf. Heritage 2012), since they are in the position
to transmit information about the diagnosis or the therapy options, whereas the patients (as medical layper-
sons) find themselves in an exceptional health-threatening situation which they mostly know nothing about.
In order to manage the communicative task of informing the patient about the oncological findings and the
therapy processes, doctors draw on routinized categorization mechanisms to classify a patient – as an individ-
ual case – into a particular group of patients that share the same indications. Within the examined 56 German
and 54 Russian oncological therapy consultations[1], this kind of categorization emerges through the ascription
of category-bound activities or features (cf. Sacks 1974) via self-answered questions (cf. Bücker 2018), as the
following example demonstrates:
Doc: у меНЯ предложЕние,
I have a suggestion
вот войТИ;=
to join
=вот в эту ГРУПпу активного наблюдЕния.
this group for active surveillance
((…))
каКИМ образом,
how
очень ПРОСто;
very simple
РАЗ в три месяца-
once every three months
вы будете сдаВАТЬ анализ крОви,
you are going to have your blood work done
This contribution shall show that self-answered questions provide a cross-linguistic categorization resource
from the perspective of the MCA (cf. Sacks 1992) as they are used by German but even more so Russian doctors
to establish different membership categorization devices (e.g. ‘patients with low-risk prostatic cancer’ or ‘breast
cancer patients’) and categories (e.g. ‘patients with low-risk prostatic cancer in active surveillance’ or ‘breast
cancer patients with an indication for a chemotherapy / an operation’). Since both the question and the answer
part of the adjacency pair are produced by the doctors due to their higher epistemic status (cf. Heritage 2012) and
hardly commented on by the patients, this categorization mechanism displays the manifestation of epistemic
hierarchy within the doctor-patient relationship.
[1] The German audio files were collected from 2014–2015 in the context of the Krebshilfe-Projekt (Cancer Aid
Project) by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Imo (University of Hamburg). The Russian contrast corpus was built from 2019–
2021 during the partnership between the University of Hamburg (Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Imo) and the Medical

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sechenov-University in Moscow (Dr. Viktoria Fedorovskaya). All audio recordings were subsequently tran-
scribed according to GAT2 (cf. Selting et al. 2009).
References
Bücker, Jörg (2018): Navigating epistemic and sequential landscapes as a ‘dialogical self’: Self-answered ques-
tions in German talk-in-interaction. Arbeitspapierreihe Sprache und Interaktion 79: 1–26.
Goffman, Erving (1981): Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Heritage, John (2012): Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Lan-
guage and Social Interaction 45/1: 1–29.
Sacks, Harvey (1974): On the analyzability of stories by children. In: Turner, Roy (ed.): Ethnomethodology.
Selected readings. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Education, 216–232.
Sacks, Harvey (1995): Lectures on conversation. Blackwell.
Selting, Margret et al. (2009): Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2. Gesprächsforschung - Online-
Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion 10: 353–402.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Morality and Credibility of Friends and Family under


Cross-Examination

Panel contribution

Ms. Tianhao Zhang 1


1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Membership categories can be deployed by both parties of the interaction during cross-examinations to ac-
complish various actions (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Lynch and Bogen 1996, 1997). In this paper, I examine
how membership categories of friends and family are deployed by interrogators and witnesses during cross-
examinations to either impugn or defend both witness’ credibility and morality (see also Brannigan and Lynch
1987). I also examine how the overhearing audience respond to such categorization work. Everyone is expected
to know about “family” and “friendship.” In addition, categories in these two devices are often consist of stan-
dardized relational pairs (e.g. “husband and wife,” “friend and friend,” etc.) that are understood as carrying
moral obligations and responsibilities towards each other. Given these two characteristics of the friends and
family devices, they can serve as an especially strong inference-making device for both legal experts and lay
persons. Without direct access to the past events, the examining counsel and the overhearing audience can
assess the plausibility of witness’ account and implicate witness’s moral culpability through the use of such de-
vices (Lynch and Bogen 1996). By the same token, the witness can mobilize these devices to resist interrogator’s
characterization of past events, defend their credibility and morality, and gain common understanding from
the audience.
Video recordings of Johnny Depp v. Amber Hear defamation trial uploaded to YouTube and viewers’ comments
serve as data for this study. I first show that interrogator deploys categories of friends or family along with a
description of the witness’s action(s) in a specific sequential position (after the witness has confirmed with the
interrogator’s prior descriptions of their action(s)) to put the witness in a dilemma where answering the inter-
rogator’s question would undermine their credibility (lied) and/or morality (e.g. “a bad sister”). Witness orients
to the moral implications in their response through practices such as resisting the description and qualifying
the applicability of the categories. I then show that witness also mobilize categories of friends or family to re-
sist interrogators’ challenge to their credibility and morality. Finally, I show that audience can either agree or
disagree with such categorization work. Audience can make the implicit moral claims made by either party ex-
plicit by spelling out the categorial inferences. However, when audience disagree, the perceived incompetence
in using categories such as friends and family is then in turn treated as reflecting the moral culpability of the
user. In this way, the use of friends and family categories can also lead to public scrutiny of the credibility and
morality of the interrogator and their client.
References
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and Paul Drew. Order in court. Springer, 1979.
Brannigan, A. and Lynch, M (1987). On bearing false witness: perjury and credibility as interactional accom-
plishments. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16(2):115-46.
Lynch, Michael, and David Bogen. 1996. The spectacle of history: Speech, text, and memory at the Iran-Contra
hearings. Duke University Press.
Lynch, Michael, and David Bogen. 1997. “Lies, recollections and categorical judgements in testimony.” Culture
in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis 99-122.

659
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Observable implicit categorization and defeasible explicit


categorization: Doing “being friends” on YouTube

Panel contribution

Dr. Ryo Okazawa 1


1. Aichi Shukutoku University

Interactional participants achieve actions under their understanding of interpersonal relationships, which can
be described with membership categories, including “friends,” “acquaintances,” and “strangers.” From a con-
versation analysis and membership categorization analysis perspective, interpersonal relationships, such as
friendship, are not necessarily given before interaction but are established, maintained, and sometimes threat-
ened and restored in the course of interaction: the participants are doing “being friends” (Nishizaka, 2012).
Notably, membership categorization is not always achieved through the explicit mention of category terms
(Stokoe 2012; Whitehead 2020). For instance, we would rarely say “we are friends” or “you are my friend”
when talking as friends. The explicit mention of participants’ friendly interpersonal relationships might imply
that they are not friends in that at least one participant cannot confirm their friendship without such explicit
categorization. Such explicit mention might also be employed as a resource to achieve actions other than the
provision of confirmation (e.g., to coerce someone into doing what he does not want to do by saying, “you are
my friend”).
How do interactional participants categorize themselves as “friends” without explicitly mentioning the category
term? This study uses YouTube videos in which well-known Japanese figures talk to each other and users’
comments provided with the videos as data to illustrate implicit categorization practices in talk-in-interaction
and explicit categorization practices in written texts. The YouTube videos and comments provide a starting
point for membership categorization analysis because, in some cases, viewers (i.e., YouTube users) explicitly
categorize the well-known figures’ relationships as “friends” in comment sections, showing that the participants’
categorial relationship is observable to the viewers who do not have personal access to their relationships. By
contrast, in other cases, viewers’ comments cast doubt on friendship among participants on videos even though
the participants explicitly describe their relationships as “friends” in the videos. The analysis of such cases
would illuminate the observability and defeasibility of membership categorization.
By elucidating participants’ behavior that allows viewers to explicitly categorize them as “friends,” this study
argues that a perspective of membership categorization analysis is beneficial for research on interpersonal
relationships that are made observable in social interaction.
References
Nishizaka, A. 2012. Doing “being friends” in Japanese telephone conversations. In H. Nasu & F. C. Waksler (Eds.),
Interaction and everyday life: Phenomenological and ethnomethodological essays in honor of George Psathas.
Lexington Books, pp. 297–315.
Stokoe, E. 2012. Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis.
Discourse Studies 14(3): 277–303.
Whitehead, K. 2020. The Problem of Context in the Analysis of Social Action: The Case of Implicit Whiteness in
Post-apartheid South Africa. Social Psychology Quarterly 83(3): 294–313.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Morality of Categories in Contrastive Descriptions

Panel contribution

Dr. Jessica Robles 1


1. Loughborough University

This project examines how descriptions in conversation are formulated as contrastive–where at least one alter-
native description is compared to another–and how the categories of person around which such descriptions
are built are invested with a moral character. An analysis of video recordings of mediated and private conver-
sations transcribed in accordance with Jefferson’s and Mondada’s conventions are inspected for descriptions
of emotional trouble and/or mental health challenges. Membership categorization and interaction analysis are
used to trace how categories are deployed in contrastive descriptions to sequentially produce identity hierar-
chies. Results show that alternative descriptions are produced to mitigate interlocutor judgement by positioning
self as morally “normal.”
For example, in the following excerpted conversation from an interview, Kat provides two explanations of par-
ents who have a “bad day”:
1 KAT: [you’re j’st having a BAd DAY] and the house’s upside
2 down: [an’ ] .HH
3 NIC: [Yeah.] ((nodding))
4 KAT: there’s a screaming chi(hh)l(h)d and they’re having a
5 tantru:m when you think °god no:.° .HHH u:m >but if< I
6 tell someone #tha#t (.) I’m not coping to
7 [da:y, they’re gonna] think [°well must]
8 NA?: [mm mm ] [mm ]
9 KAT: be because you’ve got °°bipo°°lar.° (.) whereas °it’s
10 just° the fact #tha#t <Everyone ha:s> £really shhit
11 dAY(HH)s:
In line 1 “just” in “just having a bad day” minimises the non-ordinariness of bad days. A three-part list char-
acterises recognisable features of a bad day, particularly for parents (e.g., “house’s upside down” lines 1-2;
“screaming child” line 4; “not coping” line 6). This is followed by a hypothetical attribution: “must be because
you’ve got bipolar” (line lines 7, 9). The telling (supported by others in lines 3 and 8) then introduces an al-
ternative explanation with contrastive “whereas” (line 9) plus an assertion of facticity (“It’s just the fact” lines
9-10) followed an extreme case formulation: “everyone has really shit days” (lines 10-11). This brings the telling
back to “you’re just having a bad day” as a common, universal experience with no intrinsic relationship to a
diagnosis of poor mental health.
Kat works up to this distinction in building the complaint that when one is diagnosed as bipolar, it becomes
a ready-made explanation for situations that would otherwise be commonplace. In doing so, she reproduces
a moral hierarchy between normal and diagnosed people, distancing herself from “bipolar” as a condition or
identity and orienting to the greater acceptability of “just having a bad day” as an ordinary person. This is linked
to the parental category, as the scrutiny of behaviour is characterised as especially powerful where Kat feels the
need to hide her self-harm scars when she’s with her daughter at the playground.
Kat’s formulations assert that the categories of “parent” and “bipolar” become interactionally problematic when
they overlap because of the moral judgments that will be made of her. In this and other examples, participants
wrestle with how descriptions of behaviour implicate moral categories of person, and use contrastive descrip-
tions to manage their own category entanglements.

661
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When identity categories are imposed: Vocative


second-person pronoun + nominal in interaction

Panel contribution

Mr. Pepe Droste 1


1. University of Münster

Who we are to one another depends to a large extent on how we talk to each other. In conversational inter-
action between speakers of languages such as English or German, the negotiation of identities may surface
through a particular form of direct address: Vocative expressions consisting of a second-person pronoun and
a nominal that classifies or typifies the person so addressed. These vocatives have been dubbed “exclamatory
vocatives” (Welte, 1980), “evaluative vocatives” (Corver, 2008), “expressive vocatives” (Gutzmann, 2019), and
“pseudo-vocatives” (d’Avis and Meibauer, 2013). So far, research has dealt with syntactic and semantic issues,
with insults assumed as their home environment. Interactional questions, on the other hand, remain open or
have not ever been asked: In which sequential environments do participants rely on that specific form of ad-
dress? What do they ‘do’ when they directly address their co-participants this way? And in what ways such
categorizations are sequentially intertwined with issues of accountability and remedial work?
This paper examines vocatives consisting of a second-person pronoun and a nominal in German talk-in-
interaction. It draws on a large collection of video recordings of maximally informal face-to-face interactions
among speakers of German. The analytic approach is conversation analytic and interactional linguistic: se-
quences of talk-in-interaction in which co-participants are addressed by vocatives featuring the second-person
pronoun and membership categories or category-implicative descriptions (Sacks, 1992; Hester and Eglin, 1997)
are analyzed for their design, sequential placement, and action orientation.
The analyses reveal that the occurrence of such vocatives is not limited to sequential environments of offense,
but that they occur more generally in delicate moments in interaction (e.g., moralization and teasing). In these
moments, they are used to accomplish a variety of actions through ‘imposed’ identity categories.
The paper highlights the role of direct address terms that explicitly say something about the addressed party as
a privileged window into relationship management. It contributes to our understanding of what speakers are
doing relationally through membership categories in interaction.

662
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When Karen is calling the cops: using categorisation to


sanction public conduct

Panel contribution

Dr. Linda Walz 1 , Dr. Jack Joyce 2 , Ms. Natalie Flint 3


1. Leeds Trinity University, 2. University of Oxford, 3. Loughborough University

This paper explores how social categories and relationships are co-constructed in public encounters and on
social media. The focus lies on how interactional conduct becomes observable as transgressive and how (the
threat of) the transposition onto social media achieves the action of imposing public accountability. The grow-
ing collection currently consists of 21 recordings of public encounters spontaneously recorded by participants
or by bystanders and uploaded to TikTok, YouTube and Twitter. The analysis focuses on sequences of inter-
action which feature an interlocutor explicitly branded in-situ, or post-factum on social media, as a “Karen”.
Using membership categorisation analysis (Hester and Eglin, 1997; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002), this paper
tracks how the branding of “Karen” is generated, how it is responded to via rejection, counter-challenge or
some other action, and in post-factum descriptions on social media, how members’ conduct is categorised and
thereby sanctioned.
The analysis shows firstly how the term “Karen” targets a speaker who is exhibiting some form of entitlement
that is ostensibly based on certain characteristics, which magnifies the culpability by packaging the interactional
transgression with the interlocutor’s ostensible categorial status. Secondly, through the action of filming the
interaction, participants orient to social media as a space where future holding to account can take place and
mobilise this as an interactional resource during the encounter. The categorial work thus functions on multiple
layers both to challenge co-present parties and resonate with potential future third parties.
This paper contributes to the growing literature on how ostensible wrongdoing is construed and behaviour
evaluated (Haugh and Sinkeviciute, 2018) and how the transposition of an encounter onto social media imposes
public accountability akin to a ‘degradation ceremony’ (Garfinkel, 1956) where a person is reconstructed as a
new social object. The findings provide insight into the position and composition of transgressions and accounts
on and for social media, and thus contribute to an understanding of how in-situ transgressions are worked up
in talk for a future online audience.
Keywords: transgression, accountability, morality, sanctioning, categorisation
References
Garfinkel, H. (1956) Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies. The American Journal of Sociology, 61,
420-424.
Haugh, M. and Sinkeviciute, V. (2018) Accusations and interpersonal conflict in televised multi-party interactions
amongst speakers of (Argentinian and Peninsular) Spanish. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6(2),
248-270.
Hester, S. and Eglin, P. (eds.) (1997) Culture in action: studies in membership categorization analysis. Washington:
University Press of America.
Housley, W. and Fitzgerald, R. (2002) The reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis. Qualita-
tive Research, 2(1), 59-83.

663
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Tamara, y Sam?”: The relational and categorial negotiation


of doing “being a (non)cheater” in implicit account solicitation

Panel contribution

Ms. Andrea Rodriguez 1


1. The University of Queensland

People’s understanding of the rights and responsibilities that are appropriate for incumbents of a particular
relational category (e.g., boyfriend-girlfriend) is essential to how they ascribe and negotiate actions in interac-
tion (Pomerantz & Mandelbaum, 2005). While research has predominantly focused on the sequential impli-
cations of invoking categories to accomplish particular social actions mostly in institutional settings (Stokoe &
Edwards, 2007; Stokoe, 2009), fewer studies in ordinary interaction have examined the central role of relation-
ships in action and category negotiation (but see Mandelbaum, 1987, 2003; Hester & Hester, 2012; Fitzgerand &
Rintel, 2013). Drawing on interactional pragmatics and MCA, this case study explores how participants orient
to implicit relational categorisations in instances where the implemented and ascribed action are treated as
accountable. The data comes from multiparty, video-recorded interactions between Spanish-speaking friends
living in Australia.
This study focuses on a sequence where four friends, all of whom are married or engaged, talk about dating
apps used by “commitment seekers”. As one of the participants displays marked interest in the app, what the
others know about her relational status clashes with her turn-formed relational stance (i.e. a potential online
commitment seeker) visible through the category-implicative action “requesting for information”. This triggers
her being held accountable via a jocular, implicit account solicitation that invokes her relational status (i.e., a
girlfriend) and implicitly ascribes to her the category of “a cheater”. While she works to deny and block the
unwanted category though doing “being innocent” and treating the additional meaning ascription as account-
able, another participant initiates negotiation of the category, attempting to normalise “cheating” as a justifiable
category-bound activity on the grounds of being prepared. This action is ultimately used by the initial target
of criticism to (1) deflect criticism towards the negotiator, (2) distance herself from the category, and (3) claim
incumbency in the “loyal person” category, entitled to sanction the negotiator. The analysis shows that par-
ticipants orient to the gap between action and expectation as inextricably linked to categories via sanctioning
potential behaviours, rejecting/negotiating ascribed actions and accountabilities, and locally attempting to up-
date the category in question. In doing so, they display thinly veiled criticism about the moral inconsistency
between their known relational status and the constructed relational stance, thereby treating categorisation
and action ascription triggered via category-implicative actions as procedurally consequential. This analysis of
“turn-formed categories” (Watson, 2015) also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how “category-
formed turns” can be reconstructed while avoiding reifying categories.
References
Fitzgerald, R. & Rintel, S. (2013). From lifeguard to bitch: How a story character becomes a promiscuous category
in a couple’s video call. Australian Journal of Communication, 40(2), 101–118.
Mandelbaum, J. (2003). Interactive methods for constructing relationships. In P.J. Glenn et al. (Eds.), Studies in
language and social interaction: In honor of Robert Hopper (pp. 207-219). Routledge.
Pomerantz, A. & Mandelbaum, J. (2005). Conversation analytic approaches to the relevance and uses of relation-
ship categories in interaction. In K. L. Fitch and R. Sanders (Eds.) Handbook of language and social interaction
(pp. 149-171). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

664
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Then Mum will scold you”: Identity construction in sibling


talk in a Chinese-Australian family

Panel contribution

Ms. Zhiyi Liu 1


1. The University of Queensland

Research on family discourse has paid attention to how identities of different family members are discursively
(co-)(de-)constructed and negotiated in daily family talk (e.g., Tannen et al., 2007; Butler & Fitzgerald, 2010; Li,
2022). Yet, limited research has examined how identities of non-present family members can be invoked by
interactants and how the latter constructs their identities in relation to the former in talk-in-interaction. This
study, therefore, aims to fill this gap by exploring daily conversations (audio-recorded) between two sisters in a
Chinese-Australian family, focusing on how an older sister positions herself in relation to a non-present family
member (their mother) in interaction. Guided by Harvey Sacks’s (1995) work on membership categorization
combined with sequential analysis (Stokoe, 2012), the study investigates (1) how mother identity is invoked in
sibling talk and (2) how the older sister categorizes herself in the process of such invocations of mother identity.
In the data, the invocation of mother identity functions as a tool for both the older sister and the younger sister
to achieve their conversational goals in different situations. This is done by their deploying explicit category
terms (e.g., mama “mother”) and, in some cases, linking such a term to specific category-implicative actions or
categorial attributes in their turn design and action formation. Such imports of mother identity into sibling talk
are accompanied by the invocations of the rights and entitlements associated with the mother category in rela-
tion to family management (e.g., making family rules). How the older sister orients to the invocations of mother
identity, indeed, unveils her understanding of what ‘being a member of the mother category’ should be like and
simultaneously indexes how she positions herself in relation to their mother. Two types of memberships – as a
mother assistant and a home educator – are invoked by the older sister in interacting with her younger sister
via proactively orientating to mother identity and disregarding the younger sister’s mention of their mother. By
presenting an older sister’s self-categorization intertwined with an invocation of a third-party family member’s
(here, the non-present mother’s) identity, this study contributes to our understanding of identity work in family
discourse.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“You surely can’t colour using all of them at the same time?”:
The role of the parent category in sanctioning the other child’s
behaviour and in mobilising ‘sharing’ as a moral foundation
in sibling disputes

Panel contribution

Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute 1


1. The University of Queensland

Socialising children into the responsibilities, rights and expectations as relevant to the categorial, relational
and moral work is a crucial aspect of family talk. As research has shown, an important site for such social-
isation practices can be argument and dispute sequences (e.g. Goodwin et al. 2012; Goodwin & Loyd 2020).
While research has predominantly focussed on parent-child interaction, including some work on disagreement
and conflict (e.g. Goodwin & Loyd 2020), fewer studies examine siblings’ arguments (but see Hester & Hester
2010, 2012; Busch, 2012; Friedland & Mahon, 2018). This paper explores both child-child and parent-children
talk, in particular, how one of the moral foundations – sharing – emerges in and through sibling disputes and
what role the parent category plays in such sequences, both as oriented to by children or parents themselves.
The data comes from video-recorded family interactions collected for a project on multilingual family talk in
Australia. This study examines the extended sibling dispute sequence taken from the Russian-speaking family
conversations that involve two brothers, age five and two, mother and father. Using a combination of member-
ship categorisation analysis and interactional pragmatics approaches, thus paying attention to lexical, prosodic
features and embodied action, the analysis explores how the dispute sequence starts, develops and closes and
focusses on (1) the role of parents as oriented to by children and parents themselves in the dispute resolution
and sequence closure, and (2) how ‘sharing’ as moral responsibility pertinent to the brother category emerges
through the parents’ explicit and category-implicative actions. Preliminary results show each brother’s orien-
tation to individual ownership of items in question and their attempts through lexical, prosodic and embodied
means to recruit their parents in order to sanction the other’s behaviour. Interestingly, the parents’ involvement
is primarily visible through their mobilising ‘sharing’ practices that are illustrated both verbally and through
embodied action. Throughout the sequence, both children are directed to remedial action – socialising into
sharing as moral responsibility – as relevant to the category of doing being a brother.
References:
Busch, G. 2012. Will, you’ve got to share: Disputes during family mealtime. In Disputes in Everyday Life: Social
and Moral Orders of Children and Young People, ed. by S. Danby & M. Theobald, pp. 27-56. Emerald.
Goodwin, M. H., A. Cekaite & C. Goodwin. 2012. Emotion as stance. In Emotion in Interaction, ed. by A. Peräkylä
& M.-L. Sorjonen, pp. 16-41. Oxford University Press.
Goodwin, M. H. & H. Loyd. 2020. The face of noncompliance in family interaction. Text & Talk 40(5): 573-598.
Hester, S. & S. Hester. 2010. Conversational actions and category relations: An analysis of a children’s argument.
Discourse Studies 12(1): 33-48.
Hester, S. & S. Hester. 2012. Category relations, omnirelevance, and children’s disputes. In Disputes in Everyday
Life: Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People, ed. by S. Danby & M. Theobald, pp. 1-25. Emerald.
Friedland, J. & M. Mahon. 2018. Sister talk: Investigating an older sibling’s responses to verbal challenges.
Discourse Studies 20(3): 340-360.

666
Miscommunication and
repair in interaction with
voice agents (organized
by Wyke Stommel, Saul
Albert)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Miscommunication and Repair in ‘Smart Homecare’


Interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Lauren Hall 1 , Dr. Saul Albert 1 , Prof. Elizabeth Peel 1


1. Loughborough University

This paper asks how repair is organized in interactions where a disabled care service user and a care worker
use voice activated virtual assistants and ‘smart home’ systems in homecare routines. So-called ‘smart home’
technologies including virtual assistants connected to voice-controlled plugs, lights, and thermostats are in-
creasingly integrated into homecare settings. This is happening despite there being very little evidence as to
if—and how—such tools may enhance independence and quality of life for disabled people. Worse still, and as
anyone who has used one knows, virtual assistants are barely able to string two error-free turns together. Here
we explore this perspicuous setting for repair.
We used conversation analysis to study extracts from a corpus of approximately 100 hours of video featuring
a homecare routine in which a virtual assistant is frequently summoned and used by a care service user and
their care worker. Our analysis shows how repair methods are adapted to this setting in ways that engage
both service user, care worker, and the virtual assistant in a collaborative homecare routine. When human
users engage in repair procedures with the virtual assistant in this highly routinized sequential context we
observe how, and suggest why, intersubjectivity with these devices so often fails. We also highlight moments of
miscommunication and repair where the participants achieve intersubjectivity and uphold the progressivity of
joint tasks within the collaborative homecare routine.
This research contributes key interactional evidence to our understanding of how smart homecare systems may
enhance the quality of life of disabled care service users. It points to opportunities for the designers of virtual
assistants and ‘smart home’ systems to integrate their devices into the collaborative interactional landscape of
a homecare routine. Crucially, it shows how repair methods in themselves constitute an assistive technology
through which virtual and human assistants work together to enhance their shared interdependence.

668
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Out of sight, out of mind? Speech recognition transcripts as a


resource during miscommunications with a robot

Panel contribution

Mr. Damien Rudaz 1 , Dr. Christian Licoppe 1


1. Telecom Paris

On the commercial humanoid robot Pepper, the default parameter is to display on its tablet (attached to its
torso) a transcript of what human interlocutors are saying, as heard by the robot. This “audio speech recogni-
tion transcript”, even though it is commonly found on smartphone vocal assistants, is rare among commercial
“social” robots. Indeed, it can be said to open a window on what is going on “inside the robot”, before this robot
produces any verbal or embodied response (speech, sound effects, gestures, LEDs, etc.) to the previous turn of
an interlocutor. Even in the absence of any other content on this robots’ tablet, this transcription reconfigures
the informational ecology of the interaction: we argue that it is consequential on the way miscommunications
are detected and dealt with – compared with other commercial robots not relying on a transcription, or even
with human-human interactions.
To investigate the impact of this feature in situated interactions, we base our analysis on a corpus of interactions
recorded in July 2022 in Paris, at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, one of the biggest science museums
in Europe. The first half of this video corpus consists of 100 naturally occurring interactions with a Pepper
robot placed in the hall of the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. The second half is comprised of 100 additional
interactions which occurred with the same robot in a laboratory open to the public at the Cité des Sciences et de
l’Industrie, where participants were asked to wear an eye tracking device. In both cases, participants (groups or
single individuals) interacted with the same Pepper robot, on which was running a chatbot designed to converse
on a wide variety of topics. The tablet attached to Pepper’s torso was entirely blank at the exception of the speech
recognition transcript.
We attempt to describe several typical ways in which the tablet was used as a resource by participants in situ-
ations of miscommunication, and, more specifically, when the robot misheard a human’s previous turn. First,
we focus on the way the display screen may constitute a resource to indicate and manage trouble. In particular,
we focus on the specific timing and packaging of “self-initiated other-repair” sequences which are observably
indexed to the troublesome speech recognition transcript. Then, we investigate recurring cases where the “er-
roneous” transcript is treated as a more-or-less autonomous resource: i.e. as disconnected from the embodied
robot’s vocal and gestural responses, or even as taking priority over them. We focus on the way troublesome dis-
plays may become resources to distinctive interactional performances and we try to highlight a typical format
through which the incorrect speech transcription is reported to other human co-participants by the principal
speaker.
We finish by linking these qualitative findings with an interesting pattern visible in the data obtained from our
eye tracking device: as the interaction unfolded, the attention of humans (materialised by their gaze) slowly
focused more and more on the robots’ tablet, while its head and gestures were gazed at less and less.

669
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Repair in interaction with smart speakers in German –


Repeating, insisting, altering and giving up

Panel contribution

Dr. Silke Reineke 1 , Dr. Henrike Helmer 1


1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

Repair is a conversation analytic term for various operations aimed at resolving troubles during conversation
(e.g., Schegloff et al. 1977, Kendrick 2015). Different repair initiations (e.g., open class repair initiators like
“huh?”) are apt for displaying specific troubles of understanding. Research has shown that after failed requests
in interaction with interactive virtual agents the users’ reactions resemble repair practices (Krummheuer 2008).
Although systems are also designed to display troubles to help users diagnose and repair trouble, they are not
designed to constantly secure intersubjectivity as humans do in interaction, which leads to users adapting their
talk themselves in order to improve interaction with the system (cf. Reeves et al. 2018, Fischer et al. 2019).
With an interactional linguistics approach, we are analyzing repair practices that users deploy after a failed re-
quest in interaction with a smart speaker to shed light on how troubles in interaction with smart speakers are
unfolding and on how users change their initial requests in order to ‘get things done’. The paper is based on au-
dio data of interactions of people using a smart speaker device in their homes. The data have been recorded with
a conditional voice recorder (CVR, Porcheron et al. 2018) that we adapted for our purposes. We recorded mainly
inexperienced users over periods of around 4 weeks in their home, in order to allow for a micro-longitudinal
analysis of the data. So far, we have recordings of around 350 snippets of requests to Amazon Echo Dot (Alexa).
Our data showed that in sequences after failed requests, users deploy different repair practices (both at different
times as well as subsequently after several failed requests). They range from:
- Orienting to acoustic problems by using repetitions (together with speaking louder, slower, more enunciated,
with more pauses and more focal accents and no or minor changes in the lexico-grammatical design),
- ‘insisting’ (by using several repeats subsequently),
- more substantial alterations in request formulation (e.g., by adding more specific information regarding ref-
erents, or by changing the formulation altogether, sometimes going back to one that has worked previously)
- to giving up completely.
When the formulation of a failed request has proven to work before in the ‘interactional history’, users often
seem to first use repair practices that are formulated more similar to the initial request before they go on to
try other formulations or new requests. This shows how users adapt their repair practices in interaction with
smart speakers on two levels: Sometimes they adapt their repair on a local level, orienting to the smart speaker’s
local reactions in the respective sequence. But they also show to have adapted on a more global level by using
requests that have worked previously and ‘insisting’ – which in turn leads to less (or sequentially delayed) local
adaption. These findings shed light on users’ practices of repair in interaction with a smart speaker as well as on
their (growing) expectations of what should be a well-working request, which can also inform the programming
of smart speakers.

670
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Repair-capable Conversational AI: what’s missing

Panel contribution

Dr. Arash Eshghi 1


1. Alana AI Ltd.

Miscommunication is rife in everyday human interaction. Yet people usually detect and repair misunderstand-
ings immediately, employing a set of universal (Dingemanse et al., 2015) and highly systemised interactional
processes which have collectively been called repair (Schegloff, 1992, 2007; Purver et al., 2018). Even though
the crucial role of these processes in sustaining successful interaction and coordinating meaning and joint ac-
tion has been widely recognised in the cognitive science community (Clark 1996; Healey et al, 2018; Mills, 2013;
Dingemanse et al, 2015 a. o.), there is still a paucity of research within the Conversational AI, Computational
Linguistics community on the challenges it poses, including its classification, parsing, execution, contextual
integration, as well as generation.
In this talk, I will review some of the state of the art in computational models of repair (see Purver et al. (2018)
for a comprehensive overview) and use this to set out a few requirements imposed by this phenomenon on the
topology of modular Conversational AI architectures, their various component models, and the flow of infor-
mation between them. I will then describe our repair-compatible, interactive Natural Language Understanding
(NLU) infrastructure at Alana AI and use it to illustrate some of the existing challenges of creating repair-capable
Conversational AI, including what component models are needed and what kind of data is needed to train these.
Time permitting, I will present an ongoing, crowd-sourced data collection effort to fill one of these gaps: that
of creating machine learning models for wide-coverage, open-domain classification, execution, and contextual
integration of third-position repairs (Schegloff, 1992). To conclude, I will argue that computational repair pro-
cessing with all its inherent challenges is the missing ingredient in creating robust, controllable, and adaptive
Conversational AI that can truly collaborate with people in real everyday tasks.
References:
Clark, H. H., 1996. Using Language. Cambridge University Press.
Dingemanse, M. et al., 2015. Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems. Plos One 10 (9).
Healey, P. G. T., Mills, G. J., Eshghi, A. and Howes, C., 2018. Running Repairs: Coordinating Meaning in Dialogue.
Topics in Cognitive Science.
Mills, G. J., 2013. Dialogue in Joint Activity: complementarity, convergence, conventionalisation. New Ideas in
Psychology.
Schegloff, E. A., 1992. Repair After Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in
Conversation. American Journal of Psychology 97 (5).
Schegloff, E. A., 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge
University Press.
Purver, M., Hough, J. and Howes, C., 2018. Computational Models of Miscommunication Phenomena. Topics in
Cognitive Science.

671
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I have learnt the Alexa-language” – A conversation analytical


reconstruction of users’ incidental learning of how to talk to a
voice agent

Panel contribution

Mrs. Christiane Even 1


1. Heidelberg University of Education

Talking to voice agents (VAs) is often considered easy and intuitive (e.g., Siegert, 2020). Yet, in recent studies,
users report of having had to learn how to talk to a VA (e.g., Pins et al., 2020). However, insights into users’
learning processes are mostly drawn from retrospective self-reports in interview studies. There are only a
few articles that present a micro-analytical reconstruction regarding user adaptations (e.g., Pelikan & Broth,
2016; Velkovska & Zouinar, 2018). In these articles, users’ adaptation work is analyzed for problems in terms
of turn-taking and repair, leading to users’ adjustments in form of reducing the complexity and length of turn
construction in subsequent sequences.
This presentation is going to update previous findings by presenting complementary user practices of adaptation
or incidental learning that are precedented by – often recurrent – incidents of repair. Based on a heterogenous
sample of 50 adults (aged 25 – 83), who are novice users of the VA Siri or Alexa, it is investigated how they
gradually adapt – or struggle to adapt – to the interface structures when using the VA in one function several
times or in different functions over a period of 4 weeks.
Analyses are carried out following the multimodal conversation analytical approach (e.g., Mondada, 2008),
showing users’ adaptations complementary to findings in previous research:
1. Lexical changes in turn construction:
a) Linguistic alignment in repair initiations: Users change successively their practice of repair initiation. They
adopt expressions used by the VA after having encountered trouble before when speaking naturally.
b) Suppression of linguistic alignment in sequences of information transfer: In the Siri data, users avoid repeating
the VA’s wording presented in the request for temporal information, as such linguistic alignment leads to an
unintended task shift by the VA and ensuing repair.
2. Changes in sequential ordering:
a) Anticipatory turn construction: As a result of becoming aware of the VA’s dialog structures, a user may produce
anticipatory formulations for opening a task that entails an otherwise stepwise information transfer.
b) Non-conform turn expansions: Users deviate from the interactional pattern of delivering type-conforming
answers to questions after having encountered trouble: Instead, they add non-requested information to avoid
otherwise ensuing repair.
This presentation concludes with a discussion of conversation analytically based implications for relevant prac-
titioners like VA designers.
Mondada, L. (2008). Using Video for a Sequential and Multimodal Analysis of Social Interaction: Videotaping
Institutional Telephone Calls. FQSR, 9, 1–35
Pelikan, H. R., & Broth, M. (2016). Why That Nao? How Humans Adapt to a Conventional Humanoid Robot in
Taking Turns-at-Talk. In CHI’16, 4921–4932
Pins, D., Boden, A., Essing, B., & Stevens, G. (2020). “Miss understandable” - A study on how users appropriate
voice assistants and deal with misunderstandings. In MuC’20, 349–359
Siegert, I. (2020). “Alexa in the wild” – Collecting Unconstrained Conversations with a Modern Voice Assistant
in a Public Environment. In LREC 2020, 615–619
Velkovska, J., & Zouinar, M. (2018). The Illusion of natural conversation: interacting with smart assistants in
home settings. In CHI’18 Extended Abstracts, 1–6

672
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Pepper, what do you mean?” Miscommunication, repair and


multimodality in robot-led survey interaction

Panel contribution

Mx. Lynn de Rijk 1 , Dr. Wyke Stommel 1 , Dr. Roel Boumans 1


1. Radboud University Nijmegen

In this presentation we analyze various kinds of interactional trouble occurring in task-oriented human-robot
interaction. We focus on users’ repair strategies using an existing dataset consisting of 36 video-recordings in
which elderly people complete a lengthy health survey with a Pepper robot. The interaction was structured
in three phases: 1) instructions by a nurse; 2) a practice round of three general questions after which the
nurse left; and 3) the interview proper between participant and robot. Miscommunication was abundant in
the data, with some types of miscommunication being more common than others. These were mainly related
to “hearing trouble” on the side of the robot, leading to participants’ repeats and rephrasings. Interactional
trouble was also found to escalate, with multiple repair initiations, sometimes leading to “second best
answers”. Other escalating trouble strategies were skipping the question or using scripted commands outside
their design purposes (e.g., applying the command “What do you mean” to solve a lack of response from the
robot, while the command was designed for clarifying something on the side of the participant). We also
found that in trouble contexts non-verbal robot behavior was brought up as a diagnostic tool. When repair
initiations failed while the nurse was still present, participant or nurse sometimes noticed (cf. Schegloff,
2007) non-verbal conduct of the robot, thereby collaboratively seeking explanations or solutions for the
miscommunication. Nodding was noticed when Pepper did not respond verbally after the wake phrase,
contrasting the nodding with an expected but yet absent verbal response (e.g., “He does nod, but…”). The
robot’s gaze was noticed (e.g., Par: “He’s looking at you”), when the robot was expected to direct questions
to the participant while not gazing at the participant. When no other person was present in the room, robot
non-verbal behavior was not verbally addressed when trouble occurred, even when the robot’s behavior
was deviant (e.g., staring at the wall while asking a question). This suggests that the non-verbal behavior
noticings are done to solve trouble in collaboration with other humans rather than repairing the trouble
with the robot directly. Overall, miscommunication and repair in these human-robot interactions involve a
multitude of strategies. Where types of repair other than repeats/rephrasings occur, it stands out how mis-
communication escalates as repair attempts fail. When trouble escalates, restoring progressivity is prioritized
over getting the originally selected answer across (cf. Fischer et al., 2019). Noticings of robot non-verbal
behavior that occur when another person is still present in the room suggest that solving miscommunication
is a multimodal affair, with participants drawing on robot behavior to collaboratively make sense of the trouble.

Fischer, J. E., Reeves, S., Porcheron, M., Sikveland, R. O. (2019). Progressivity for voice interface design, in Pro-
ceedings 1st International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (pp. 1-8).
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cam-
bridge university press.

673
Mobility disabilities in
interaction: A new
research agenda within
atypical interaction
(organized by Gitte
Rasmussen, Brian Due)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Facilitating Residents’ Mobility in Caregiving Interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Yu-Han Lin 1


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

The mobility of residents in care facilities may become an issue as a result of not only their physical impair-
ments (e.g., wheelchair-bound due to lower limb muscle weakness) but also their cognitive impairments (e.g.,
wandering due to dementia). These residents need caregivers’ assistance with nearly all of their body move-
ment, including standing up, sitting down, walking with or without a walking frame, and moving around with
a wheelchair. This study examines how caregivers respond to this mobility issue—specifically with the use of
touch.
This study builds on two research traditions: mobility and interpersonal touch. Mobility and interpersonal
touch have received increasing attention in ethnomethodology/conversation analysis research in recent years.
Among the studies on touch, more current research has begun to center on caregiving interaction. Marstrand
and Svennevig (2018) were the most relevant predecessors who explored how a caregiver facilitated mobility of
a resident with physical and cognitive disorders through touch in a residential home in Denmark. In their single
case study, the caregiver often began her instructions with talk or gesture. When the approach did not work,
she resorted to touch. To extend the findings in a different country, the current study analyzes the navigation
of resident’s mobility among various residents and caregivers in Taiwan.
One hundred and forty four cases were drawn from 96-hours of video data from a residential home in Taiwan.
Participants include local residents with mobility and/or cognitive impairments and caregivers from Taiwan
and Vietnam. Multimodal conversation analysis reveals that the caregivers’ facilitation displays their orienta-
tion to the residents’ cognitive impairments, physical impairments, or a combination of both. For instance, first,
the caregivers grab the residents’ arm to help them stand up or sit down, which orients to the residents’ physi-
cal impairments. In contrast, this haptic assistance is regularly coordinated with talk (e.g., “don’t get up. Watch
out” in Chinese) when assisting the residents with cognitive disorders (e.g., dementia). Second, the caregivers
hold the residents’ arm when walking with them to minimize their risk of falling, which orients to their phys-
ical limitations. The same action can also be utilized to guide wandering residents back to their seats, which
targets their cognitive disorders (e.g., dementia). In addition to confirming Marstrand and Svennevig’s finding
that caregivers delay their use of touch until talk or other less intrusive practices (e.g., gesture) turn out to be
ineffective, this study finds that the caregivers deploy touch to facilitate the residents’ mobility before the res-
idents have a chance to reply to talk. This indicates the caregivers’ orientation to the residents’ impairments
and their need for haptic assistance. From a large corpus of data, this study demonstrates the complexity of
mobility assistance, and how this assistance is recipient-designed for various impairments.
Reference
Marstrand, A. K., & Svennevig, J. (2018). A preference for non-invasive touch in caregiving contexts. Social
Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 1(2).

675
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How mobility disabilities and wheelchair use shape closures


of social interaction and dissolutions of interactional spaces

Panel contribution

Prof. Gitte Rasmussen 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

Social interaction is ordinary ended through sequentially organized closures (Button, 1990) in combination
with dissolutions of interactional spaces accomplished through the coordination of multimodal actions (Mon-
dada, 2016). Research in the framework of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis has shown how co-
participants e.g., retract bodily from interactional spaces as they orient to subtle changes in each other’s bod-
ily orientation away from the space. The change of bodily orientation concerns often lower body segments
(Kendon, 1990), e.g., a foot, which co-participants respond to (vom Lehn, 2013).
This study aims at demonstrating how wheelchair users draw on different modes to achieve the same ends:
closures are initiated through talk in combination with the use of upper body segments, i.e., arms to e.g., release
the breaks. Following Schegloff and Sacks (1973) any sequential closure and topic termination may lead to
closure and termination of the conversation. The study shows how the co-participants orient towards the arm
movement as an initiation of conversational closure. It is followed by steps to dissolve the interactional space in
terms of changing the position of the wheelchair and consequentially the orientation of lower body segments.
Furthermore, it shows how the co-participants establish an interactional order of multimodal actions to close
the conversation and dissolve the interactional space in an interplay with the physical environment.
The study draws on approximately 10 hours of video-recordings of mobility impaired sports students, sports
instructors, and researchers in interaction at a sports high school in Denmark. The school enrolls sports students
with and without mobility impairments. The recordings are part of a larger corpus of video-recordings collected
by the SDU contexture for interdisciplinary research in mobility disorders. The data were transcribed using
conventional methods for multimodal interactions.
The study falls within the area Atypical Interaction research (Wilkinson et al., 2020) in multimodal interaction
(Rasmussen, (forth)) that aims at investigating if and how impairments shape interaction.
Button G (1990) On varieties of closings. In: Psathas G (ed) Interactional Competence. Lanham: Univerisiy Press
of America, pp.93-148.
Kendon A (1990) Conducting Interaction. Patterns of behavior in foused encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mondada L (2016) Multimodal resources and the organization of social interaction In: Rocci A and De Saussure
L (eds) Handbooks of Communication Science. Berlin: De Gruyter pp.328-350.
Rasmussen G ((forth)) The relevance of EMCA studies in multimodal interactions involving blindness and visual
impairment to Atypical Interaction research. In: Due B (ed) The Practical Accomplishment of Blind People’s
Ordinary Activities. Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Routledge.
Schegloff E and Sacks H (1973) Opening up closings. Semiotica 8(4): 289-327.
vom Lehn D (2013) Withdrawing from exhibits: The interactional organisation of museum visits. In: Hadding-
ton P, Mondada L and Nevile M (eds) Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion. Berlin: De
Gruyter„ pp.65-90.
Wilkinson R, Rae J and Rasmussen G (2020) Atypical Interaction: The impact of communicative impairments
within everyday talk. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

676
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The consequences of ocularcentric participation frameworks


for the ability for visually impaired people to be mobile in situ

Panel contribution

Dr. Brian Due 1


1. Copenhagen University

Ocularcentrism is when vision is privileged over other senses for reasons of practical organization (Chandler
& Munday, 2011). Visual practices of seeing, looking and gazing are important for perception and action-
construction but are taken for granted in various ordinary interactional projects. I suggest the concept of “Ocu-
larcentric participation frameworks”, building on Goffman (1974) and Goodwin & Goodwin (2005) occur when-
ever vision becomes a collectively anticipated resource for joint activity in mobile formations. These types of
visual organizations become observable and accountable when visually impaired people are part of the frame-
work. An ocularcentric participation framework is not only an emerging issue for situated members but also a
methodological problem that researchers must address in their analyses. The research question is: What meth-
ods do sighted members of society apply when trying to achieve intersubjectivity with and adopt a visually
impaired member’s perspective in a context of being mobile?
This presentation builds on video data from a larger ethnographic project studying visually impaired people
in contexts of new technologies. The presentation will show examples of a visually impaired person being
involved in trying a robot-dog (Due, 2021) and I will show how this mobile organization is complicated due
to the production of the ocularcentric organization. There are atypical aspects in interaction involving visually
impaired people which specifically relates to the problems of visually projecting next actions instead of applying
touch as primary sensory resource in interaction.
Based on EM/CA methodology this presentation contributes to studies of vision, perception and complex partici-
pation frameworks by showing and discussing the limits of vision in interaction and when conducting analyses.
In addition, the presentation contributes to the discussion of the researchers prior knowledge, what Garfinkel
and Wieder (1992, p. 182) called the “unique adequacy requirement of methods” that refers to how the re-
searcher must be “vulgarly competent in the local production and reflexively natural accountability of the phe-
nomenon of order he is ‘studying’ ”. As vulgar competence in atypical populations is almost impossible, this
presentation contributes with a more nuanced approach.
Chandler, D., & Munday, R. (2011). Ocularcentrism. In A Dictionary of Media and Communication. Ox-
ford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199568758.001.0001/acref-
9780199568758-e-1905
Due, B. L. (2021). Robodog. Exploring the Spot robot as a “guide dog” for visually impaired people: Vestibular
and proprioceptive sensations as sociality. 6th Copenhagen Multimodality Day 2021: AI in interaction - UCPH,
Copenhagen , Danmark.
Garfinkel, H., & Wieder, D. L. (1992). Two incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies of social
analysis. In G. Watson & R. M. Seiler (Eds.), Text in context: Studies in ethnomethodology (pp. 175–206). SAGE.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harvard University Press.
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (2005). Participation. In A. Duranti (ed.).: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology.
Blackwell.

677
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I feel like a normal person”: The interactive accomplishment


of walking normally

Panel contribution

Mrs. Emilie Nicolaisen 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

Studies on walking have demonstrated the fine coordination between talk, bodily movements, and the physical
environment in office encounters (Tuncer, 2015), guided tours (Mondada, 2018), and traffic (Merlino & Mon-
dada, 2019). However, in these studies, the walk and the ability to walk are often taken for granted. This study
seeks to understand how people interact to achieve what others take for granted: walking normally. For this
purpose, it focuses on walking-impaired persons who are learning to walk using a bodyweight unloading robot.
Through an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to atypical multimodal interaction (Ras-
mussen, in press), the study examines the participants’ practices for evaluating and intervening with the walk.
It describes how co-participants rely on what they see, whereas the participants convey the kinesthetic experi-
ence (Katila & Turja, 2021) of what they are feeling and how they all work to achieve a common understanding
based on these different approaches. The study is based on video recordings of students with various kinds of
mobility disabilities trying out robot-assisted gait training at a sports high school and in a gait lab at the Univer-
sity of Southern Denmark. The video recordings are transcribed by EMCA standards for talk and multimodality.
Katila, J., & Turja, T. (2021). Capturing the nurse’s kinesthetic experience of wearing an exoskeleton: The benefits
of using intercorporeal perspective to video analysis. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality.
Merlino, S., & Mondada, L. (2019). Crossing the street: How pedestrians interact with cars. Language & Commu-
nication, pp. 131-147.
Mondada, L. (2018). Questions on the move: The ecology of question-answer sequences in mobility settings.
In A. Deppermann, & J. Streeck, Time in Embodied Interaction: Synchronicity and Sequentiality of Multimodal
Resources, pp. 161-202. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rasmussen, G. (in press). The relevance of EMCA studies in multimodal interactions involving blindness and
visual impairment to Atypical Interaction research. In B. Due, The Practical Accomplishment of Blind People’s
Ordinary Activities.
Tuncer, S. (2015). Walking away: an embodied resource to close informal encounters in offices. Journal of
Pragmatics, pp. 101-116.

678
Modelling cultural and
contextual influence:
Patterns, templates and
schemas in utterance
interpretation (organized
by Elke Diedrichsen,
Frank Liedtke)Topic #61
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A case study on pragmatic meaning: The plasticity of


third-person forms

Panel contribution

Dr. Naomi Truan 1


1. Leiden University

Large-scale corpus examinations have already shown that words do not mean something by themselves, but
only in relation to one another (see Rühlemann 2018: 121 for an overview). A typical tool in corpus linguistics,
aimed at assessing how often words appear together (and how likely it is that they do, and whether this is more
than expected), is collocations. Collocations measure “the above-chance frequent co-occurrence of two words
within a pre-determined span, usually five words on either side of the word under investigation (the node)”
(Baker et al. 2008: 278).
Now, we only know very little on how to integrate this quantitative perspective into a more qualitative one,
looking at utterances in context. In the corpus of German, British, and French parliamentary debates (Truan
2016a; Truan 2016b; Truan 2016c) I closely look into, some lexical items are preferably used to convey an op-
positional stance from the speaker’s point of view. This is notably the case for French certains (‘some’) and
German manche and einige (‘some’), and, to a lesser extent, to English some: All these forms are predominantly
used to show that the speaker disaffiliates from the indeterminate and indefinite group of people they are re-
ferring to. This means that these lexical items referring to discourse participants convey an evaluative stance
that helps understand the speaker’s positioning towards the referent(s). This phenomenon can be described
as ‘evaluative prosody’ (Partington 2015), ‘semantic prosody’ (Louw 1993), ‘discourse prosody’ (Stubbs 2001),
or ‘pragmatic meaning’ (Channell 2000) – the denomination I opt for in this talk, as it highlights the pragmatic
component of the reference via third-person forms.
I apply the idea of pragmatic meaning to third-person forms denoting human participants that are marked
with a certain connotation. By this, I mean that without being restricted to certain contexts of apparition, some
lexical units co-occur primarily in positive or negative contexts. Specifically, in the corpus, some third-person
forms are used to denote out-group members, i.e. discourse participants the speaker constructs as distant. This
tends to show that in political discourse (but this could be a more general property), some third-person forms
activate a particular pragmatic meaning. This new layer of meaning is pragmatic insofar as it does not belong
to the semantic core of the word, and, conversely, is not to be found in dictionaries (and has not been reported
in the literature).

680
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A same message in two different situations ?

Panel contribution

Prof. Irmtraud Behr 1


1. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

A same message in two different situations ?


Irmtraud Behr, Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris
Signs and posters can be considered as statements issued to be read in specific situation. Assuming that certain
situations can be considered sufficiently standardized to serve as a basis for the interpretation of signs and
posters, we examine two messages which have the same linguistic form, even the same semantic content, but
whose social meaning differs according to the situations in which they appear.
The sign “maximum capacity 4 people” (1) in an elevator means : the weight supported and the volume of
this elevator are sufficient for four people. The technical characteristics of the lift determine its capacity and
therefore the use that can be made of it. The sign fonctions as a regular diacritical mark (Bühler 1934, Behr /
Lefeuvre 2019).
Between spring 2020 and spring 2021, the sign “maximum capacity 4 people” (2) appears on the door of café-
restaurants in Paris, requiring other interpretative factors. The weight criterion cannot be taken into account
for a café-restaurant, but the interior volume is a valid criterion. If in normal times, the number of people
present at the same time inside the establishment is fluctuating and depends only on the material capacity, the
reception capacity of 4 people is fixed by the health autorities during Covid-19. Social distancing and ‘gauges’
have been surprising restrictive measures with limited time validity. To understand the sign “maximum ca-
pacity 4 people” on the door of a café-restaurant, receivers must therefore know the health discourse and the
measures taken, but also the normal working of a café-restaurant in order to appreciate the points which are
modified by the measure announced on the panel (Schank/Abelson 1975, Behr / Liedtke 2021). They can then
align their concrete (social, bodily) reaction with the elevator instructions.
We can suppose regular utterance-context-pairings for example (1), but not so easily for example (2). Starting
from a concrete case, the aim of the presentation will be to model the mechanisms of interpretation by locating
the differences in the scripts mobilized by both speakers and receivers (Behr, upcoming presentation),
References :
Behr, Irmtraud [upcoming presentation] Instructions écrites acccompagnant le consommateur à l’entrée d’un
bar-tabac au temps du Covid-19 (Tokyo, 29-30 octobre 2022, Colloque international : l’implication du récepteur
dans les énoncés de l’espace public, Université Aoyama Gakuin)
Behr, Irmtraud / Lefeuvre, Florence (éds), 2019, Le genre bref. Des contraintes grammaticales, lexicales et énon-
ciatives à une exploitation ludique et esthétique. Berlin, Frank&Timme, 75-90.
Behr, Irmtraud / Liedtke, Frank, 2021, Krise im öffentlichen Raum. Formen und Funktionen kleiner
Kommunikationsformate zu Covid 19. Krise im öffentlichen Raum. Z Literaturwiss Linguistik (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41244-021-00213-3.
Bühler, Karl, 1934 (1978), Sprachtheorie, Frankfurt am Main, Ullstein.
Schank, Roger C. / Abelson, Robert P., 1975, Scripts, plans, and knowledge. Published in IJCAI 3 September 1975,
p 151-157.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversational Contributions in Discourse:


Contextualization, Entextualization and Recontextualization

Panel contribution

Prof. Anita Fetzer 1


1. University of Augsburg

Interaction-based conceptualizations of context are based on the premise of indexicality of communicative ac-
tion, relating its exclusively product-oriented conceptualization of context-as-given, which is external to a con-
versational contribution, to an inherently dynamic process of contextualization, which is interdependent on a
conversational contribution and its surroundings. Context is thus no longer solely a social or linguistic construct
but rather a dynamic socio-cognitive construal feeding on the contextualization of communicative action.
This paper examines the pragmatics of meaning-making processes in discourse focussing not only on the inter-
pretation and processing of linguistic utterances, but also on their production in context. While there seems to
be general agreement about participants relying on context in their processing of utterances, the production
of utterances in discourse has not yet attracted a huge amount of attention. Instead, the tacit assumption of
semantic meaning encoded in syntactic structure still seems the standard approach.
The paper argues for a change in perspective, supplementing the interpretation-based processes of contextu-
alization, and re- and decontextualization with production-based entextualization of context-dependent dis-
cursive meaning. It expands Norén and Linell’s (2007) concept of meaning potential to a discursive frame of
reference with conversational contribution as the minimal unit of investigation. Conversational contributions
are constitutive parts of the delimiting frame of discourse genre which functions as a blueprint constraining
meaning-making and meaning-production processes. Situated sense-making and situated sense-construction
are thus not solely approached from the semantics of tokens but rather from the dynamics of the interaction
of context and token. From that angle, meaning-making processes do not proceed from linguistic part(s) – or
lexical semantics – to a linguistic whole, but rather from the linguistic whole – or genre as a blueprint – to
linguistic parts and back again. The interaction between linguistic parts and a linguistic whole considers their
connectedness across varying levels. As for meaning-production processes, contextual information is not only a
constitutive part of pragmatic enrichment. Rather, context is a constitutive part of the production of discursive
meaning and entextualised in conversational contributions.
The argument put forward in the paper is illustrated with meaning-making processes in mediated political
discourse for the semantic concepts of citizen (Weizman and Fetzer 2021) and appropriateness, and of their
functional synonyms (Fetzer, submitted).
References
Fetzer, Anita. 2022. Role of Context. In Kecskes, Istvan (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmat-
ics (CHIP). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 139 – 163.
Fetzer, Anita. “Don’t mistake British politeness for weakness over Brexit”: The strategic use of (im)polite(ness)
in mediated political discourse. In Advancing (Im)politeness Studies. Ed. by C. Xie, Cham: Springer.
Gumperz, John 1996. he Linguistic and Cultural Relativity of Inference. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed.
by J. J. Gumperz, and S. C. Levinson, 374-406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norén, Kerstin and Linell, Per. 2007. Meaning potentials and the interaction between lexis and contexts: An
empirical substantiation. Pragmatics 17(3): 387-416.
Weizman, Elda and Fetzer, Anita. 2021. The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action
to citizens: A contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse. Intercultural Pragmatics 18(5):
605-632.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

From context to constructions? A usage-based approach on


German “wollen wir” and “sollen wir” question formats in
written interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Marie-Louise Bartsch 1


1. University of Hamburg

Modals are characterized by two main aspects. First, they are specific because of their auxiliar verb like be-
havior. What then distinguishes them from being an auxiliar verb is their ability to contribute meaning, that
is modality. While the formal properties of the modals are quite fixed, modality remains indeterminate until
its specific use. Considering now that meaning emerges through use (Tomasello 2003), the question arises, how
elements of the concrete usage context can be integrated into a holistic description of modal verbs.
Therefore, the presentation puts forward an approach which combines Interactional Linguistic methods
(Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018; Deppermann 2006) with Construction Grammar premises (Cruise 2001; Goldberg
2006). It focusses on wollen wir and sollen wir question formats taken from a corpus of German WhatsApp in-
teractions. While there is a small amount of action specific usage that seems to distinguish the stable syntactic
patterns clearly from one another, the data shows that more than 70 percent of the cases are used in appoint-
ment sequences to initiate and coordinate joint activities, such as ”sollen wir uns zum Eis essen treffen¿‘ or
„Wollen wir ins Einkaufszentrum fahren oder so? “. Since they are recruited to perform the same action, the
question arises in which aspects these patterns differ and how modality is related to them. I am going to show,
how aspects of the usage context – e.g. sequential position and preference organization– interact with aspects
of the modals core meanings as well as with the semantics of the interrogative pattern. Based on this, I assume
that the two formats span a functional continuum on which they move gradually due to their specific correla-
tions. This finally leads to the discussion, if wollen wir and sollen wir question formats can be regarded as two
instantiations of the same construction (Goldberg 2006).
Assuming that “a set of properties or entities forms a structured whole with characteristic features which is ac-
quired and used as a linguistic or semiotic unit together with pragmatic factors of its use” (Liedtke 2013: 185), the
case study puts forward an argument for a maximalist and strictly usage-oriented approach by fundamentally
asking how aspects of use can be empirically validly captured and conceptualized as elements of constructions
to be finally made accessible to a holistic language description.
References
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth; Selting, Margret (2018): Interactional Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Croft, William (2001): Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Deppermann, Arnulf (2006): Construction Grammar – Eine Grammatik für die Interaktion? In: Deppermann,
Arnulf; Fiehler, Reinhard; Spranz-Fogasy, Thomas (Hg.): Grammatik und Interaktion. Radolfzell: Verlag für
Gesprächsforschung, S. 43–65.
Goldberg, Adele E. (2006): Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: University
Press.
Liedtke, Frank (2013): Pragmatic templates and free enrichment. In: Liedtke, Frank; Schulze, Cornelia (Hg.):
Beyond Words. Content, context, and inference. Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, S. 183-205.
Databanks
Mobile Communication Database 2 - https://db.mocoda2.de/c/home

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Goal-schemas as contexts for understanding

Panel contribution

Prof. Marco Mazzone 1


1. Department of Humanistic Sciences (University of Catania)

The notion of schema has been used to account for the structured representation of information across different
cognitive domains: perception, action, language, emotions, conceptual system. It is also thought to allow for the
representation of (hierarchically organized) systems of goals which motivate action (Baldwin & Baird 2001;
D’Andrade 1992; Mazzone 2018; Miceli & Castelfranchi 2014).
This notion of hierarchically organized goal-schemas will be used to provide a diagrammatic analysis of three
pragmatic phenomena. The first is the dynamics by which conventions about language (or “situation-bound ut-
terances” in the sense of Kecskes 2010) may turn into conventions of language (Morgan 1978). Conventions
about language seem to involve “short-circuiting” of inferential reasoning through chains of goal-schemas,
which eventually can be lexicalized in actual conventions of language. The second phenomenon is negotia-
tion of meaning. I will suggest that the amount of (implicit, non-conflictual) meaning negotiation is an inverse
function of the strength of the goals which constrain the “activity type” (Levinson 1992): the more an activ-
ity type is constrained by goals, the less room there is for negotiation of meanings. The third phenomenon is
conflictual communication, which involves a variably complex combination of goal sharing and goal conflict
between interlocutors.
Taken as a whole, these analyses speak in favor of the Gricean claim that pragmatic understanding is not only
inferential, it is essentially a case of practical reasoning based on tentative recognition (in fact, attribution) of
goals.
References
Baldwin, D.A., & Baird, J.A. (2001). Discerning intentions in dynamic human action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
5, 171–178.
D’Andrade, R. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (eds.), Human motives and cultural
models, 23-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kecskes, I. (2010). Situation-bound utterances as pragmatic acts. Journal of pragmatics, 42(11), 2889-2897.
Levinson, S.J. (1992). Activity types and language. In Paul Drew & John Heritage (eds.), Talk at work: Interactions
in osservational settings, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mazzone, M. (2018). Cognitive Pragmatics. Mindreading, inferences, consciousness. Boston-Berlin: de Gruyter.
Miceli, M., & Castelfranchi, C. (2014). Expectancy and emotion. Oxford: OUP.
Morgan, J.L. (1978). Two types of convention in indirect speech acts. In P. Cole (ed.), Pragmatics, 261–280. New
York: Academic Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Inferences from, and about, context in a joint inference model


of utterance interpretation

Panel contribution

Dr. Chris Cummins 1


1. University of Edinburgh

Much research in experimental pragmatics has addressed quantity implicature, as exemplified by the use of
some to convey the negation of the stronger alternative all. A number of contextual factors have been argued
empirically to influence whether a quantity implicature is available. These include whether the speaker is
knowledgeable about the stronger alternative (Bergen and Grodner 2012), whether the stronger alternative is
blocked by politeness considerations (Bonnefon et al. 2009), whether the stronger alternative is relevant to the
current discourse (Breheny et al. 2006), and potentially whether the speaker is strategically refraining from
making a stronger statement for argumentative reasons (Cummins and Franke 2021).
In real-life contexts, however, the state of these contextual variables is not typically known to the hearer: it
may be unclear whether the speaker is knowledgeable and what they perceive to be relevant or polite. Most
strikingly, it may be unclear whether the speaker is attempting to present information selectively in order to
advance an argumentative agenda, e.g. to convince the hearer of the largeness or smallness of the quantity un-
der discussion. There is evidence that hearers use the content of a speaker’s utterance to draw inferences about
these factors, with some linguistic expressions being especially associated with speaker uncertainty (Geurts and
Nouwen 2007) and some being associated with particular argumentative orientations (Ariel 2004).
A promising approach to integrating these sources of knowledge is to treat the interpretation of utterances as
a joint inference problem, in which the hearer draws inferences not only about the world state but also about
other potentially relevant social interpretation dimensions. This can be captured in a Bayesian model, building
upon ideas pursued within the Rational Speech Act framework (Goodman and Stuhlmüller 2013). In this talk, I
outline such a model and discuss how to evaluate it empirically. I consider the extent to which it is possible to
integrate cultural and interpersonal factors into such a model, and how readily it generalises to other varieties
of pragmatic inference. And I discuss how the model relates to established accounts of how linguistic content
triggers pragmatic enrichment.
References
Ariel, M. (2004). Most. Language, 80(4):658–706.
Bergen, L., and Grodner, D.J. (2012). Speaker knowledge influences the comprehension of pragmatic inferences.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(5):1450–1460.
Bonnefon, J.-F., Feeney, A., and Villejoubert, G. (2009). When some is actually all: scalar inferences in face-
threatening contexts. Cognition, 112(2):249–258.
Breheny, R., Katsos, N., and Williams, J. (2006). Are Generalised Scalar Implicatures generated by default? An
on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition, 100(3):434–463.
Cummins, C., and Franke, M. (2021). Rational interpretation of numerical quantity in argumentative contexts.
Frontiers in Communication, 6. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.662027
Geurts, B., and Nouwen, R. (2007). At least et al.: the semantics of scalar modifiers. Language, 83(3):533–559.
Goodman, N.D., and Stuhlmüller, A. (2013). Knowledge and implicature: modeling language understanding as
social cognition. Topics in Cognitive Science, 5:173–184.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Inferential significance of ascription as pragmatic patterns

Panel contribution

Prof. Ulf Harendarski 1 , Mr. Joschka Briese 1


1. Europa-Universität Flensburg

Intentions (e. g. goals) and intentionality (e. g. normative significance) in everyday interaction are accessi-
ble only by traces (signs)—we assume based on Robert B. Brandom’s inferentialism (1994). Inferences are the
nexus of normative pragmatics. Nevertheless, they tend to be axioms in ordinary language theory. Brandom
on the other hand considers intentionality with reference to ascriptions and attributions, which are grounded
in discursive norms of commitments and entitlements.
Based on normative inferentialism, our approach to discursive practices and pragmatic significance (e. g. illo-
cutionary force) proceeds from third-person descriptions of everyday action. These descriptions of actions seem
to signify traces to former interpretations which therefore can be reconstructed in regard to implicit pragmatic
processes of social interaction. Being heuristic, these descriptions are inferentially significant regarding the
semio-cognitive aspects of action and utterance interpretation. Our perspective is therefore more focused on
the cognitive concepts constituted in semiosis (e.g. Brandt 2013, Brandt 2020) than on preconditioned mental
processes.
Following the assumption that “intentional verbs” are key elements of understanding the daily routine of social
actions as well as interpretation of utterances (e.g. Briese 2019, 2020, submitted; Descombes 2014; Harendarski
2021; Short 2007), we discuss pragmatic patterns signified by these verbs, especially by verbs of social-normative
and communicative action. These patterns are significant pre-structures, coming along by means of certain
verbs, and work as inferential roles in the ascriptions or attributions of intention and intentionality. We assume
that these pre-structures are relatively universal across cultures on the one hand and are a basic framework
for culture-specific action and speech-act typologies on the other.
We present some pragmatic patterns, which are analyzed corpus based. By means of a small sample size we
show how third-person descriptions of everyday intentional actions can be used to elaborate on the interpreta-
tion of linguistic behavior as intentional action.
References
Brandom, R. B. (1994). Making It Explicit. Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Cam-
bridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Brandt, L. (2013). The Communicative Mind. A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning
Construction. Newcastle upon Tyre: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Brandt, P. A. (2020). Cognitive Semiotics. Signs, Mind and Meaning. London/New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Briese, J. (2019). Intentionalität ohne Intentionalismus? Entwurf eines sprachgebrauchs- und zeichenbasierten
Konzepts von Denk- und Handlungsfähigkeit. In: S. Meier, L. Bülow, F. Liedtke, K. Marx (Hrsg.): 50 Jahre Speech
Acts. Bilanz und Perspektiven. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. 203–226.
Briese, J. (2020). Diagramming discursive intentionality – A cognitive-pragmatic model of intentional verbs. In.
Cognitive Semiotics 13(2). 1–22.
Briese, J. (submitted): Pragmatik der diskursiven Intentionalität. Intentionale Verben, Signifikanz und diskursive
Rollen. Europa-Universität Flensburg: Dissertation.
Descombes, V. (2014). The Institutions of Meaning. A Defense of Anthropological Holism. Translated by S. A.
Schwartz. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Harendarski, U. (2021). Implizite Intentionalitätszuschreibung an Andere. Die Funktion von Verben. In: U.
Harendarski (Hrsg.). Reden über Andere. Diskursive Konstitutionen von Subjektpositionen und Personalität.
Tübingen: Stauffenburg. 31–76.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Short, T. L. (2007). Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

687
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Integrating shared and individual realities in communication:


A model of emergent aspects of common ground in interactive
situations

Panel contribution

Dr. Elke Diedrichsen 1


1. Technological University Dublin

This paper proposes a model for the integration of knowledge portions for interaction. These involve back-
ground knowledge, including cultural knowledge, that is shared a priori to the interaction, but also information
that is interactively processed and edited in an ongoing discourse situation.
A priori shared knowledge has been termed common ground (Clark 1996) and core common ground (Kecskes
2014, Kecskes and Zhang 2009). It is shared due to a common cultural background or a shared history of ex-
periences and conversations. Common ground, cooperation, regularities and conventions are known to be
prerequisites for successful communication. This paper will, however, explore a counter-influence, namely the
egocentric perspective that every participant brings into the interaction.
As a consequence of each participant’s individual access, a shared knowledge base may have to be interactively
established in the discourse situation. This has been described as emergent common ground. It entails that pre-
viously unshared issues are introduced and explained by the interactants in order to be useable as a knowledge
base for the conversation. Some issues may figure only in the reality of one participant and affect conversa-
tional turns latently. A background that is treated as shared but is not actually shared has been discussed in
terms of dark-side commitments (Walton and Krabbe 1995) or uncommon ground (Macagno and Capone 2016).
The resolution of such mismatches in communication constitutes a case of emergent common ground (Kecskes
2014).
There is also a factor I call Hiding in Plain Sight: Not all aspects of an interactive situation are necessarily seen or
accepted by all participants alike. For personal reasons, including the experience, profession or health situation
of an individual, some people might perceive and focus things differently than others. There has to be a con-
vergence of point of view among interactants. Any communicative situation is evoked, built and/or processed
interactively in order to serve as a knowledge resource for the conversation. The situation, as it is utilised for
the conversation, is, after all, emergent common ground.
The paper will provide a model of the knowledge factors thus interactively integrated in a conversational in-
teraction. It will be demonstrated that this account incorporates the description of online interactions, where
there is no guarantee for an a priori shared knowledge base, let alone a shared space. If the exposure to a
shared situation is regarded as something interactively achieved rather than a priori given, then this holds for
all communicative encounters, including online conversation.
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kecskes, Istvan. 2014. Intercultural Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kecskes, Istvan and Zhang, Fenghui. 2009. Activating, seeking and creating common ground: A socio- cognitive
approach. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(2), 331–355.
Macagno, Fabrizio and Capone, Alessandro. 2016. Uncommon ground. Intercultural Pragmatics 13:2, 151–180.
Walton, Douglas and Krabbe, Erik. 1995. Commitment in dialogue. Albany: State University of New York Press.

688
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of multiple viewpoints in utterance interpretation

Panel contribution

Mrs. Aleksandra Uttenweiler 1


1. University of Leipzig

The contribution explores the role of complex viewpoint networks (Dancygier and Vandelanotte 2016) in ut-
terance interpretation. The approach relies on the emergence of multiple viewpoints in a single utterance,
implying that in the process of interpretation several points of view must be taken into account. Accordingly,
an utterance can be interpreted on many levels depending on the viewpoint considered. A relevant point of
view may not be expressed directly by the speaker, but the hearer may need to rely on their pragmatic compe-
tence to be able to interpret an utterance from a given viewpoint. I suggest considering viewpoint patterns as
constructional templates (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), that come as ritualized formations (e. g. memes, forms
like “unpopular opinion”, irony) providing additional information about possible viewpoints in discourse and
the hierarchies between them.
In a Twitter corpus I have compiled there are numerous formations, which express the writer’s stance while
conveying multiple viewpoints. Examples include the expressions “unpopular opinion” or “friendly reminder”
used as conventionalized markers of a subjective point of view by projecting the writer’s opinion. However,
they also express an opposing or a more general viewpoint. The conventional use of the expressions mentioned
above implies that in order to interpret them and the utterances they introduce it is not only important to
account for individual viewpoints but also the cultural and situational knowledge influencing online discourse.
The findings suggest that utterance interpretation requires taking multiple viewpoints as well as the connections
between them into account. The production and comprehension of viewpoint patterns relies on core common
ground (Clark 1996; Kecskes and Zhang 2009), including shared knowledge about cultural conceptualization
and norms. The assumed common ground needs to account for possible viewpoints that may occur in a society.
Furthermore, the emerging common ground informs the reader about the hierarchy of viewpoints expressed
in an utterance. When it comes to Twitter discourse previous postings and biographical information need to be
considered. Throughout the presentation, I aim to model the comprehension of complex viewpoint patterns in
relation to cultural and situational contexts.
References:
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dancygier, Barbara and Lieven Vandelanotte. 2016. Discourse Viewpoint as network. In Barbara Dancygier,
Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen (eds.), Viewpoint and the Fabric of Meaning. Form and Use of Viewpoint Tools
across Languages and Modalities, 13–40. Berlin, Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kecskes, Istvan and Fenghui Zhang. 2009. Activating, seeking, and creating common ground: A socio-cognitive
approach. Pragmatics & Cognition. John Benjamins 17(2). 331–355.
Van Valin, Robert D. and Randy J. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structure, meaning, and function. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of the situation in utterance interpretation: How


context and common ground informs a speech act

Panel contribution

Dr. Brian Nolan 1


1. Technological University Dublin

It is argued that the situation is an essential component within a model of utterance interpretation with a clear
role in binding together relevant aspects of context and common ground. As a cognitive frame, a pragmatic
template, the situation encompasses context and common ground in informing the uttered speech act.
A speech act is part of a collective behaviour, within a dialogue, that evolves within the context of a social
environment and grounded in the situation of the utterance. Interlocutors draw on the associated context, and
establish a shared common ground. Employing the situation, we model speech acts based on the Searle (1979)
taxonomy, such that their respective underspecified meaning can be computed. In characterising speech acts,
we show that, in order to compute utterance meaning, a consideration of the situation, its context and common
ground is necessary.
A situation can be formalised as a structured entity with important attributes that reflect its real-time pragmatic
functions (Nolan 2022a, 2022b). We propose that the templatic structure of a situation includes the construc-
tional signature, illocutionary force, initial context at the time of the speech act utterance and the initial common
ground of the speaker and hearer along with the real-time preconditions that exist, the speech act proposition,
the cognitive states of belief, desire and intention (BDI) of the speaker (and hearer), and the post-context ‘as it is’
after the utterance of the speech act. As a schematic template, the formalisation of the situation also needs to be
able to show the realisation factors and the resulting post conditions that exist following a successful felicitous
utterance. We address the following key questions:

1. As a template, how does the situation of the utterance encapsulate those relevant parts of context and
common ground in support of the speech act?
2. In a situation, how can we represent the contents of context and common ground, with the appropriate
level of specificity?
3. How might the situation be represented such that it becomes operationally useful in linguistic analysis?

An appealing advantage of employing a situation in the analysis of speech acts, as instances of real-time
language-in-use, is that the situation provides us with the means to relate relevant context and common ground
to the resolution of underspecified components of the utterance. A speech act must be interpreted in the context
of a given situation, taking into account the different speech act types, along with context, and common ground.
References
Nolan, Brian. 2022a. Language, culture, and knowledge in context: A functional-cognitive approach. Sheffield:
Equinox Publishing Company.
Nolan, Brian. 2022b. The Cultural, Contextual, and Computational Dimensions of Common Ground. In Istvan
Kecskes (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and
Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108884303. 107–138.
Searle, John R. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

690
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Unarticulated constituents versus ad hoc concepts

Panel contribution

Dr. Alison Hall 1


1. De Montfort University

Contextualist approaches to utterance interpretation posit two broad kinds of ‘free’ (non-linguistically man-
dated) enrichment processes contributing to what is said, as opposed to implicatures: (i) ad hoc concept con-
struction, where a concept’s denotation is narrowed or broadened so that the concept conveyed differs from
the concept linguistically encoded, and (ii) unarticulated constituents (UCs), which do not correspond to any ele-
ment of the uttered sentence. For example, what is said with an utterance of “It’s raining”, given the appropriate
context, would be that it is raining in Paris, where the location in Paris is a UC.
A frequent concern voiced about UCs is that it is unclear how they ‘get into’ what is said given that, unlike ad
hoc concepts, they are not the value of any element of the linguistic meaning: Jodlowiec (2015) argues against
the relevance-theoretic account of what is said, and the concern is also reflected in ‘overgeneration’ arguments
against UCs (e.g. Borg 2016, Stanley 2002), and a suggestion from Recanati (2010), himself one of the most
prominent contextualist philosophers of language, that UCs are part of the context against which the Austinian
proposition (roughly the semantic content or what is said) is assessed for truth or falsity, rather than part of that
proposition (see also Corazza and Dokic 2012’s ‘Situated minimalism’).
In this talk, I consider whether we can draw a principled distinction between UCs and ad hoc concepts, and
therefore whether the above criticisms are warranted. A key difference is that it tends to be easier to articulate
the content of UCs, such as in Paris, than of ad hoc concepts, giving the impression of two different processes.
However, this is a difference of degree rather than kind, and I will suggest that at least some UCs can be re-
analysed as ad hoc concepts, while others, following a proposal in Hinzen (2015), may not in fact be part of
communicated content at all.
References:
Borg, E. 2016. Exploding explicatures. Mind & Language 31: 335-355.
Corazza, E, and Dokic, J. 2012. Situated minimalism versus free enrichment. Synthese 184: 179-198.
Hinzen, W. 2015. Nothing is hidden: Contextualism and the grammar-meaning interface. Mind & Language 30:
259-291.
Jodlowiec, M. 2015. The Challenges of Explicit and Implicit Communication. Peter Lang.
Recanati, F. 2010. Perspectival Thought: A Plea for (Moderate) Relativism. Oxford University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Uttering sentences and using templates

Panel contribution

Prof. Frank Liedtke 1


1. University of Leipzig

As a rule, in uttering sentences or sentence fragments, speakers express more than they articulate. I distinguish
two strategies for capturing the underdetermination of the articulated with respect to the information which
is expressed by an utterance. The first strategy is to assume unarticulated constituents as part of the utterance
which is understood by the addressee; the second is to avoid this assumption and to rely instead on informa-
tion of the utterance context, not being projected upon the utterance content itself. I argue that the second
strategy should be pursued, and a proposal is made for capturing the relation between linguistic and contex-
tual aspects of the utterance situation by means of the notion of a pragmatic template. The latter is defined as
a holistic cluster of relations between uttered sentences with a meaning on the one side and elements of the
utterance situation on the other, a cluster which can be highly standardized in cases of more ritualized com-
munication or which might be shaped according to the utterance situation. It is assumed that we as addressees
have such clusters at our disposal in order to form a representation of an utterance with respect to its con-
textual determination. Several examples for using templates are discussed in the contribution. These include
“and”-conjunctions, which have to be enriched in order to obtain a complete proposition. It is shown that these
enrichments belong to different types, encompassing “and then”, “and therefore”, “and consequently” etc. The
hypothesis is that these enrichments are possible only if the participants rely on pragmatic templates, covering
different types of standardized utterance-situation-clusters.
Literature:
Pragmatic Templates and Free Enrichment. In: F. Liedtke / Cornelia Schulze (Eds.) Beyond Words. Content,
context and inference. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2013, 183-205.

692
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I only wrote that to frighten her” – Threatening speech in the


Late Modern English period

Panel contribution

Dr. Theresa Neumaier 1


1. TU Dortmund University

While speech act analysis on commissives has often focused on ‘positive’ promises, “evil promises” (Christensen
2019: 119), i.e., threats, have often been neglected when it comes to historical periods (but see, e.g., Peters & van
Hattum 2021). Since threats do not involve a specific performative speech act verb, they cannot be extracted
automatically. Moreover, speech acts are always socially situated, i.e., in order for them to be successful, in-
teractants need to have access to a similar set of sociocultural categories and schemas associated with them.
Hence, the realisation of threats in general and the typical structure of a threatening letter can change over
time.
This paper investigates the linguistic realisation of threats in the Late Modern English period. Using court-
room data from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (1674-1913), I first compiled a corpus of speech acts which
were perceived as potentially threatening by contemporaries – otherwise they would not have made it into the
courtroom. I then manually analyse the formal structure of 100 written and 100 reported verbal threats and
use corpus linguistic tools to search for recurring lexical bundles and determine keywords. Finally, I look at the
rhetorical organisation of the written part of the corpus to identify recurrent moves which might be considered
obligatory for threatening letters in Late Modern English.
The findings reveal interesting differences to modern threats. While analyses of modern courtroom data found
the vast majority of threats to be indirect (Christensen 2019), threats in the Old Bailey data are mostly direct,
i.e., they explicitly specify threatener, victim, and type of threat. Additionally, more than a third of all threats
can be classified as unconditional, as the victims are not provided with an option to prevent the threat from
being carried out. This is less than has been reported for Modern English (Muschalik 2018) but considerably
more than found in Middle English literary texts (Rudanko 2004), which might indicate a decrease over time in
how openly conditions are expressed in threatening language. Apart from that, this finding could be explained
by context-dependent schematisation patterns, as many of the letters are clearly influenced by contemporary
social grievances, such as the Swing riots. Hence, the study not only shows that the analysis of speech acts in
general and of historical speech acts in particular needs to be based on an ethnographic approach, but also
provides a first glimpse into the historical development of a yet under-researched speech act type.
References:
Christensen, T. (2019). Indirect threats as an illegal speech act. In K. Ramshøj Christensen, H. Jørgensen, and J.
L. Wood (eds.), The Sign of the V – Papers in Honour of Sten Vikner, 113-130. Aarhus University.

Muschalik, J. (2018). Threatening in English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.


Peters, A. & M. van Hattum. (2021). Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th -century Irish English
threatening notices. English World-Wide 42(1), 29-53.
Rudanko, J. (2004). ‘I Wol Sterve‘: Negotiating the issue of a lady‘s consent in Chaucer‘s poety. Journal of Histor-
ical Pragmatics 5(1), 137-159.

693
18th International Pragmatics Conference

„hä (-) wie meinst du das¿‘ Sequential construction of non


understanding in German spoken interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Robert Mroczynski 1


1. University of Leipzig

This paper will outline the sequential construction of (non) understanding in German spoken interaction. The
idea of the sequential construction is based on thoughts of Langacker (2001, 2008), Fischer (2010), Deppermann
(2006) and Linell/ Lindström (2016). They all claim that linguistic structures are never merely formal, but always
have a functional site and this units are not isolated but a part of social interaction. I am assuming that abstract
sequential structures are used in interaction in conditions where interactants have difficulties understanding
each other. These sequential structures have the function of monitoring or repairing failures in understanding.
In my paper, such form-function pairs Goldberg (2006) will be presented and discussed at different levels of
abstraction (Imo 2011) based on empirical (Schegloff 1996) spoken data. The analyses in this paper build on
several corpora of DGD (Database for Spoken German). Additionally, the paper will address the contextual
conditions that have to be given in order to activate certain sequences of non-understanding.
Fischer, Kerstin (2010). Beyond the sentence: Constructions, frames and spoken interaction. Constructions and
Frames, 2(2):185–207.
Goldberg, Adele E. (2006). Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. (2001). Discourse in Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 12.2.: 143–188.
Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Linell, Per / Lindström, Jan (2016). “Partial intersubjectivity and sufficient understandings for current practical
purposes: On a specialized practice in Swedish conversation”, Nordic Journal of Linguistics, vol. 39, no. 2,:
113–133.
Schegloff EA. Confirming allusions: toward an empirical account of action. American Journal of Sociology. 1996;
102(1): 161–216.

694
Multilingual pragmatics.
A focus on pragmatic
awareness in
multilingual
instructional settings
(organized by Pilar
Safont, Laura Portolés)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Developing Multilingual Young Students’ Pragmatic


Awareness through Pedagogical Translanguaging

Panel contribution

Dr. Laura Portolés 1 , Ms. Gema Gayete Domínguez 1


1. Universitat Jaume I

Students’ pragmatic awareness has been widely researched in recent decades, although most of these studies
have ignored the multilingual background of the participants (Kim & Taguchi, 2015, 2016; Myrset, 2022; Savić
et al., 2021; Taguchi, 2019). The multilingual turn in education has led to the need for a more multilingual ap-
proach to the study of pragmatic awareness (McConachy, 2019). A number of studies have addressed this issue
by examining the pragmatic awareness of multilingual students at the primary level (Portolés, 2015; Safont
& Portolés, 2015, 2016; Portolés & Safont, 2018), in secondary education (Martín-Laguna & Alcón-Soler, 2018;
Martín-Laguna, 2020; Nightingale & Safont, 2019), and in higher education (Safont, 2005; Safont & Alcón, 2012;
Martínez-Buffa & Safont, 2022). These studies have reported that multilingual learners have an enhanced prag-
matic awareness. Similarly, several studies have examined how instruction affects students’ pragmatic aware-
ness and found that explicit instruction is beneficial (Safont & Alcón, 2012; Usó-Juan, 2021, 2022; Usó-Juan &
Martínez-Flor, 2021). However, these instructional treatments have been conducted in secondary and higher
education and followed a monolingual bias. Very current research has explored the effects of implementing a
multilingual approach on students’ language awareness (Duarte, 2020; Cenoz & Santos, 2020; Leonet; Cenoz &
Gorter, 2020; Cenoz, Leonet & Gorter, 2021; Galante, 2020; Yasar Yuzlu & Dikilitas, 2022), although none of them
has focused specifically on pragmatic awareness.
Given the limited number of studies investigating pragmatics and multilingualism in elementary school con-
texts, the present study analyses the effect of multilingual instruction, referring to pedagogical translanguaging,
on multilingual young learners’ pragmatic awareness, paying particular attention to the sociopragmatic dimen-
sion of the speech act of requesting. The sample consisted of 28 primary school students from a public trilingual
school in the province of Castellón (Valencian Community), where three main languages (Catalan, Spanish and
English) are used as languages of instruction. Elementary school students were asked to complete a pre- and
post-test on multilingual pragmatic awareness of requests before and after receiving multilingual pragmatic
instruction. Using computer-animated scenarios created with Nawmal software, the treatment included three
sessions focused on the sociopragmatic dimension of requests through pedagogical translanguaging. Data were
coded and analysed using the SPSS programme. The results showed that students’ understanding of requestive
behaviour improved after the implementation of multilingual pedagogies. Thus, in our study, the multilingual
approach of pedagogical translanguaging was found to be beneficial for the development of young students’
pragmatic awareness. In conclusion, we believe that using learners’ whole language repertoire through a mul-
tilingual teaching approach, such as pedagogical translanguaging, may provide a rich environment for devel-
oping students’ understanding and awareness of pragmatic issues.

696
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic awareness of multilingual teenagers. Examining


the effect of pedagogical translanguaging.

Panel contribution

Prof. Pilar Safont 1 , Dr. Richard Nightingale 1


1. Universitat Jaume I

Pragmatic awareness in third language acquisition contexts has received scant attention (Jessner, 2017; Portolés,
2015; Safont and Alcón-Soler, 2012; Martínez-Buffa and Safont, 2022). Given their pancultural nature (Brown,
2017), requests have been widely examined in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. Nevertheless, fur-
ther research is still needed that considers a sociopragmatic viewpoint (Kesckes, 2019) and a multilingual focus
(Cenoz and Gorter, 2011; Cenoz, 2013).
Bearing this purpose in mind, the present study focuses on the effect of pedagogical translanguaging on the
pragmatic awareness of third language learners of English. Participants include 50 adolescent learners of En-
glish as L3 from a multilingual sociolinguistic setting, namely that of Castelló. Three languages coexist in the
instructional setting in which data were collected, Catalan, Spanish and English. In an attempt to consider all
their languages, participants were tested on their pragmatic awareness in these languages before (pre-test) and
after (post-test) the instructional treatment which incorporated pedagogical translanguaging in the tasks per-
formed. The control group was not involved in explicit instructional activities. Results from our analyses show
the extent to which an explicit multilingual focus on pragmatic instruction may benefit multilingual learners of
English as well as the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic acquisition.

697
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The effect of pedagogical translanguaging on young learners’


metapragmatic awareness of requests

Panel contribution

Mrs. Irene Guzman 1 , Mr. Ignacio Martinez Buffa 1


1. Universitat Jaume I

The present study focuses on the effect of instruction on young multilingual learners’ understanding of requests.
The limited number of studies targeting this age group has evidenced their ability to reflect on pragmatic-related
issues (Portolés, 2015; Savić, 2021). In addition, previous research has shown the positive effect of short periods
of instruction on young learners’ metapragmatic development (Myrset, 2022). However, as suggested by Por-
tolés and Safont (2018), further studies are needed to consider learners’ multilingual backgrounds as a resource
for metapragmatic development. From this perspective, the aim of the present study is to examine the effect
of a translingual approach focused on the construction of requests on primary school learners. An intact class
of Spanish-Catalan bilingual sixth graders learning English as an L3 participated in this pre-post-test design
study. A translingual –Spanish, Catalan and English– instruction was implemented to foster pragmalinguistic
and sociopragmatic awareness in the comprehension and production of requests. Quantitative and qualitative
analyses were conducted to describe changes in learners’ conception of appropriateness, social distance, as
well as the formulation of request forms. Results are in line with previous studies highlighting the benefits
of translingual instruction for the teaching and learning of pragmatics. More specifically, findings from the
present study provide further evidence regarding the relevance of a multilingual approach to engage young
learners in pragmatic-related discussion by drawing on their multilingual experience.
Myrset, A. (2022). ‘You could win Masterchef with this soup. Can I get some more?’ Request
production and the impact of instruction on young EFL learners. Journal of Pragmatics, 192, 56-76.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.02.010
Portolés, L. (2015). Multilingualism and very young learners. An analysis of pragmatic awareness and language
attitude. Mouton de Gruyter .https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501500022
Portolés, L. & Safont, M. P. (2018). Examining authentic and elicited data from a multilingual per-
spective. The real picture of child requestive behaviour in the L3 classroom. System, 75, 81-92.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.03.012
Savić, M. (2021). Co-constructing metapragmatic understanding. How young EFL learners talk about making
requests. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 10(2), 153-176

698
Multimodal and prosodic
markers of information
structure and discourse
structure (organized by
Pilar Prieto, Frank
Kügler)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Focus types and the prosody-gesture link in Catalan and


German: A production study

Panel contribution

Ms. Alina Gregori 1 , Ms. Paula G. Sánchez-Ramón 2 , Prof. Pilar Prieto 3 , Prof. Frank Kügler 1
1. Goethe Universität Frankfurt, 2. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, 3. ICREA-Universitat
Pompeu Fabra

Research has shown that gesture and speech are highly interconnected (McNeill, 1992) and that information
structure and prosody correlate in terms of prominence (Féry & Kügler, 2008; Dufter & Gabriel, 2016). The role
of focus types in this correlation and in the attraction of gesture use has rarely been considered. Esteve-Gibert
et al. (2021) found that (children’s) head gestures were used to indicate the informational status of referents,
suggesting that gestures may play a structural role in communication.
We investigate the impact of focus conditions on prosodic prominence, gestures, and their synchronization.
Following Krifka (2008), focus conditions are classified as: information focus, contrastive focus or corrective
focus. As contrastive and corrective conditions have a stronger prosodic prominence than information focus
conditions (Krifka, 2008), we hypothesize that pitch accentuation and gesture will be mostly associated with
corrective and contrastive constituents, rather than with information focus. A comparative analysis is carried
out for German and Catalan.
A production study will be conducted relying on an adaptation of the elicitation method by Esteve-Gibert et
al. (2021). The method consists of pictures prompted in a digital board game. Participants request certain
objects from an animated conversation partner. The focus types can be controlled by the responses of the
animated “speaker”. For data coding, prosody will be analyzed using ToBI adaptations (Grice et al., 2005; Prieto
et al., 2015), assuming that pitch accents are associated with different levels of prominence (in accordance with
Baumann et al. (2006)). Gesture apexes will be annotated using the M3D labeling system (Rohrer et al., 2020).
We expect to conduct and analyze the data in the upcoming months for both German and Catalan.

Baumann, S., Grice, M. & Steindamm, S. (2006). Prosodic Marking of Focus Domains Categorical or Gradient?
Proc. Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden, 301–304.
Dufter, A. & Gabriel, C. (2016). Information structure, prosody, and word order. In Fischer, S. & Gabriel, C. (eds.),
Manual of grammatical interfaces in Romance, 419–456. Berlin, Boston: DeGruyter.
Esteve-Gibert, N., Lœvenbruck, H., Dohen M. & D’Imperio, M. (2021). Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather
than prosodic cues to highlight important information in speech. Developmental Science. e13154.
Féry, C. & Kügler, F. (2008). Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of
Phonetics 36(4). 680–703.
Grice, M., Baumann, S. & Benzmüller, R. (2005). German Intonation in Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology. In
Jun, S. (ed.) Prosody Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. Oxford: OUP,55-83.
Krifka, M. (2008). Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55(3).
243–276.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: what gestures reveal about thought. UCP.
Prieto, P., Borràs-Comes, J., Cabré, T., Crespo-Sendra, V., Mascaró, I., Roseano, P., Sichel-Bazin, R., & Vanrell, M.M.
(2015). Intonational phonology of Catalan and its dialectal varieties. In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in
Romance, pp. 9-62. Oxford: OUP.
Rohrer, P., Vilà-Giménez, I., Florit-Pons, J., Gurrado, G., Esteve-Gibert, N., Ren, A., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & Prieto,
P. (2020). The MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system for the annotation of audiovisual corpora:
Gesture Labeling Manual. UPF Barcelona.

700
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Head movements and pitch accents as cues to information


status in L2 French

Panel contribution

Prof. Stefan Baumann 1 , Dr. Florence Baills 1


1. IfL-Phonetik, University of Cologne

Languages differ in the way prosodic prominence is implemented to mark information status or focus (e.g. Kü-
gler & Calhoun, 2020). At a parallel level of description, gestures have been found to occur more frequently with
new and inferable referents than with given ones (e.g. Debreslioska & Gullberg 2020). For foreign languages,
previous research has shown that deaccenting given information may be challenging for speakers of languages
which use this strategy less (e.g. Rasier & Hiligsmann 2007). As for gestures, there is evidence that learners tend
to over-explicitly mark referring expressions such as pronouns (Yoshioka 2008). To our knowledge, an analysis
of information status expressed through both prosodic and gestural prominence (here: head movements) in L2
speech has not been carried out so far.
In the present study, 25 Catalan learners of French were video-recorded giving a short description of their best
friend in French. The recordings were annotated in terms of information status (RefLex Scheme, Riester &
Baumann 2017), pitch accents (F_ToBI, Delais-Roussarie et al. 2015), perceived prominence (DIMA, Kügler et al.
2022) and head movement types and apexes (M3D, Rohrer et al. 2020). Results show that Catalan learners of
French marked new and inferable information more than given information either with pitch accents alone or
with a combination of pitch accents and gestures. Given information was generally marked as less prominent
than new(er) information (more initial accents, fewer rises, lower level of perceived prominence, fewer head
movements) but still received a large proportion of pitch accents. However, no difference between the types of
accent or the types of head movement were found in non-given categories.
Currently, the annotation and analysis of comparable speech by ten French native speakers who performed the
same task is being annotated and the results of their analysis will be contrasted with the present results.
References
Debreslioska, S., & Gullberg, M. (2020). What’s New? Gestures accompany inferable rather than brand-new
referents in discourse. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1935.
Delais-Roussarie et al. (2015) Intonational Phonology of French: Developing a ToBI system for French In S. Frota
& P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance. OUP.
Kügler, F., Baumann, S. & Röhr, C.T. (2022). Deutsche Intonation, Modellierung und Annotation (DIMA) –
Richtlinien zur prosodischen Annotation des Deutschen. In: Schwarze, C. & Grawunder, S. (Eds.), Transkrip-
tion und Annotation gesprochener Sprache und multimodaler Interaktion (pp. 23–54). Narr.
Kügler, F. & Calhoun, S. (2020). Prosodic encoding of information structure: A typological perspective. In (C.
Gussenhoven & A. Chen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody (pp. 454–467). Oxford Academic.
Riester, A. & Baumann S. (2017). The RefLex Scheme – Annotation Guidelines. SinSpeC. Working Papers of the
SFB 732, vol. 14. University of Stuttgart.
Rohrer, P., Vilà-Giménez, I, Florit-Pons, J., Esteve-Gibert, N., Ren, A., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Prieto, P. (2020). The
MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system. OSF. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ANKDX
Yoshioka, K. (2008). Gesture and information structure in first and second language. Gesture, 8, 236–255.

701
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prosodic marking of contrast in signed languages: the case of


LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language)

Panel contribution

Ms. Clara Lombart 1


1. Université de Namur

The relationships between prosody and information structure (IS) have been documented for spoken languages
(SpLs) before being investigated in signed languages (SLs) in the 2000s (Kimmelman and Pfau 2016). Research
has highlighted that the prosodic marking of IS in SLs follows patterns similar to those documented for SpLs,
and relies on manual features (e.g. duration of the signs) and non-manual markers (e.g. facial expressions or
eyebrow movements) (Wilbur 2012).
Among information units, we find contrast, defined as the opposition between two or more alternatives that
share dependency in discourse (Navarrete-González 2021). A recurrent problem in the literature is that con-
trast is regarded as a homogeneous notion. However, some authors (e.g. Umbach 2004) have claimed that its
marking can only be understood by considering different subtypes, such as discourse opposition, selection, and
correction. Furthermore, studies on IS in SLs have been limited to a few languages, and have been based on elic-
itation tasks and translations from a SpL to a SL. Thus, more diversity in data and more studies on spontaneous
language use are needed (Kimmelman and Pfau 2016).
This presentation aims to overcome these shortcomings by examining contrast in a SL in which IS has not yet
been studied, LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language). In particular, the present study seeks to address the follow-
ing questions: Which prosodic features of LSFB are used to encode contrast? Does this marking differ across
contrast subtypes (i.e. discourse opposition, selection, and correction)? To tackle these questions, we analysed
videos extracted from the LSFB Corpus (Meurant 2015) produced by six native deaf signers who interacted with
someone familiar. We examined the prosodic marking of the contrast subtypes in comparison to the signed
units (i.e. sequences of signs delimited by stops of the hands) that precede or follow them, and thus form their
surrounding context. With this aim in mind, we annotated 1500 manual signs according to manual holds, sign
repetitions, dominance reversals, duration, and displacement of the hands. In addition, 1200 non-manual signs
(eyebrow, head, and torso movements) were considered.
The results show that contrast has a specific prosodic marking in LSFB compared to non-contrastive items. More
specifically, the prevailing prosodic cues that encode contrast are changes in displacement (e.g. a sign is placed
higher in space than the previous one), variations in duration (e.g. a sign is longer than the preceding one),
non-manual cues, and combinations of these markers. Contrast is also characterised by a form of prominence
that is stronger than non-contrastive items. Moreover, we observed either i) the gradual marking of the contrast
subtypes or ii) the use of a specific marking for one subtype that was distinct from the other two. Patterns (i) and
(ii) manifest differently depending on the prosodic cue. The interactions between prosody, IS, and articulatory
constraints (i.e. types of sign, movement, and position in an utterance) are discussed to explain the different
tendencies highlighted in the data sample.
Ultimately, this study opens new avenues for a more thorough definition of contrast in SLs.

702
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speech-associated gestures reflect topic-comment structures

Panel contribution

Dr. Sandra Debreslioska 1 , Prof. Pamela Perniss 2


1. Lund University, 2. University of Cologne

How speakers linguistically express the difference between new/given or topic/comment information in dis-
course is a well-established field of research. What role the visual/gestural parts of language play, however,
is less well understood. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the information status of referents
and shown that gesture frequency and mode of representation vary according to a referent’s accessibility (De-
breslioska & Gullberg, 2019; Perniss & Özyürek, 2015). However, other information structural dimensions such
as ‘aboutness’ (topic vs. comment elements of the clause) and how they influence gesture use remain largely
unexplored. This study therefore examines when and if so, howgestures accompany discourse referents with a
focus on ‘aboutness’, in addition to referent accessibility and referential forms.
The data set consisted of 30 videotaped narrative retellings produced by 10 native speakers of German. We used
three short Charlie Chaplin movie clips as stimulus material. We divided the narratives into clauses, identified
all referential expressions, coded them for form (lexical NP vs. pronoun), referent accessibility (maintained vs.
(re)introduced), and ‘aboutness’ (referential expression as part of the topic or comment element of the clause).
For gesture, all strokes that co-occurred with referential expressions were identified and classified as referential
or non-referential (Kendon, 2004).
We analyzed the data from three perspectives. Analysis 1 examined how likely different types of referential
expressions are accompanied by gestures (DV: presence/absence of gesture). Analysis 2 took the gestures as
starting point and examined how they pattern with the different properties of the referential expressions (DV:
number of gestures). Analysis 3 examined gesture referentiality in relation to ‘aboutness’.
Preliminary results for analysis 1 showed that gestures tend to occur with lexical NPs and (re)introduced refer-
ents. However, there was no relationship between ‘aboutness’ and the presence/absence of gestures. Analysis 2
revealed that more gestures are produced with lexical NPs, (re)introduced referents, as well as referents that are
part of the comment. Analysis 3 showed that non-referential gestures associate with topics whereas referential
gestures pattern with referents that are part of the comment.
The findings suggest that speech-associated gestures play a role in the expression of information structure. That
is, if we take speech as a starting point, referential form and referent accessibility predict whether a gesture will
be produced. Furthermore, if we start with gestures, that is, if we come across a gesture in discourse, it is highly
likely that the co-occurring speech will be part of the comment element of a clause. Finally, the findings suggest
that gesture referentiality co-varies with ‘aboutness’, which highlights the importance of information structure
for our understanding of gesture functions. Thus, the study also provides new insights into the speech-gesture
relationship in general.
References
Debreslioska, S., & Gullberg, M. (2019). Discourse reference is bimodal: how information status in speech inter-
acts with presence and viewpoint of gestures. Discourse Processes, 56(1), 41-60.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. CUP.

Perniss, P., & Özyürek, A. (2015). Visible cohesion: a comparison of reference tracking in sign, speech, and
co�speech gesture. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7(1), 36-60.

703
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The multimodal marking of information status of referents in


English academic discourses

Panel contribution

Dr. Patrick Louis Rohrer 1 , Prof. Pilar Prieto 2


1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2. ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

When managing the common ground between speaker and addressee in discourse, speakers may use a number
of cues which signal the information status of discourse referents (henceforth ISR) where discourse referents
correspond to Noun Phrases or Prepositional Phrases which may be new to the discourse, accessible from con-
text, or given (see Krifka, 2008; Götze et al., 2007). In Germanic languages speakers tend to use pitch accentuation
to mark new referents, while given referents are often deaccented (e.g., Kügler & Calhoun, 2021 for a review).
Some studies have also suggested a close relationship between pitch accent types and the degree of newness
in discourse (e.g., Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). Similarly, co-speech gestures seem to be produced with
accessible and new referents more than given ones (Debreslioska & Gullberg, 2019; 2020b, Im & Baumann, 2020;
among many others), and that, similarly, the production of certain gesture types are related to the newness of
information in discourse (McNeill, 1992). However, no study to our knowledge has investigated the joint use
of pitch accentuation and gesture as highlighters of new information in discourse, while accounting for pitch
accent type and gesture type. Furthermore, phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents have been found to largely
act as attractors for gesture production (Rohrer, 2022), indicating that phrasal prosodic structure may also guide
gesture production patterns. Thus, the objectives of this study are a) to better understand the multimodal (joint
prosodic and gestural) cues to the information status of referents; b) to assess the role of pitch accent type as a
prosodic cue to information status via pitch accentuation; and c) to assess the role of gesture type (referential
vs. non-referential) as a gestural cue to information status, as well as any potential interaction between gesture
production and prosodic phrasal structure (i.e., gestures which associate with prenuclear pitch accents) in the
marking of ISR.
A corpus analysis was carried out on the English M3D-TED corpus containing over 23 minutes of multimodal dis-
course across 5 speakers, which was independently annotated for gesture, prosody, and information status. We
found that both gesture and prosody seem to work together to mark information status, particularly that given
referents were found to be deaccented and produced without gesture more than accessible or new referents.
However, no significant relationship was found for pitch accent type. That is, all pitch accents associate with
new information equally. Similarly, no effect was found for gesture type, showing that both referential and non-
referential gestures associate with new information equally. Crucially, in prenuclear pitch accented positions,
an interaction between gesture and prosody was found for the first time, showing that gestures marked accessi-
ble referents significantly more than given or new ones, playing a complementary role with pitch accentuation.
In our view, even though these results reflect a good degree of integration between pitch accentuation and
the production of gesture, which jointly act as multimodal highlighters of information status, they also reveal
a more nuanced situation where gesture is not directly dependent on prosodic structure to convey pragmatic
meaning.

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Multimodal stancetaking
– the (a) typical case of
taking a stance?
(organized by Cornelia
Müller)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Affective stancetaking in mediatised political speeches of


‘Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen’ (The German ‘Green Party’

Panel contribution

Mrs. Clara Kindler 1 , Prof. Cornelia Müller 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Based on the ongoing DFG/NCN research project “Multimodal Stancetaking: Expressive Movement and Affective
Stance” (http://mmstance.home.amu.edu.pl/), this talk takes a closer look on the specific affective stancetaking
in political speeches as multimodal actions. Multimodality is addressed in a double sense: First, as the dynamic
interplay of hand and body gestures with the spoken utterance. And secondly, it includes the media-specific con-
texts in which the political speeches are embedded, concerning the audiovisual orchestration of camerawork,
shots, montage and sound. Both levels of multimodality form an inseparable unit that unfolds temporally as ex-
pressive movement in the moment of perception (Kappelhoff & Müller, 2011). Affectivity unfolds as movement
quality and rhythm of expressive movements and in this way mobilizes affective stance in the perception of
the viewer. It is the goal of this talk to illustrate this approach with analyses of two speeches given by members
of the German party “Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen”: a parliamentary speech delivered in person in the German
Bundestag in 2019 and a speech made at the national congress of the Green Party in 2020, held digitally.
The speeches under scrutiny are 16:13 Min (parliament speech 2019) and 4:20 Min (party congress 2020) long.
They are official video recordings from the German Bundestag and the Green Party and were free for download
on the official websites. Transcribed, annotated and analyzed were only the areas of the speeches that showed
high affective engagement, in total around 3-3:30 Min unfolding within four expressive movement units (EMU)
per speech. These EMUs were analyzed with the expressive movement analysis developed by Kappelhoff and
Müller (2011; Müller, 2019; Müller & Kappelhoff, 2018) and as far as multimodal utterances are concerned the
analysis draws on Müller’s Methods of Gesture Analysis (Müller, 2010, Kappelhoff & Müller 2018, Müller, in
press). The analysis of stancetaking on the semantic level is based on the approach by DuBois (2007).
The analyses of the two speeches illustrate that a systematic consideration of the audiovisual orchestration of
mediatised political speeches not only broadens the perspective on media-specific contexts of forms of multi-
modal stancetaking, but shows that and how the form of affective stancetaking changes with them. The face-to-
face parliament speech unfolds as a live interaction between audience and speaker, where the reactions of the
audience affect and shape the speech and thus stancetaking can be conceived as interactive and multimodal.
The digital party congress speech, on the other side, lacks this immediate interactive feedback and in its place
we find a cinematic staging of affective stancetaking. It is concluded that it is the unfolding of media specific
dynamics that shapes multimodal affective stancetaking.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Approaching multimodal stancetaking by viewpoint analysis


in intercultural interaction

Panel contribution

Prof. Ulrike Schröder 1


1. Federal University of Minas Gerais

Most work on multimodal stancetaking so far has been implemented in the field of conversation analysis and
interactional linguistics (cf., e.g., Goodwin, Cekaite & Goodwin 2012; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018; Depper-
mann 2015) while the major work on viewpoint has been carried out primarily by scholars from cognitive
linguistics and gesture studies (e.g., McNeill, 1992; Parrill 2009, 2012; Sweetser & Stec, 2016; Mittelberg, 2019).
Recently, interest has arisen in bringing these fields together. Feyaerts et al. (2017) studied amplifiers and com-
ical hypotheticals as markers of mental viewpoint and revealed how amplifiers offer a straightforward view of
a speaker’s evaluative stance that may be copied by the interlocutor in gesture, posture, gaze, or intonation, as
well as how comical hypotheticals provide an intersubjective account of a viewpoint construal. Rekittke (2017)
unveiled that stancetaking relates to the deployment of gestures from a C-VPT as opposed to an O-VPT hinging
on a given discourse topic if this topic is seen as taboo. This is to say, an O-VPT abstracts away from details and
allows for a wider and more critical scope of interpretation.
The work of the Research Center Intercultural Communication in Multimodal Interactions
(www.letras.ufmg.br/icmi) is based on transcribed video data stored in the ICMI corpus. Recent analy-
ses of these data have shown that prosodic and gestural-corporal means such as wide open eyes, frozen
gaze and gesture movements, pitch jumps, and accent density, etc. are recurrent resources for constructing
and organizing shared affective stance toward episodes experienced as culture shock by exchange students
(Schröder 2017, 2020). A current project on the analysis of the cultural conceptualization of Brazilian jeitinho,
a ‘way of muddling through’, focuses, inter alia, on the analysis of an intercultural encounter between two
Brazilian and two German professors, who have lived in Brazil for more than twenty years (Schröder &
Streeck, 2022; Schröder 2021). Although all four participants have deep knowledge of this concept and know
it by experience, they enact it from quite different viewpoints. In this talk, I aim to present the results from
a fine-grained analysis of sequences including a form-based notation of the gestures (Bressem 2013) in order
to highlight the interconnectedness of stancetaking and viewpoint: The two Brazilians adopt a C-VPT with
an iconically rich action description (Bressem, Ladewig & Müller 2018) that involves the entire body. This
points to higher engagement, additionally marked through laughter, extra strong accents, and pitch jumps.
In contrast, the two Germans deploy predominantly deictic and metacommunicative gestures and adopt an
O-VPT. One recurrent gesture is the Raised and Stretched Index Finger serving the function of calling attention
(Bressem & Müller 2014). This gesture has also a rhetoric-rhythmic impact, frequently co-occurs prosodically
with the list construction (Selting 2004) and displays an ‘epistemic authority’ (Inbar in press) here.
Hence, the two different viewpoints and multimodal ways of incorporating jeitinho clearly represent stancetak-
ing actions: engaged versus detached, close versus distanced, affective versus critical, from the inside versus
from the outside.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse markers and pragmatic gestures in Russian

Panel contribution

Dr. Yulia Nikolaeva 1


1. Lomonosov Moscow State University

Co-speech gestures can be divided into two distinct groups: (1) referring to the world and events being described
and (2) revealing the speaker’s attitudes, discourse structure, interaction with the interlocutors, and the process
of making the narration. Gestures with this kind of meaning (or their sub-types) can be referred to as pragmatic
(Kendon 1995, 2004), interactive (Bavelas et al. 1992), recurrent gestures (Bressem & Müller 2014), or regulators
(Ekman & Friesen 1969).
Their meta-discoursive meaning combines with an easily recognized recurrent form (Bressem & Müller 2014),
which seems to be very similar in Russian and German.
The study based on retellings of “The Pear Film” (Chafe 1980) in Russian showed that pragmatic gestures have
some features that distinguish them from narrative-level iconics and deictics. First, they can be combined in
one gesture (simultaneously or successively) with other gestures (referential or rhythmic). For example, while
saying “The gardener goes down the ladder”, the speaker shows the trajectory (diagonal down with a few stops
marking the rungs of the ladder) and holds her hand with the open palm up, so the iconic gesture for climbing
down the ladder is combined with PUOH presenting the gardener. Pragmatic gestures can be easily combined
with deictics too, since the main distinctive feature of a pragmatic gesture is its recurrent form, while iconics
or deictics can use space to show direction or movement. At the same time, pragmatics often cover more than
one clause (when a speaker is holding her hand for a while, marking, for example, uncertainty or doubt), which
is unusual for referential gestures, which mostly follow McNeill’s rule “one gesture – one clause”. This sort of
temporal flexibility of pragmatics brings them closer to pragmatic means in speech which can range from a
morpheme to several clauses.
Matching pragmatic gestures to discourse markers showed that gestures can add some information to the words.
Thus, markers of preparative substitution used when the speaker is looking for the right word (kind of, be like,
type) can either reveal a word search or, on the contrary, draw attention to the speaker’s pantomime. In the
first case, there will be pragmatic gestures meaning word search or approximation. The latter case is illustrated
with a clear iconic gesture or pantomime.
Evidential discourse markers describing the source of information (we can see, it sounds like, there’s a feeling)
can either be accompanied by iconic gestures (thus marking important discourse events, plot shifts, or a new
protagonist) or have no gesture illustration. In this case, the markers are separate clauses and are not connected
to the story being told but rather to the speaker’s attitude and her interaction with the interlocutors.
Hedging markers (I’d say, evidently, probably) revealing the speaker’s cognitive processes can appear with prag-
matic gestures and thus highlight the meta-discursive layer of the statement; if these markers are accompanied
by other gestures, the latter most likely are iconics or deictics and add some essential information to the verbal
message.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal Comparison in Orchestra Instructions

Panel contribution

Ms. Katharina Meissl 1 , Dr. Paul Sambre 1 , Dr. Kurt Feyaerts 1


1. KU Leuven

Orchestra conductors essentially evaluate and instruct musicians to improve their collective performance, thus
rendering rehearsals an inherently stance-laden setting (Meissl et al., in press). They use a wide range of semi-
otic resources, often expressing comparisons between undesired and desired performances (cf. Messner, 2020).
Comparative constructions have been studied from a monomodal, primarily lexico-grammatical perspective in
different sub-disciplines of linguistics (cf. Hilpert, 2010; Treis, 2018). In this contribution, we approach com-
parative constructions from a multimodal, cognitive linguistic, interactional perspective (Zima & Bergs, 2017;
Cienki, 2022) in the setting of orchestra rehearsals.
We investigate how conductors express comparisons multimodally i.e. using both verbal and other semiotic
resources. We use 25 hours of video data recorded during rehearsals of 5 conductors with their respective
orchestras in Belgium; the language used in the corpus is Dutch (Schrooten & Feyaerts, 2020). From this dataset,
we extract sequences containing verbal comparative constructions using the annotation tool ELAN (Wittenburg
et al., 2006).
We analyze utterances surrounding scalable or gradable adjectives (e.g. loud, soft, calm) or adverbs (e.g. less
loudly, more clearly), which reveal a combination of scalarity and subjective construal (Pander Maat, 2006,
p. 279). Within these comparative constructions, we scrutinize the construal of evaluations and instructions;
more specifically, how musical phenomena, aspects of performance as well as the intersubjective relation of
participants are construed along the subjective-objective dimension (Feyaerts, 2013) across different semiotic
resources.
Next to the conductors’ verbal utterances, we analyze visual aspects such as facial expressions, head or body
movements and manual gestures as well as vocalizations and sung depictions of music. We are specifically
interested in the role of these resources for contrastive constructions, their sequential relation to speech, as
well as the construal work they fulfil. While we do expect speech to be the dominant resource used to express
evaluations and instructions, as observed by Stoeckl & Messner (2021), we presume that visual and acoustic
components contribute substantially to comparative construal, foregrounding and managing past, present and
upcoming usage events.
Selected references
Cienki, A. (2022). The study of gesture in cognitive linguistics: How it could inform and inspire other research
in cognitive science. WIREs Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1623.
Meissl, K., Sambre, P., & Feyaerts, K. (in press). Contrast Pairs in Orchestra Instruction as a Window into the
Multimodal Expression of Stance. Papers of the Linguistic Society of Belgium.
Messner, M. (2020). Gesangliche Demonstrationen als instruktive Praktik in der Orchesterprobe. Gesprächs-
forschung - Online-Zeitschrift Zur Verbalen Interaktion, 21, 309–345.
Pander Maat, H. (2006). Subjectification in gradable adjectives. In A. Athanasiadou, C. Canakis, & B. Cornillie
(Eds.), Subjectification (pp. 279–322). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110892970.279
Schrooten, S., & Feyaerts, K. (2020). Conducting Fanfare Orchestras. A multimodal corpus. KU Leuven MIDI.
Stoeckl, H., & Messner, M. (2021). Tam pam pam pam and mi – fa – sol: Constituting musical instruc-
tions through multimodal interaction in orchestra rehearsals. Multimodal Communication, 10(3), 193–209.
https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2021-0003
Treis, Y. (2018). Comparative Constructions: An Introduction. Linguistic Discovery, 16(1).
https://doi.org/10.1349/PS1.1537-0852.A.492

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Zima, E., & Bergs, A. (2017). Multimodality and construction grammar. Linguistics Vanguard, 3(s1).
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-1006

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal Resources for Stance-Taking in Storytelling with


an Aphasic Man

Panel contribution

Dr. Marjorie Goodwin 1


1. UCLA

This paper examines the resources utilized in stance taking (M Goodwin et al.) in the midst of family storytelling,
and dispute in interaction with a man with aphasia (Chil) who can produce only three words (C. Goodwin 2004).
Making use of a host of embodied resources he can express his stance of righteous indignation when told that
a hospital bed has been ordered for him; for Chil such an action indexes the category of disabled person. De-
spite his lack of elaborate lexicon, the aphasic man is nonetheless able to participate fully in dialogue, utilizing
prosody, body posture and gesture to animate characters in a story while simultaneously providing his com-
mentary on the very actions he is depicting. His vivid character enactment recruits others’ alignment with him.
Family members initially positioned as bystanders to a dispute between Chil and his son, align towards the de-
veloping dispute through embodied stances of incredulity and amazement (shrugging shoulders, covering eyes
while laughing), providing commentary on the action taking place between principal participants.
Rather than forefronting speech, we take participation (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004) as the framework for our
analysis. Embodied participation is a temporally unfolding process through which separate parties demonstrate
to each other their ongoing understanding of the events they are engaged in by building actions and stances that
contribute to the further progression of these same events. While doing things together people display how
they position themselves towards others with whom they are interacting in the very midst of another’s turn —
through their facial expressions, eye gaze, and body comportment as well as interjected verbal commentaries.
Participation goes beyond the structure of talk to encompass the practices used by rich, feeling bodies to perform
relevant operations on a public substrate provided by others. We conclude that action within interaction is thus
not found in the stream of speech alone, but instead is emergent through the meaningful frameworks created
by acting and interacting bodies. From this perspective, stance and affect are not individual phenomena or
primarily manifestations of a single actor’s psychological state, but instead core public features that interactively
constitute the action of the moment to be what it is.
Goodwin, C. (2004). A Competent Speaker who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology, 14(2), 151-170.
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (2004). Participation. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology
(pp. 222-243). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Goodwin, M. H., Cekaite, A., & Goodwin, C. (2012). Emotion as Stance. In M.-L. Sorjonen & A. Perakyla (Eds.),
Emotion in Interaction (pp. 16-41). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prosodic cues to affective stancetaking in German and Polish


parliamentary speeches

Panel contribution

Prof. Maciej Karpinski 1 , Prof. Katarzyna Klessa 1 , Prof. Ewa Jarmołowicz-Nowikow 1


1. Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań

In the ongoing DFG/NCN research project “Multimodal Stancetaking: Expressive Movement and Affective
Stance” (http://mmstance.home.amu.edu.pl/), we explore the multimodal process of stancetaking in German
and Polish parliamentary speeches. In the subsequent steps of holistic expert analyses carried out in the
expressive movement framework (e.g., Mueller & Kappelhof 2018), the recordings were manually annotated
for foregrounding clusters and affective peaks by Polish and German team members. On our way to capture a
coherent, comprehensive, multimodal image of stancetaking, we start from independent analyses of the motion
and speech components. In the present contribution, we inspect prosodic features of the political speeches
in the areas tagged as characterised by lower or higher affective engagement, including affective peaks. The
selection of potential prosodic correlates of the affective expression and phonetic-acoustic parameters to be
applied is discussed. Sample analyses of duration and pitch-related prosodic features in high and low affective
engagement areas of Polish and German parliamentary speeches are presented. They include vocalic nPVI,
Time Group Analysis, Rhythm Spectra, pitch range and the profile of its changes. An attempt is made to capture
both general and language-specific tendencies, as well as individual idiosyncratic prosodic characteristics of
particular speakers.

The study was carried out within the German-Polish MuMo Stance project funded by the National Science Centre
(UMO-2018/31/G/HS2/03633) and DFG.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stancetaking and adolescence. Multimodal positioning in


dialogue among Italian teenagers

Panel contribution

Dr. Emanuela Campisi 1


1. Università degli Studi di Catania

The goal of this paper is to investigate the features of speech acts of stancetaking deployed by Italian teenagers
during multi-party interactions. While a growing literature confirms that stancetaking is not only a matter of
speech but of other bodily components as well, especially co-speech gestures (Kendon 2004; Debras & Cienki
2015; Bressem & Müller 2014, 2017 among others), there are still some limitations to our knowledge of the
phenomenon. For example, the majority of the available results concerns adults only, while almost nothing is
known about adolescence, a fundamental moment for the development of the self through the first forms of so-
cial and ideological positioning, usually including a strong emotional component (Laursen 1995). Furthermore,
while those studies do not concern English only, we still lack of a systematic description of multimodal stanc-
etaking in languages such as Italian, usually considered a “gesture rich” one (Iverson et al. 1999) and for this
reason usually investigated only from a quantitative point of view. Finally, very few studies explore multiparty
conversations, even if this form of dialogue is pervasive in everyday life, and even if, as Du Bois (2007: 140)
points out, “stances build each other dialogically”.
Drawing on a corpus of video recordings of a group of 12 Italian teenagers discussing (and arguing) about con-
flict in interaction in two high schools in Catania (Italy), analyzed in ELAN, the present study aims at identifying
recurrent multimodal features of stancetaking, starting from the identification of all the instances of epistemic
and affective positioning in speech (Du Bois 2007), transcribed and coded for their linguistic form (i.e. verbs,
adjectives, adverbs). To expand on the linguistic analysis, all the co-occurring gestures have been identified and
coded for their kinetic features (handshape, orientation, space, movement) and for other bodily cues involved
(i.e. facial expressions and gaze). The analysis, still ongoing, has a dual purpose: first of all, the identifica-
tion of recurrent patterns of form, both in speech and gestures, associated with an act of positioning; secondly,
the measure of the degree (or the lack) of alignment among the young participants not only in speech, but in
gestures as well.
The results of the analysis will be discussed in two directions: on the one hand in relation to their theoretical
contribution to the notion of stancetaking, still predominantly based on speech, and its role in conflictual in-
teractions among teenagers; on the other hand, questions will be raised from a methodological point of view,
with a focus on how multimodal analysts can overcome the constraints of a speech-driven approach in order,
for example, to include also instances of stancetaking not accompanied by speech (e.g. a pragmatic gesture of
the away family) and yet sometime decisive in transforming a dialogue into a conflict.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Taking an affective stance: How affectivity is mobilized in


mediatised political debates

Panel contribution

Prof. Cornelia Müller 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Despite a rich and diverse literature on stance and stancetaking (Du Bois 2007; Englebretson 2007; Dancygier
2012), the role of gesture, posture, and prosody, as aspects of this communicative activity remains only scarcely
studied. Moreover, stancetaking often becomes a vibrant multimodal activity when people are highly engaged
affectively. This is the starting point for the argument presented in this talk and of an ongoing DFG/NCN re-
search project (http://mmstance.home.amu.edu.pl/). Extending previous work on ‘expressive movement’ as a
key concept for the analysis of multimodal phenomena (in face-to-face interaction and in audiovisual compo-
sition) multimodal stancetaking is considered as dynamic interaffective process (Kappelhoff & Müller 2011;
Müller & Kappelhoff 2018). Drawing on analyses of political debates in the German Bundestag, it will be illus-
trated how the concept of ‘expressive movement’ serves as an analytical tool to capture affective stance taking
as a dynamic, multidimensional and multimodal movement gestalt displaying characteristic affective profiles.
The talk concludes on the specific media-aesthetic dimension of taking an affective stance in mediatised political
debates – and suggests how affectivity is mobilized in audio-visual broadcasts of political debates.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Taking stance with the Slapping movement. Inter-affectivity


in interactions among children

Panel contribution

Dr. Silva Ladewig 1 , Ms. Lena Hotze 2


1. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 2. Europa-Universität Viadrina

This paper introduces the Slapping movement as an embodied practice of dislike or meta-commentary
recurring in conflictive situations between German children aged four to six (Ladewig & Hotze 2021, in press).
Children move this way primarily in stopping a co-participant’s action and protesting against the action to be
stopped. In our data of seven hours of natural and everyday interactions among children between the age of
four to six, we identified 20 cases of the Slapping movement which were embedded in conflictive situations or
negotiations. All forms of the Slapping movement are linked to one another by a particular movement gestalt
and by their communicative function.

However, the Slapping movements documented showed different manners of execution. Some forms appeared
to be very expressive, others were more schematic. Inspired by a phenomenological approach to multimodal
communication that sets affectivity center stage (Horst, et al. 2014; Müller & Kappelhoff, 2018; see also Fuchs
2017), our analysis reveals that the movement qualities show different degrees of communicative effort and
affective intensity. Affective intensities are not considered as represented by single words or gestures, but they
emerge during the interaction. They are discernable by the qualities of multimodal expressions such as into-
nation, tempo, or rate of turn takings in speech, and repetition, overlapping gesticulation of different speakers,
speed, size, and accentuation in gestures (Horst et al., 2014; Ladewig & Hotze 2021). Based on our analysis of
the temporal unfolding of affectivity, we argue that the Slapping movements do not stand out but form an in-
tegrated whole with speech which is embedded in a flow of emerging inter-affective dynamics. What is more,
the affective intensities unfolding in the situations analyzed also influence how the hands are moved. In more
detail, we observed that the higher the affective intensities become the larger and more vigorous the Slapping
movements are.
Fuchs, T. (2017). Intercorporeality and interaffectivity. In C. Meyer, J. Streeck, & S. Jordan (Eds.), Intercorpore-
ality: Emerging socialities in interaction (pp. 194–209). Oxford: Oxford University Press
Horst, D., Boll, F., Schmitt, C., & Müller, C. (2014). Gestures as interactive expressive movement: Inter-affectivity
in face-to-face communication. In A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S.H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J. Bressem (Eds.), Body –
language – communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction (Vol. 2, pp. 2112–
2125). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Ladewig, S. H. & Lena Hotze (in press). From action to performative gesture. The Slapping movement used by
children at the age of four to six, Semiotica.
Ladewig, Silva H. & Lena Hotze (2021). The Slapping movement as an embodied practice of dislike: Inter-
affectivity in interactions among children. In: Gesture 20:2, 285–312.
Müller, C. & Kappelhoff, H. (2018). Cinematic metaphor: experience – affectivity – temporality. Berlin & Boston:
Walter de Gruyter.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The sequential and multimodal unfolding of enactments in


VGT. A comparison of ‘enactment only’ and embedded enacted
stance expressions.

Panel contribution

Ms. Fien Andries 1 , Mr. Geert Brône 1 , Mrs. Myriam Vermeerbergen 1


1. KU Leuven

In interaction, speakers and signers can make use of enactment, i.e., they combine “bodily movements, postures
and eye gaze to ‘construct’ actions and dialogue in order to ‘show’ characters, events and points of view” (Hodge
& Ferrara, 2014, p. 373). These enactments are often not a reproduction of real-world actions or dialogues.
Rather, the interlocutor constructs their version of these actions or dialogues and presents them through a
representation of other characters.
As a result, enactment is well-suited to be used in stance expressions (Authors, 2018). An interlocutor may use
enactment to present the stance of the person they enact, their own stance, or both.
With a dataset of five hours of dyadic conversations in Flemish Sign Language (VGT), we compare stance ex-
pressions that consist of a (sequential or simultaneous) combination of enactment and lexicogrammatical and
gestural information from a narrator perspective on the one hand, and stance expressions consisting of only
enactment on the other hand (henceforth “enactment only”). In doing so, we will focus on 1) the types of stance
expressions in these sequences, 2) the sequential organization of enactments, 3) the polyphonic strategies sign-
ers use.
Interlocutors can embed enactment in (lexicogrammatical/gestural) stance expressions, presenting stances
from a character and narrator viewpoint sequentially or through body partitioning, but they can also make use
of polyphonic strategies to make one utterance belong to the narrator as well as the character in such way that
“it can carry two points of view (the quoted figure’s perspective and the ironic, mocking, evaluative perspective
of the reporter)” (Günthner, 1999, p. 705). Facial expressions, mouthings and mouth gestures, body posture and
code switching have been found to be used as polyphonic strategies in a few signed languages (Authors, 2016;
Author, 2020). In other words, interlocutors can express stance through ‘enactment only’, or embed enactment
in a bigger, (partly) narrated stance expression, providing information from two different viewpoints.
In this last case, the enactment and other lexicogrammatical or gestural activities can be combined simultane-
ously, given the fact that enactment can be realized in different degrees, leaving place for other information to
be simultaneously expressed with the enactment.
We found that in VGT, ‘enactment only’ as well as enactment with narration appear in stance expressions. Poly-
phonic strategies include the use of facial expressions, (manual or mouth) gestures, body posture and spatial
distancing. We expect to find that affective stances are most expressed in these sequences, compared to deon-
tic and epistemic stance. Moreover, we hypothesize that signers make use of reduced and subtle enactment to
present multiple stances. We analyze how gestural and lexicogrammatical stance markers are sequentially or
simultaneously structured within enacted sequences.
Selected references

Günthner, S. (1999). Polyphony and the ‘layering of voices’ in reported dialogues: An analysis of
the use of prosodic devices in everyday reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(5), 685–708.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00093-9
Hodge, G., & Ferrara, L. (2014). Showing the story: Enactment as performance in Auslan nar-
ratives. Selected Papers From the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (2014), 372–
397. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Showing-the-story-%3A-Enactment-as-performance-in-Gawne-

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Vaughan/cc5fae968168cca1d33f146364cddf40dbbcdddd

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Cutting off” inappropriate formulations: A disalignment


practice in Hebrew face-to-face interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Gil Newman 1 , Dr. Anna Inbar 2 , Dr. Leon Shor 3


1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. University of Haifa, 3. Achva Academic College

In this talk, we explore a particular recurrent gesture used by Hebrew speakers—-raising a slightly tilted hand
(or two hands) in line with the head and moving the palm back and forth, with the right palm facing left (or the
left palm facing right), as if cutting something in the air (Figure 1).
We show that the “cutting-off” gesture is usually coordinated with formulations that are framed by the speaker
as being ill-suited to the interactional context. This use is illustrated in the following example taken from an
interview with an Israeli philosopher. The interviewer summarizes the interviewee’s previously asserted pro-
posal to divide a particular historical event into four periods, metaphorically referring to the entire event as a
cake (lines 1–3).
01 I-er: ’ata mexalek ’et ha-
you.SGM divide.PRS.SGM OBJ DEF
You divide the
02 (a burst of laughter)
03 #(0.5) ’uga,#
#cutting-off gesture#
cake
cake,
04 lo batua’x she-ze ha-bituy ha-naxon,
NEG sure.SGM that-this.SGM DEF-expression.SGM DEF-right.SGM
[I’m] not sure that’s the right expression,
05 I-ee: ken.
Yes.
06 I-er: le-’arba prusot?
to-four slice.PL
into four slices?
07 I-ee: naxon.
Right.
In line 1, the interviewer indicates trouble in producing the direct object after the verb mexalek ‘divide’,
initiating a word search with a vowel stretch of the definite article ha- ‘the’ projecting a noun to come. The
trouble in the formulation is further indicated by a burst of laughter and a silence of 0.5 seconds, during which
the interviewer performs the cutting-off gesture, which is then extended to the projected formulation ’uga
‘cake’ (line 3). The gesture-laminated formulation is followed by an explicit verbal elaboration that reveals the
interviewee’s lesser endorsement of that formulation in greater detail (line 4).

Our data come from two sources of spoken Israeli Hebrew—television talk shows and video recordings of or-
dinary conversations among pairs of well-acquainted native Hebrew speakers in private settings. Employing
multimodal Conversation Analysis (e.g., Kendrick & Drew, 2016; Mondada, 2006) and Interactional Linguistic
methodology (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018), we analyze sequential environments yielding such multimodal
patterns, discussing what the deployment of the gesture accomplishes in the immediacy of interaction. We sug-
gest that the gesture constitutes a stance marker of disalignment that frames the verbal formulation coordinated

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with the gesture as inappropriate in the interactional context. In line with previous research (e.g., Debras, 2017;
Ford et al., 2012; Inbar, forthcoming; Inbar & Maschler, forthcoming; Jehoul et al., 2017; Marrese et al., 2021;
Shor & Marmorstein, 2022), the present study shows that gestures can be mobilized to display a speaker’s stance
and make it interpretable, thereby furthering our understanding of the grammar–body interface.

719
Multimodality, metaphor,
magic: Typical and
atypical narratives across
cultures, pre- &
post-pandemic
(organized by Rukmini
Nair, Laura Hidalgo)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Arm Your Community”: Ideology in Vaccine Advertising


Campaigns Across Countries

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna Islentyeva 1 , Mr. Torben Scheffler 2


1. Universität Innsbruck, 2. Universität Hamburg

The coronavirus pandemic has dominated public discourse since 2020 and has impacted society in major ways.
Media and political discourses surrounding COVID-19 have primarily employed metaphorical framings, such as
the pandemic as a force of nature, or depictions of the virus in the military terms (cf. Islentyeva 2020; Charteris-
Black 2021).
The pandemic has also given rise to new waves of conspiracy theories; such theories and misinformation have
become particularly prevalent with regard to the much-anticipated “solution” to the pandemic in the form of
effective vaccines. Many members of the general public remained steadfast in their anti-vaccine views for a
multitude of reasons, including misinformation shared on social media (Gunaratne et al. 2019). Governments
followed suit by running advertising campaigns aimed at informing their citizens about the virus, while si-
multaneously urging them to receive their vaccinations. In doing so, the notions of ideology and persuasion
coalesced; governments became pandemic explainers (Luzón 2022) providing the public with necessary infor-
mation, while simultaneously using persuasive language to urge citizens to act against the virus.
This paper represents an intercultural comparative study that explores the governmental vaccine advertising
campaigns that were authorised by and in two English-speaking and two German-speaking countries, namely
Australia, Britain, Austria, and Germany, within the context of the global SARS-Cov2 pandemic. The data set
in question comprises 40 vaccination posters issued by the respective governments between January 2021 and
July 2022, all of which were displayed in public spaces. In terms of methodology, this cross-linguistic, intercul-
tural study combines methods of multimodal analysis with critical discourse analysis (CDA). The major findings
of this study highlight the various subversive elements of the vaccination campaigns; for example, how in the
Australian campaign the visual mode of the poster softens its original military edge by revealing a play on words
through the homonymy of the word arm, or exclusionary language is juxtaposed with a visual representation of
community in the case of the sample of Austrian posters analysed. The study thus explores how these ambiva-
lences are linked with the notions of ideology and persuasion, and how governments are using their ideological
foothold to create action.
References
Brugman, Britta C., et al. ‘Audience Perceptions of COVID-19 Metaphors: The Role of Source Domain and Country
Context’. Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 37, no. 2, Apr. 2022, pp. 101–13.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Metaphors of Coronavirus Invisible Enemy or Zombie Apocalypse? 2021.
Gunaratne, Keith, et al. ‘Temporal Trends in Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Twitter’. Vaccine, vol. 37, no. 35, Aug.
2019, pp. 4867–71.
Islentyeva, Anna. On the Front Line in the Fight against the Virus: Conceptual Framing and War Patterns in
Political Discourse. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, vol. 8, no. 1, Oct. 2020, pp.
157–80.
Luzón, María. ‘Coronavirus explainers’ for public communication of science: Everything the public needs to
know’. Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy, edited by Andreas
Musolff, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, pp. 97–114.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analyzing a Creative Delivery of Covid-19 Advice: Metaphor,


Multimodality, and Narrativity

Panel contribution

Prof. Ming-Yu Tseng 1


1. National Sun Yat-sen University

This study investigates how Covid advice is creatively delivered in a one-minute video produced by Taiwan
Centers for Disease Control in February 2022. The video is atypical, and therefore, creative, in several ways.
First, instead of directly telling the public what to do and what not to do, it features the story of a Taiwanese
weightlifter who won an Olympic gold medal for women’s weightlifting in the 2020 Olympics. The video is set in
a stadium, and the activity shown is mainly the athlete’s weightlifting practices, including her holding and lifting
barbells. Second, the video uses multimodal metaphors throughout. For example, in the video the speaker—the
featured weightlifter—applies grip powder to her hands and then chaps it off, a scene immediately followed
by a quick image of her handwashing, with the words on the screen meaning “Wash your hands frequently to
keep away from the virus”. This is a multimodal metaphor. Third, in the video the talk appears to concern the
speaker’s experience of weightlifting, and the pandemic is treated like a source domain because the speaker
says “Faced with the barbell, don’t utilize it by playing hardball, but find the right way to face it, just like beating
the pandemic”. The verbalized simile is followed by the multimodal metaphors that suggest Covid advice. For
example, toward the end of the video, the speaker holds and lifts up a weight, and this image is followed by a
close-up in which her hands hold up a facemask featuring an Olympic logo, with the utterance of the Chinese
four-character idiom jǔ zhòng ruò qīng, which means “Lifting something heavy as if it’s light”. This is another
multimodal metaphor that assists both the narrative of the weightlifter’s experience and the delivery of the
suggestion of facemask-wearing. Traditionally, a narrative of a past recovery experience can serve as offering
personal health advice, and a clear, non-metaphorical instruction is favored over metaphor when advice is
delivered. However, in the video under analysis, it uses a sports narrative and weightlifting metaphors for the
delivery of Covid advice and speaks of the pandemic as if it is a source domain. By leaving the source and target
domains somewhat unsettled and slippery, the multimodal narrative concerning the experience of an Olympic
gold medalist generates a creative delivery of Covid advice in a less didactic manner, and, at the same time, it
evokes a sense of cheerfulness and a sense of hope to fight the pandemic. The analysis of the video shows that
the creativity in the delivery of Covid advice lies not only in language but also in the generation of affect and in
the coupling of metaphor, narrativity, and multimodality.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Covid-19: an (a)typical discourse for an (in)visible enemy

Panel contribution

Prof. Roberta Giordano 1


1. Università degli studi della Tuscia

Since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent health emergency, a relevant research effort have
devoted to the topic of its discursive representation, which basically consisted in a narration, description and
explanation of an event as novel, unexpected and dramatic as a pandemic can be. Through the construction
of a small corpus of authentic spanish and italian journalistic and political texts, the present work brings this
research stream forward by investigating the persuasive force of one of the key elements of the aforementioned
representation: the metaphor, with which (a)typical expressions taken from the field of war or statistics have
become typical of the journalistic and political language. Now the enemy coincides with whom violates the
rules of social distancing, and with whom breaks safety protocols.
The discourse on Covid permitted to experiment a great creativity through different mechanisms: “creative
realizations (verbal and visual) of wide-scope mappings; the use of one-off source domains, shifts in the valence
of the source domain evoked, and the exploitation of source domains that are specific to particular discourse
communities”. (Pérez Sobrino 2022: 127). This creative trend enhanced the multidimensional dimension of the
metaphorical phenomenon (conceptual, discursive and social). With respect to this relationship, starting from
the assumption that written or oral language is only one of the many means available for representing and
conveying meaning, Multimodal Discourse Analysis constitutes an useful research perspective just for grasping
the interconnection between the thought of a given community and its semiotic manifestations. In a Multimodal
approach, in effect: “all modes are framed as one field, as one domain. Jointly they are treated as one connected
cultural resource for (representation as) meaning-making by members of a social group at a particular moment.
All are seen as equal, potentially, in their capacity to contribute meaning to a complex semiotic entity, a text,
and each is treated as distinct in its material potential and social shaping”. (Kress 2011: 38)
Battistelli, F. (2020). Coronavirus: metafore di guerra e confusione di concetti, «MicroMega», 3.
Danesi, M. (2004). Metáfora, pensamiento y lenguaje. Una perspectiva viquiana de teorización sobre la metáfora
como elemento de interconexión. Presentación y traducción de J. M. Sevilla, CIV, Sevilla.
Faloppa, F. (2020). Sul «nemico invisibile» e altre metafore di guerra.
https://www.treccani.it/magazine/lingua_italiana/articoli/parole/cura_parole_2.html [25.03.2020]
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and Social Change, Polity, Cambridge.
Garrido, F. Coronavirus: el enemigo invisible, ABC. (20 de marzo de 2020).
Kress, G. (2011). Multimodal discourse analysis, in The Routledge Handbook of Discourse analysis.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perelman, Ch. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (2000). The new rhetoric. A treatise on argumentation. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Pérez-Sobrino, P. et al. (2022). Acting like a Hedgehog in Times of Pandemic: Metaphorical Creativity in the
#reframecovid Collection, Metaphor and Symbol, 37: 2.
Silvera Roig, M. ¿Guerra contra el Covid-19? No culpes a la metáfora. El Confidencial Opinión, Tribuna (29 de
abril de 2020).
Sontag, S. (1989). L’Aids e le sue metafore Torino, Einaudi.

723
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal metaphors in environmental awareness


campaigns: pre-pandemic narratives of crisis and hope

Panel contribution

Prof. Laura Downing 1


1. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

This paper presents a study of the multimodal metaphors and metonymies used in a corpus of non-commercial
advertisements of charities and Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) concerned with raising awareness
towards the impact of global warming, climate change and pollution, and with engaging audiences in joining
in environmental activism. As such, this study explores one of the topics which have been a crucial source of
concern in the pre-pandemic period, the state of our environment, and the future of the planet we inhabit. It
can be argued that this situation of environmental risk has led to atypical situations across the world, which
over the last years has witnessed natural catastrophes such as floods and fires on unprecedented scales and the
invasion of rivers and oceans of plastic objects (IPCC, 2021).
Against this background, our study of environmental awareness advertisements (2007-2020) has the aim of
exploring the figurative strategies adopted by charities and NGOs in their multimodal campaigns. Multimodal
and visual metaphors are powerful discursive strategies which allow communicators to frame discourse topics
and make complex abstract ideas such as climate change accessible to a broad audience (Nisbet & Mooney, 2007,
Koteyko and Atanasova 2016). In our paper we identify the overarching frames that are used in our corpus, in
order to determine preferences in the framing of the events we study and identify possible narratives of climate
change, global warming and pollution. More specifically, our study explores the extent to which the metaphoric
frames provide negative or alternative perspectives on the represented events (see (Koteyko and Atanasova
2016, Flusberg et al. 2017, Pérez-Sobrino et al 2022, Semino et al. 2018). Given the crucial role of metonymy in
the construal of multimodal meaning, we also explore the types of metonymies that interact with the metaphors
(See Pérez-Sobrino 2016, 2017, Pérez-Sornino, Littlemore and Ford 2021). Additionally, we analyse whether the
campaigns evoke positive, negative or mixed value and how such value is manifested. Finally, we explore the
occurrence of hyperbole in the corpus, which is used to magnify and exaggerate metaphorical representations,
creating imagined worlds where the negative effects of global warming and pollution are highlighted.
Our results shed light on the way in which the topics of climate change, global warming and pollution are
conceptualised and framed by means of multimodal figurative strategies and enable us to identify possible
narratives of environmental awareness campaigns. Half of the campaigns use source domains which evoke
feelings of fear and danger, such as war, natural catastrophes and threats, and cause effect metonymies are
frequently used to highlight the negative effects of global warming and pollution. Negative value is by far the
more frequent value identified in our corpus, though positive value is used to call the audience to take action.
It remains to be discussed what are the implications of this study for future discourses and perspectives on
environmental awareness in our post-pandemic world.

724
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Parent, Child, School: A Triad of Multimodal Interactions


during the Covid-19 Pandemic in India

Panel contribution

Dr. Annie Koshi 1


1. St Mary’s School

Parent, Child, School:


A Triad of Multimodal Interactions during the Covid-19 Pandemic in India
The impact of Covid-19 generated isolation on the physical, mental and socio-
emotional well-being of children has been widely documented. This study considers
a more complex multimodal scenario in which the child and the teacher are the main
interactionists in the the pandemic perforce engendered online teaching environment. It
turns out, however, that the child’s parents are also significant, if often silent and invisible,
third party actors in these contexts.
This paper focusses on one 5-minute video out of a large archive collected by a
English-medium school in Delhi during the pandemic. It shows 7 Indian children
aged between 4 to 5+ performing school-tasks at home in order to specifically
analyse the role of ‘parental prompts’ and the orientation of the child towards the
embodied and physical presence of their parents in these non-normative learning
contexts. Such parental prompts are evidenced by indexical gestures, sotto voce
parental instructions, repetitions of the teacher’s instructions, and so
forth, while the child in turn looks repeatedly at the parent, rather than at the faraway
teacher for approval and guidance. It goes without saying that this looming shadow
figure of a parent by their child’s side would be highly atypical in a pre-or post-
pandemic setting. Some related parameters monitored in this paper are the contrasts
between distal and proximate interaction as well as the bilingual contrasts between
the language of the home (Hindi) and that of the school (English) with the children,
teacher and parents moving fluently between the languages.
In this video, all the children and the teacher are visible on-screen throughout. Thus,
we can putatively compare subtle differences between a number of home
environments and individual children’s agency and actions simultaneously via this
multimodal medium. It should also be mentioned that, as a pedagogic imperative
during the years of Covid-19, parents were routinely given a timetable of activities to
be performed beforehand and often required to arrange their homes to simulate a
classroom setup. They had, for example, to use everyday objects or toys available at
home in innovative ways to enable their children to acquire the ‘socio-emotional’ or
‘gross motor’ skills that might normally have comprised part of their usual school
activities. In this particular video, on the theme of ‘what I want to be’, the effort that
parents put into getting not just their homes ready as learning spaces but into
elaborately dressing up their children as aspirational Indian heroes (from the anti-
colonial freedom fighters Rani Laxmi Bai and Bhagat Singh to a present day Prime
Minister) is clearly non-trivial. Parents seem unselfconsciously to be working hard to
prove to themselves as well as to the ‘visible’ teacher and other ‘invisible’ parents
that they form a nationalist virtual community of caring, innovative and informed
parent. Finally, then, this multimodal video seems to reveal a great deal about the

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

formation of cultural ideologies during anxiety prone pandemic times - extending


even to very young children.

726
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I am Sher-locked” Atypicality, Typicality and Multimodality


in Indian Students’ Pandemic Narratives

Panel contribution

Prof. Rukmini Nair 1


1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Atypicality manifests in several phenomenological ways. Changes in linguistic genre and theme, the conver-
gence of unexpected cascades of visual images, the upending of established institutional arrangements and the
occurrence of unforeseen large-scale natural events all offer up examples of the atypicality of lived experience
during a ‘once in a lifetime’ global crisis like the recent pandemic.
The present research analyses the intersections of these four aspects of atypicality, namely, the linguistic, the
visual, the institutional and the natural in an unusually coherent dataset that is also rich in multimodal content.
This corpus consists of 14 online student magazines 15 pages or so in length and broadly reflective of the views
of students aged 18-22 at a premier educational institute in India between the years 2020-2022. Curated by an
editorial team about 8-10 students who, in turn, represented a cohort of 800-1000 students distributed across
14 hostels, each magazine was actually supposed to be located in the physical space of an on-campus hostel. In
reality, however, these hostels were ghost-outposts during the peak of Covid-19 when many students lived away
and only communicated online. As one editorial put it: “Things were difficult … because Google meets were not
as successful as night-long sessions in the hostel common room.”
In this sense, these magazines provide researchers a valuable contemporaneous account of the narratives, vi-
sual images and metaphors deployed by a large group of young technological super-achievers (often expert
gamers and graphic designers as well) to understand a world where their verities of language, vision, institu-
tional location and bodily health were simultaneously threatened. In Labovian terms, then, these magazines
each comprise 14 ‘tellable’ episodes in an overall Covid-19 ‘danger-of-death’ narrative. Each has a clear ‘Ab-
stract’, signaled by names or onomastic tropes dripping with metaphorical content: Adventum (Latin for ‘arrival’
– in this case, minus the possibility of departure), Allusion, Aporia, Arcadia, Enigma, Holocene, Lucidity in Dark-
ness, Metamorphosis, Renaissance, Reviver (a palindrome), Sphinx, The Morrigan, Unrewarding (a portmanteau)
and Zoiros (Greek for ‘vibrant’). Each also has an evident ‘Orientation’, indicating the specific context for its
pandemic story; a dense set of ‘Evaluations’, comprising intense emotions such as confusion, fear, hope, panic,
surprise, etc.); and, crucially - a well-defined ‘Crisis’. But what these narratives conspicuously lack are the final
elements of the Labovian schema: a ‘Resolution’ and a ‘Coda’ returning narrative time to present time. Using
a simple set of tools such as frequency counts, semantic cluster analysis etc., in addition to metaphor theory,
this paper argues that these absent narrative elements converge towards a single, paradoxically very typical,
multimodal metaphor emerging from these 150+ atypical pages of text-cum-imagery – one of being ‘locked in’
and ‘locked down’ in perpetuity, resulting in utter loneliness, loss of identity and, often, fantastical ‘magical
thinking’. Captured in vivid graphics that range from their hostels covered in barbed wire to smashed clocks
and corseted bodies, escaping this existential prison created by the pandemic now poses, according to these
Indian young-adult narratives, a Sherlockian challenge for all humanity.

727
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Stuck in a scroll hole”: Metaphor scenarios of social media’s


effect on mental health before and during the Covid-19
Pandemic

Panel contribution

Ms. Jennifer Foley 1


1. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

This paper explores the use of metaphor scenarios and the evocation of mini-narratives used to conceptualize
social media’s effect on mental health and well-being in the context of two atypical situations that have changed
our recent lives: the Covid-19 pandemic and the effects of our constant exposure to social media. The role of
social media in our lives during the Covid-19 pandemic has been controversial. On the one hand, it played a
pivotal role in helping people stay connected, informed, and entertained. On the other, however, it also played
a key role in the spread of misinformation, and constant exposure to social media increased anxiety in some
users (Goel and Gupta 2020; Tsao et al. 2021). Indeed, 24/7 digital connectivity may come with many drawbacks
(Vanden Abeele 2022). Some people feel pressure to be constantly “switched on” and that their mental health
and well-being are negatively affected by social media.
This study identifies and analyses metaphor scenarios used in opinion articles from the British newspapers
The Guardian and The Independent. According to Musolff (2006: 23), scenarios are source concepts organized
into “mininarratives…that dominate the discourse manifestations of source domains.” The notion of metaphor
scenario is used to combine the concept of metaphorical framing with key aspects of narrative, such as agency
and (dis)empowerment, which are crucial in the understanding of evaluative metaphors (Semino et al. 2018).
Steen et al.’s (2010) MIPVU is used to identify metaphors in two corpora – a pre-Covid corpus and a Covid corpus.
Findings reveal that metaphors are used primarily to evoke narratives of disempowerment in people’s rela-
tionships with social media. While the pre-Covid corpus focuses mainly on ADDICTION scenarios and on social
media applications and platforms as agents who negatively impact our mental health in subtle ways, the Covid
corpus focuses on narratives of social media as causing mental health problems. Furthermore, the Covid cor-
pus features a preoccupation with deteriorating attention spans caused by social media, but also an awareness
that healthier relationships with social media can be cultivated by practicing mindfulness when using digital
devices.

728
Narrative, argumentation
and multimodality in
(post-)Covid science
mediation (organized by
Geert Jacobs, Sofie
Verkest, Seppe Goddaert)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Catchier than COVID: An analysis of pandemic coverage by


Dutch news satire show Zondag met Lubach

Panel contribution

Mr. Jonas Nicolaï 1 , Prof. Pieter Maeseele 1


1. University of Antwerp

The context of the COVID-19 pandemic was a challenging time for science communication, amongst others be-
cause of an increasing political instrumentalization of scientific discourse. In such times of crisis, political com-
edy may take up a vital role in public debate by voicing media critique or calling out political leaders (Nitsch
& Lichtenstein, 2019). One particular voice taking up this role was Dutch news satire show Zondag met Lubach
(ZML). Commenting existing news media footage while woven together with the host’s comedic storytelling,
news satire has the potential to critique and inform audiences simultaneously (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). The
aim of this study is to investigate how ZML covered the COVID-19 pandemic by tracing the show’s interactions
with pandemic-related issues and actors, and evaluate its role in terms of critique and engagement with sci-
entific discourse. To do so, we draw on the textual analysis of 30 COVID-19-related segments from March 2020
until April, 2021. Our analytical framework integrates two distinct theoretical bodies. The first places ZML
within the context of the ongoing COVID-19 “infodemic” which refers to the general overabundance of infor-
mation and the detrimental effects of the spread of misinformation (Simon & Camargo, 2021). Implicit to this
notion of an infodemic is the agreement that the successful management of a global health crisis depends upon
a largely unimpeded flow of clear and truthful information (McKay & Tenove, 2021). Such an idea reiterates
assumptions of a deliberative view of democracy. We incorporate literature on deliberative democracy to in-
terpret the dimensions of critique in ZML in as far as they discuss the disruption of COVID-19-related flows of
information. A second body of literature concerns the social roles television news satire may take up. Here,
we incorporate literature on science communication as well as humor to assess the way in which ZML engages
with scientific discourse within and beyond its satirical critique. Our findings show how ZML critiqued news
media and politicians of the incumbent Rutte cabinet for contributing to the infodemic during the COVID-19
pandemic, and ousted right-wing populist parties as illegitimate for their anti-democratic rhetoric: By comed-
ically interrogating policy makers’ statements and actions, ZML diagnosed as well as countered the “top-down
misinformation” from politicians and other prominent social actors, which has been found to account for 20% of
the general infodemic flow (Nielsen et al., 2020). In answer to its diagnosis of a distorted informational context,
ZML also sidestepped its conventional satirical function to take up an informational role for its audiences by
covering the pandemic measures. In doing so, it simultaneously reproduced a deliberative view of an ongoing
infodemic, and promoted a mode of comedic science communication as a valid way of engaging with pandemic
discourse.

730
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From one scientist to another: A Post-Normal Science


approach to scientist interactions in a citizen science project
on air quality

Panel contribution

Ms. Sofie Verkest 1


1. Ghent University

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993, 2020, p. 3) publish a new foreword to
their nearly 30-year old- essay on Post-Normal Science (PNS) claiming that “we are now truly in a Post-Normal
age”. PNS implies that the way we do science has been increasingly challenged by post-normal situations in
which uncertainties are prevalent, values cannot always be distinguished from facts, stakes are high, and po-
litical decision-making is urgent (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993). The essay was once written as a normative piece,
intended to give the field of science appropriate new problem-solving strategies, which included managing un-
certainties, being transparent about values, and engaging stakeholders in an ‘extended peer community’ (Fun-
towicz & Ravetz, 1993) Brüggemann et al. (2020) transformed this normative concept into an analytical frame-
work for analyzing science communication against the backdrop of post-normal situations. In their outline
of a PNS communication model, they note that new and divergent norms - such as transparency, interpreta-
tion, advocacy, and participation are emerging within the field of science communication and call for a closer
inspection of how norms, roles, and practices are challenged or affirmed in PNS communication.
In this paper, I use the PNS communication lens in order to conduct a linguistic ethnographic study of a citizen
science project on air quality. This project was set up by a newspaper, a university, and a government agency.
In an intense year-long collaboration, they not only gathered a large amount of air quality data in Flanders but
also published a series of news items on the results. I conducted fieldwork throughout this collaboration and
investigated how the journalists and scientists interacted, analyzed the scientific results, and constructed news
stories about those results. I focus on so-called ‘scientific committees’ in which the scientists met separately
to discuss the scientific analyses and results, but also how the results would be mediated to the journalists
in the project, the public at large, policymakers, and politicians. In particular, I explore how the scientists
involved in the project attempt to interpret the scientific results and anticipate the interpretation of their various
audiences as they construct their message. In doing so, I intend to answer the call of Brüggemann et al. (2020)
and investigate how norms, roles, and practices within the field of science and journalism are being challenged
or affirmed in these meetings. Finally, I show that PNS communication can provide a useful framework to study
how participation and collaboration are increasingly shaping the way science is mediated in society (Declercq
et al., 2021).

731
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Managing Fact and Uncertainty: Science Mediation during


Telephone Contact Tracing in Flanders.

Panel contribution

Dr. Sofie Van de Geuchte 1 , Mr. Romeo De Timmerman 2 , Ms. Anne-Sophie Bafort 1 ,
Prof. Mieke Vandenbroucke 1 , Prof. Stef Slembrouck 3
1. University of Antwerp, 2. Ghent University, 3. Linguistics, Ghent University

Effective contact tracing was repeatedly noted as an essential public health tool in containing, and eventually
exiting, the Covid-19 pandemic (WHO 2020). The WHO also stressed that a workforce of trained contact trac-
ers and supervisors was crucial and that “communication about contact tracing should emphasise solidarity,
reciprocity and the common good”. In this paper, we report on results from an applied project of interactional
analysis which was aimed at mapping and optimising the interactional dynamics and functioning of contact
tracing phone calls in Flanders. Our paper highlights those instances where the telephone contact tracers en-
gaged with scientifically-informed pieces of information that had become publicly available in the course of the
pandemic.
Between May 2020 and November 2021, contact tracing in Belgium via call centre dispatched telephone con-
versations formed an important large-scale, yet micro-level form of dialogic risk management with a specific
topical-functional brief. Of central importance, no doubt, were the dimensions of risk management and foster-
ing responsible behaviour (De Timmerman et al. 2023). A considerable part of the work was task-focused along
the expected dimensions of registering and indexing a patient’s contacts during a critical period and instructing
the caller-patient about when and how to quarantine and self-isolate. However, the telephone contact tracers
also took on the role of representatives of public health policy, disseminating relevant information, while be-
ing instructed to conduct their phone calls under a brief of patient-centred care which stressed an empathetic
response and a listening ear. In many instances, contact tracers attended to a patient-caller’s anxieties, worries
and uncertainties and anything they would raise during the call as being of Covid-19 related interest (e.g., the
current state of vaccine development, incl. whether the rapid course of action could be trusted; e.g., whether it
would be risky to be vaccinated while being unaware that one is infected). Note in this respect that the Belgian
telephone contact tracers were not expected to be (para)medically trained or qualified. Instead, they were re-
cruited from an existing workforce of telephone helpline workers and new recruits from various professional
backgrounds that had faced temporary unemployment during the lockdown (e.g., airline attendants, restaurant
staff, actors, etc.).
Our focus in this paper will be on formulations of fact, opinion, speculation and uncertainty regarding Covid-19.
In doing so, we analyse those dialogic instances where the contact tracers moved beyond their more narrowly
defined brief, as they were called upon by the patient-caller to engage with especially bio-medical scientific
knowledge that had become available in the public domain. In the background was a period of high public
anxiety about the nature of sickness and its cure which in various ways sped up the process of scientific knowl-
edge production, including its circulation in conventional media channels. The data base for this paper consists
of roughly 170 contact tracing phone calls which were collected in one of the participating call centres over a
period of roughly one year and half.

732
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediating prostate cancer patient empowerment

Panel contribution

Prof. Ulrike Vogl 1 , Dr. Ursula Vogl 2


1. Ghent University, 2. Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland (IOSI)

Within the field of oncology, communicating scientific results and treatment options has gained importance in
the past decade. Patients have gained access to digital media that enhance their knowledge about therapeutic
developments. Specifically, since the Covid-19 pandemic, online information campaigns and digital applica-
tions, e.g. apps to monitor your health, have gained importance. This paper addresses the case of the “Movem-
ber” movement, a global charity which started out in Australia in 2003 and is now active in more than twenty
countries. Movember focuses on empowering men to make their health a priority. Patient empowerment has
become an important concept in oncology: patient reported measurements (PREMs), enquiring about patients’
quality of life, have shown to correlate with progression-free survival and overall survival in combination with
oncological treatment (Efficace, et al. 2021). The Movember movement unites specialists in global health care,
renown genitourinary cancer specialists and public relations strategists. Movember uses the iconic moustache
for its information campaigns and educational events, and supporters are encouraged to grow a moustache
(or glue on a moustache) during the central campaign month November, under the motto “Whatever you grow
will save a bro”. In our analysis, we focus on the Movember campaign’s website (http://movember.com), and
its strategy to mediate prevention and treatment options for prostate cancer. We take both verbal and visual
code into account, making use of critical discourse analysis (Kress 2010; Jancsary et al 2016) to uncover possi-
ble shifts in the conceptualization of the patient (as more “empowered”). We also critically examine how the
scientific enterprise of optimizing treatment options is articulated: who has the authority, whose voice is be-
ing heard? In addition to our multimodal analysis of the global Movember campaign’s website, we examine
how the central goal of Movember, patient empowerment, is enacted in a local event targeting prostate cancer
in the Swiss canton of Ticino, in November 2022, featuring online expert presentations and an offline educa-
tional event for (prospective) patients and their relatives. The main objective of this paper is to assess how the
Movember campaign reflects, masks and/or constitutes the social reality of men’s health from a global and local
perspective.
Efficace, F.; Collins, G.S.; Cottone, F., et al (2021): Patient-Reported Outcomes as Independent Prognostic Factors
for Survival in Oncology: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Value in Health 24(2), 250-267.
Jancsary, D.; Höllerer, M. A.; Meyer, R. E. (2016): Critical analysis of visual and multimodal texts. In: R. Wodak
& M. Meyer (eds.): Methods of critical discourse studies. 3rd edition. Los Angeles: SAGE, 180–204.
Kress, G. R. (2010): Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Rout-
ledge.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediating Scientific Thinking and Engineering Judgement


(STEJ) in classroom contexts

Panel contribution

Prof. Colleen Cotter 1 , Ms. Agne Kocnevaite 1 , Dr. Gabriel Cavalli 1 , Dr. Janet DeWilde 1
1. Queen Mary University of London

Scientific thinking and engineering judgment (STEJ) are skills necessary to perform effectively as a scientist
and an engineer. STEJ is expected from students and included in learning objectives (Bao et al 2009; MacRobert
2018); however, little empirical investigation has been undertaken into the practice of such skills (Weedon 2019),
especially through collaboration with experts from non-STEM disciplines (Klassen et al. 2022). Explicit under-
standing of STEJ can help experts (on both subject knowledge and skills/communication) articulate knowledge
more effectively to students, which can improve the quality of teaching and learning and potentially lead to
greater inclusion within STEM – whether this is in person, online, or in a hybrid context.
We undertook ethnographic research through Queen Mary Engineering School (QMES) – a joint educational
institute based in China between Queen Mary University of London and Northwestern Polytechnical Univer-
sity. QMES has created a learning community where language and subject lecturers collaborate to improve
communication and skills support across the programme while encouraging students to actively reflect on and
think explicitly about their professional and academic practice. The research uses frameworks and methods
deployed in a range of sociocultural, ethnographic (Bernard 2018), and community of practice (Wenger 1998)
linguistic paradigms to contribute rich data to create a more comprehensive understanding of developing STEJ.
Evidence thus far – through quantitative analysis of student’s final outcomes as well as pragmatic evaluation of
comments in individual student interviews – makes clear the key role of interpersonal mediation between the
learner and the expert, and highlights the challenges to realize that, whether in the classroom, the newsroom,
or the wider world.

734
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Parascientific genres in the times of Covid-19: Engaging an


online audience throughout multimodality

Panel contribution

Dr. Miguel Ruiz-Garrido 1 , Dr. Juan Carlos Palmer Silveira 1


1. Universitat Jaume I

Online genres for science communication are the result of the democratization of science; an attempt to share
research with the widest and most diversified audience (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2019). Sometimes called para-
scientific genres (Kelly and Miller, 2016), they offer the gist of scientific research, and scholars try to make it sim-
ple enough to be understood by laypersons, aiming to overcome the image of difficulty that is often inherent to
science.
COVID-19 has affected how science is communicated, forcing scholars to think of new ways to do so, reformu-
lating and recontextualizing how it can be presented to the public. A case in point can be the international
scientific talks competition called FameLab that, apart from bringing science closer to the general public, has
adapted its original format to this new reality. FameLab talks are 3-minute presentations in English (for the
international competition) on a scientific and/or technological subject, performed in front of an audience, but
since 2020, due to the pandemics, they are performed online.
Content, clarity and charisma are the three elements evaluated by judges in this competition. It is charisma
that allows speakers to engage the audience and command attention. Nevertheless, if the public is not present,
that level of engagement has to be modified. To engage the audience, the role of multimodality, along with the
linguistic interpersonal and rhetorical choices, need to be analyzed.
Our aim is to show the different resources and strategies used by the speakers to engage online viewers from
a multimodal perspective. We have analyzed the 20 talks from the 2020 and 2021 FameLab finals, since they
were not delivered as live events, but as pre-recorded ones. We have relied on previous research about a similar
genre (3 minute-thesis) and its rhetorical strategies (Hyland and Zhou, 2021; Carter-Thomas and Rowley-Jolivet,
2020). Results show that some features also appear in our dataset, but a few multimodal characteristics are new
for these short online presentations.
As ESP practitioners and EMI instructors, our research can bring new rhetorical tools to be applied in our own
teaching, but also in the teaching of different scientific subjects that can be used for science dissemination.

References
Carter-Thomas, S. & Rowley-Jolivet, E. (2020). Three-minute thesis presentations: Recontextualisation strategies
in doctoral research. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 48, 1–14.
Hyland, K. & Zou, H.J. (2021). Pithy Persuasion: Engagement in 3-minute thesis presentations. Applied Linguis-
tics, 43(1), 21-44.
Kelly, A.R. & Miller, C.R. (2016). Intersections: Scientific and parascientific communication on the Internet. In
Gross, A. & Buehl, J. (Eds.), Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a Digital Age (pp. 221–245).
Amityville, NY: Baywood.
Luzón, M.J. (2019). Bridging the gap between experts and publics: The role of multimodality in disseminating
research in online videos. IBÉRICA. Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 37,
167-192.
Luzón, M. J. & Pérez-Llantada, C. (Eds). 2019. Science Communication on the Internet: Old Genres meet New
Genres. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

735
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The mediating role of science teachers in the dissemination of


scientific knowledge

Panel contribution

Mr. Seppe Goddaert 1


1. Ghent University

While education is hardly a novel way of communicating scientific knowledge, both educators and scholars aim
to create innovative pedagogical ways to increase scientific literacy, most notably by the use of so-called Socio-
Scientific Issues (Levy et al., 2021; McNeill & Vaughn, 2012; Rudsberg et al., 2013). SSIs are presented to learners
in order for them to make sense of scientific uncertainty, moral issues and personal agency within complex
(socio-political) environments (Zeidler et al., 2005; Zeidler & Nichols, 2009). In terms of didactics, SSIs heavily
favor interactional methods of knowledge construction, such as dialogue, debate and discussion, all of which
allow for critical epistemologies to emerge (Dewey, 1910; Rudsberg et al., 2013; Simonneaux & Simonneaux,
2012).
This research focuses on the case of a Brussels-based project on air quality, with an educational branch focused
on teacher training. An educational non-profit organization was asked to design teaching materials and sem-
inars on the science of air quality. These seminars, organized by teacher trainers, were meant for in-service
teachers who wanted to use the teaching materials in their classroom. The linguistic-ethnographic data for this
research consists of two recorded interviews, seven recorded teaching seminars and fieldnotes.
The main focus of this research is twofold: (1) we aim to find out how these teacher trainers reflect on the
scientific pedagogy on SSIs they present to teachers and (2) we examine what their actual teaching practice then
is, in relation to their reflections. In essence, what do they consider the base principles of their SSI education
and how are these base principles reflected in their own teaching practice?
The results of this research show that the teacher trainers construct an explicitly political and moral framework
for their education as they claim successful scientific education implies emancipation and, by extension, a re-
distribution of power within society. In their education, they motivate teachers to take up argumentative and
interactional roles in the classroom to provoke agency in learners.
References:
Dewey, J. (1910). Science as Subject-Matter and as Method. Science, 31(787), 8.
Levy, B. L. M., Oliveira, A. W., & Harris, C. B. (2021). The potential of “civic science education”: Theory, research,
practice, and uncertainties. Science Education, 105(6), 1053–1075. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21678
McNeill, K. L., & Vaughn, M. H. (2012). Urban High School Students’ Critical Science Agency: Conceptual Under-
standings and Environmental Actions Around Climate Change. Research in Science Education, 42(2), 373–399.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-010-9202-5
Rudsberg, K., Öhman, J., & Östman, L. (2013). Analyzing Students’ Learning in Classroom Discussions about
Socioscientific Issues. Science Education, 97(4), 594–620. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21065
Simonneaux, J., & Simonneaux, L. (2012). Educational Configurations for Teaching Environmental So-
cioscientific Issues Within The Perspective of Sustainability. Research in Science Education, 42(1), 75–94.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-011-9257-y
Zeidler, D. L., & Nichols, B. H. (2009). Socioscientific issues: Theory and practice. Journal of elementary science
education, 21(2), 49–58.
Zeidler, D. L., Sadler, T. D., Simmons, M. L., & Howes, E. V. (2005). Beyond STS: A research-based framework for
socioscientific issues education. Science Education, 89(3), 357–377. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.20048

736
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Misplaced Pragmatics of Official U.S. COVID-19 Mediatized


Health Communication

Panel contribution

Prof. Charles Briggs 1


1. University of California, Berkeley

This paper explores the misplaced pragmatics of the mediatization of health communication during the U.S.
COVID-19 pandemic. As with H1N1 in 2009, health authorities attempted to institute what I call the pandemic-
discursive-industrial-complex. It relies on a set of discourse practices developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) for public health and security officials, politicians scientists, and journalists for
mediatizating pandemic discourse. Its ideological infrastructure relies on biomedical authority communica-
bility (Briggs and Hallin 2016), which projects pandemic discourse as a linear, hierarchically-ordered process:
health professionals produce knowledge, public health officials, journalists, and physicians translate it into lay
language, and members of “the public” become passive receivers who replicate biomedical interpretations and
enact prescribed “behaviors.” The CDC model casts alternative discourses as “threats” to public health.
After announcing the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an associated “infodemic,”
defined as “an overabundance of information, both online and offline” that includes “mis- and disinformation”
that “disseminate wrong information to undermine the public health response and advance alternative agendas
of groups or individuals” (2020). WHO created a “COVID-19 Mythbusters” website that features binary contrasts
between “myths,” tiny bits of referential content that misrepresent COVID-19, with equally succinct biomedical
“facts.”
Like much public-health discourse, Mythbusters” fundamentally misconstrued the pragmatics of COVID-19 dis-
course in two ways. First, COVID-19 scientific and medical knowledge was complex and uncertain. Its linear
projections were often disrupted as new variants appeared and previous public statements proved inaccurate.
Second, asking laypersons to develop creative practices for caring for themselves and family members (except in
serious cases) and passively assimilate shifting biomedical knowledge produced a contradiction that led many to
reject the injunction against lay contributions to producing knowledge about COVID-19. Lay discourses ranged
widely from forwarding and discussing social media posts and YouTube videos by dissident health professionals
to internet and social media networks formed by persons trying to make sense of “long COVID” symptoms that
did not match clinical descriptions. Attempts by journalists and health professionals to fit this diversity of dis-
course into the same metapragmatic box—as anti-science, anti-medicine conspiracy theories—prompted even
many U.S. residents who had initially accepted pandemic mitigation measures to increasingly reject pandemic
biocommunicability.
Negotiating boundaries of scientific and popular discourse were further complicated by health officials’ at-
tempts to temporarily suppress an another prevalent form of U.S. health mediation, which revolves around
patient-consumer communicability (Briggs and Hallin 2016). Patient consumers are projected as self-interested,
agentive, active seekers of knowledge relevant to their “risk factors” and health aspirations, a more desirable
lay subject position than afforded by biomedical authority communicability. These two forms had become
racialized: Whites were frequently projected as expert patient-consumers and racialized persons as defective
receivers of biomedical discourse. In the politics of race associated with the Trump presidency, efforts to with-
draw the social capital associated with patient-consumer communicability augmented rejection by persons who
embraced White supremacist ideologies of the pandemic-discursive-industrial-complex and increased their in-
vestment in discourses that officials framed as “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.”

737
Narratives on COVID-19
experiences in the digital
age (organized by Kazuyo
Murata)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Building empathy remotely: A strategic-style shift for creating


closeness in online dialogues in Japanese

Panel contribution

Prof. Etsuko Yoshida 1


1. The University of Shiga Prefecture

This study examines the alternation of honorifics, i.e., the exchange of Japanese polite masu/desu forms and
plain forms as resources for the speakers’ desired social identities. It focuses on how strategic ways of style-
shifting are subtlely but dynamically co-constructed to create closeness among unfamiliar pairs of students
in remote communication. As several studies of style shifts based on naturally occurring Japanese data have
discovered, the practice of using honorifics is complex. The mechanism of style-shifting, in particular, is not
straightforward, given the association of formal context with honorifics and that of informal context with non-
honorifics (e.g., Cook 1996, 2008; Geyer 2008; Ikuta 2008; Jones and Ono 2008). Remarkably, style-shifting may be
“a way to convey how closely connect different parts of a conversation” in negotiating the psychological distance
between the participants (Jones and Ono 2008). Cook (2008) also noted that “a hierarchical relationship is co-
constructed” by the exchanges between the student’s use of masu form and the professor’s use of plain form
under the mutual consciousness of their social ranks.
The data for the analysis comprises dialogues by seven pairs of Japanese students (mixed male–female pairs,
ranging from 18 to 26 years of age) who met online for a 20-minute talk, having never met previously, to share
any experience of the COVID-19 pandemic that had affected their everyday lives. Our expectation is that the
qualitative analysis will reveal that the alternation between desu/masu polite forms and their non-honorific
counterparts can foreground a hierarchical relationship, especially when the two parties are conscious of their
age difference or their relative social positions in a formal setting such as a Zoom meeting.
When the use of these two forms is observed, it is found that the plain forms do not occur frequently, but they
do arise in a special interactive context. That is, the plain forms of speech style tend to emerge in the episodic
small narratives in which a speaker tells a monologic story with a somewhat personal tone within the sequence
of the polite forms as default.
Although all seven pairs continue to use polite forms even after realizing that they are nearly in the same school
year, some parties, for instance, temporarily narrate their own episodes using plain forms, while others revert
to desu/masu forms showing their listenership for the “recipient design.”
In conclusion, this mixed-style shift can create a sense of closeness between the parties in building empathy
from a relational perspective..
The practice of this style-mixing as described above can be further investigated as a process of stance-taking
in that the shift from polite form to plain form can be treated as an affective stance to the target objects co-
constructed with the polite expressions, including fragments and reactive tokens (Clancy et al.) with particles
(ka/ne/yo/yone).

739
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Content Analysis of Narratives on COVID-19 by the Japanese


Digital Native Generation Using Topic Modeling

Panel contribution

Dr. Ryoga Ishihara 1


1. Ryukoku University

Personal narratives of the unprecedented experience of COVID-19 provide various lessons learned for fu-
ture pandemic responses. Nakahara and Nagaoka (2009) suggested that “common wisdom” of the pandemic
could be generated through sharing personal narratives within the community, though learning embedded in
verbalized experience is rarely replicable in other crises due to its high peculiarity. Accordingly, it is indeed
essential to utilize narratives on the COVID-19 catastrophe in order to prepare the community for the next pan-
demic.
The purpose of this study is to quantitatively investigate the ways in which the Japanese digital native gener-
ation narrates the COVID-19 experience and the trends in their statements by employing text mining techniques.
Data for this research is conversation collected from 30 pairs of Japanese youth on their first meeting. Partici-
pants were asked to talk for 20 minutes about their experiences of COVID-19. The conversation was analyzed
in its totality (number of sentences: 4,496; the total number of words extracted: 55,357).
In this research, topic modeling was employed for analysis among other forms of text mining. Topic mod-
eling is a method that summarizes the overall trend of a collection of textual material by first finding the topics
that each sentence in the text contains and quantitatively illustrating the ways in which each sentence is gen-
erated from specific topics. To build this model, an estimated number of topics must be set in advance. Indica-
tors used for making the estimation include Griffiths2004, Cao2009, Arun2010, and Daveaud2014, referring to
Odanaka and Nakai (2019), in which the above four indicators were employed. The number of topics is consid-
ered optimum when the value is at its minimum for Cao2009 and Arun2010, and its maximum for Griffiths2014
and Daveaud2014. The number of topics for this model was set to 8, considering Cao2009 and Daveaud2014
indicated it as an optimum.
The following are interpretations of each topic based on its characteristics. Topic 1 is about vaccination.
Topic 2 is about crowding. Topic 3 is about college life. Topic 4 is about friends. Topic 5 is about commuting.
Topic 6 is about online classes. Topic 7 is about part-time jobs. Topic 8 is related to general experiences of
COVID-19.
In conclusion, based on 30 pairs of youth conversations, this study reveals the trends in narratives of the
COVID-19 experience by the Japanese digital native generation, which include vaccines, crowding, college life,
friends, commuting, online classes, part-time jobs, and general experiences of COVID-19.

740
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Contested Experience: Building the COVID Long-hauler


Identity

Panel contribution

Ms. Brienna Johnson-Morris 1


1. University of California, Los Angeles

This paper examines how those with Long-COVID discursively carve out space for them and other COVID sur-
vivors to validate their experiences. Previous scholarship on disability activism, advocacy, and identity forma-
tion has shown that stigma and negative identity formation have been defining aspects of disability narratives.
The COVID-19 Pandemic has created a number of new challenges, one of these emerging challenges relates to
those who do not fully recover from being ill who are known as COVID long-haulers. The debilitating effects
of Long-COVID affect the daily lives of people and prevent them from doing many of the things they were able
to pre-COVID. Living with Long-COVID poses a personal and social challenge due to health changes but also so-
cial perceptions of COVID. As a contested experience, those with Long-COVID have to fight to be recognized as
disabled. To combat invalidation long-haulers use discursive and semiotic practices to reify the idea of COVID
being a disabling event. Social media has been an important site of discourse and has allowed for the devel-
opment of support and advocacy groups to connect long-haulers globally. Finding community as a disabled
person is complicated by social ideas of disability, but online spaces have allowed for further development of
widespread disability discourse and culture. This paper explores identity formation in long-haulers by looking
at online data and speaking directly with long-haulers. Using the relationality principle of identity, I outline the
ways COVID long-haulers are negotiating their disability identity.

741
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Digital natives’ online first meeting discourse about COVID-19


Disaster: The boundaries between exclusion and empathy in
the narratives

Panel contribution

Prof. Kaori Hata 1


1. Osaka University

Since the early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to change our communication style drastically. After
some blank for several months, most of us started to use online tool instead of meeting face-to-face. Especially
for the teenagers and early 20s, the online communication is only the opportunity to see their face each other
and it turned into a sort of new-normal communication style for them. Some have spent all of their high school
life with masks and had classes only online.
In this study, the narratives represented in such situation should be defined as disaster narratives (Iwasaki
1997). By applying positioning theory (Bamberg 1997, 2004) and small stories (Georgakopoulou 2007), the col-
lected narratives have been analysed.
This study is part of the results of a project initiated by Shoichi Iwasaki (UCLA) on conversations between neo-
digital natives in five countries talking about COVID-19. The Japanese team, led by Kazuyo Murata (Ryukoku
University), asked the participants aged 18 to early 20s for communicating each other by online. They were
analysed qualitatively in this study to examine 1) the structure of the narratives from the beginning of the
conversation to the end, and 2) what features are presented in the structure.
The analysis showed that from the beginning of the conversation to the end, they show a similar structure.
It can also be pointed out that in the interactions in the first face-to-face discourse, where there is little prior
information, there is a tendency that participants grope for the points to exclude others as ‘different’ in order to
emphasise that they belong to the same category, and that the line between the two is produced context-based
and arbitrary. These are observed that they frequently use “our generation” which has been analysed as “we”
code and “they” code. These structures of empathy and exclusion are inextricably linked.
In this presentation, some salient examples of this phenomenon will be illustrated and suggestions for coexis-
tence with the ‘different’ will be proposed.

742
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How the Pandemic Divides Us: Analysis of Pandemic


Narratives from the Japanese Generation Z

Panel contribution

Dr. Kazuyo Murata 1


1. Ryukoku University

The COVID-19 pandemic is a massive public health and economic crisis that has extensively reshaped the ways
in which we see ourselves and others. As invisible social divisions polarized by the pandemic are observed
worldwide in questionnaires and other quantitative surveys, it becomes critical to disclose what kind of social
divisions they are, and in which ways they are being narrated. The purpose of this study is to qualitatively
examine the Japanese Generation Z’s narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic and discern the ways in which
various types of social divisions are being narrated.
The data for this study is taken from a narrative data corpus which consists of thirty dyadic initial interactions
in Japanese collected in 2021. The participants were between the age of 18 and the late 20s. They were asked to
discuss their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic on their first meetings. Audio and video recordings of
their dialogues were captured over Zoom.
This study employs the analytical framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Holmes, 2008). The notion of
“identity” referred to in this study is conceptualized not as a fixed attribute but as what is actively and discur-
sively performed and carried out in social contexts (Marra and Angouri, 2011). This conscious and performative
effort of identity is realized as “social positioning of self and other” by individuals and groupings of people as
they express perceived similarities and differences with others (De Fina et al. 2006).
The result shows that various social divisions are constructed discursively and collaboratively between the
participants. These social divisions are being experienced from the perspective of Japanese Generation Z, which
include coronavirus and the divide between young and elderly, rural and urban, Asian and western nations,
high and low levels of coronavirus awareness, those who go out and those who stay home, vaccine proponents
and opponents, high and low-income occupations, etc. The narratives in the data set suggest the ways in which
youth in Japan experience and struggle with these invisible social divisions in the quotidian.

743
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negotiating commonalities on COVID-19 experiences: An


analysis of troubles-telling between unacquainted
interactants

Panel contribution

Ms. Satsuki Iseki 1


1. The University of Tokyo

The unprecedented situation of COVID-19 provided an unusual shared experience, even to those who were
formerly unacquainted. Generally, formerly unacquainted interactants do not share any personal common
ground, or self-awareness of each other’s personal information, and it needs to be justified in the interaction
by pointing to shared bases (Clark, 1996). This lack of common ground could be an interactional obstruction
when a participant reports their personal experience, since the recipients may face difficulties in displaying
affiliation due to the lack of experience, epistemic knowledge, or subjective resources (Heritage, 2011). This
study aims to elucidate how this difficulty may be resolved in troubles-telling between formerly unacquainted
participants. It will also show how these participants establish common ground and thereby solidify their social
and interpersonal bonds through this activity.
The data for this study is taken from a conversation data corpus which consists of thirty dyadic initial interac-
tions in Japanese. The participants were asked to talk about their experience with COVID-19 for twenty minutes.
Sixteen instances of troubles-telling found in this corpus were analyzed with the methodology of Conversation
Analysis.
In all of the collected instances, the story recipient responded with a display of some kind of affiliative stance to
the other participant’s troubles-talk. In the subsequent procedure to arrive at a mutually agreed closing of the
telling, participants collectively engage in the negotiation of the commonalities and the uniqueness of the re-
ported experience. Two broad types of the sequential organization according to the characteristics of recipient
affiliation were identified; a) the story recipient claims their independent access to the told experience which
is followed by a co-telling sequence of the shared experience, and b) the story recipient displays an affiliative
understanding towards the telling without claiming their independent access to the told event, which is then
followed by a complementary sequence to explore the possible commonalities between the interactants. In in-
stances of type (a), the recipient straightforwardly orients to the commonalities of their experiences which is
approved by the teller. In instances of type (b), on the other hand, the story recipient respects the uniqueness
of the teller’s experience by being affiliative but not presenting themselves in the same position as the teller.
This response in type (b) is treated as an interactional problem or a minor disagreement, which makes some
remedial work relevant.
As the unacquainted interactants know very little about each other, they exploit the troubles-telling activity to
establish common ground and to solidify their social and interpersonal bond by turning “how I experienced
COVID-19” into “how we experienced COVID-19.” It is the common ground from which they derive the basis of
“our” experience, and to which “our” experience contributes in establishing.
References
Clark, H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (2011). Territories of knowledge, territories of experience: Empathic moments in interaction. In T.
Stivers, L. Mondada, & J. Steensig (Eds.), The morality of knowledge in conversation (pp. 159–183). Cambridge
University Press.

744
Navigating a
conversation with a
stranger through
laughter (organized by
Shoichi Iwasaki)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Laughing off Troubles: Managing Social Distance Through


Laughter on Delicate Matters in Social Interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Yi Ren 1 , Dr. Yan Zhou 2 , Ms. Ruyu Yang 1 , Ms. Dayoung Jeong 1 , Ms. Yukun Li 3
1. UCLA, 2. Northwestern University, 3. The University of Tokyo

Laughter has been found to mitigate face-threatening actions and maximize affiliation in delicate moments of
conversation by framing them as “unserious” (Glenn & Holt, 2013). While previous research either focuses on
ordinary conversations among family and friends or institutional talk with an unequal social status (Glenn,
2013; Jacknick, 2013; Ticca, 2013), laughter in delicate talk among unacquainted persons with an equal social
status, which is a common scenario in social interaction, remains underdiscussed.
Drawing on research methods in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the present study investi-
gates laughter in a specific type of delicate moments in conversations when speakers display a negative affective
stance towards a personal experience, which put alignment and affiliation of the interlocutors particularly at
stake. Specifically, this study seeks to examine the interactional functions of post-completion laughter at the
initiating position of such delicate moments and their (dis)preferred responses. Our dataset contains 12 hours
of naturally occurring dyadic Zoom conversations on COVID-19 experiences between unacquainted Mandarin
native speakers.
A close examination of the data has yielded two initial findings. First of all, laughter produced by the current
speaker in post-completion position serves as a powerful tool to manage social distance with unacquainted
interlocutors. Laughter enables the speaker to frame their negative emotions as unserious and mark their
distant relationship to the interlocutor. Second, we found that recipients of laughter in this environment tend to
reciprocate laughter or smile, which shows a congruent stance on the distant social relationship while displaying
alignment. In the following example, A complains about not being able to explore his city due to the pandemic.
His laughter in the turn-final position frames the complaint as unserious and indicates his distant relationship
with the recipient. B starts his response with laughter, which aligns with A’s laughter and shows his congruent
stance regarding their relationship.
(1) 01 A: ranhou suoyi erling nian zhe yi nian
then so twenty-twenty year this one year
wo jibenshang dou meizenme chumen
1SG basically entirely barely go.out
’Then, so, during 2020, I basically didn’t go out the entire year.’
(0.51)
→ LA zhe hao difang ye meizenme wan hehehe.
LA this good place also barely play hehehe
‘LA is such a good place, but I barely had fun here hehehe.’
02→ B: hehehe
keyi.
good
‘Good/ (you) can.’
(0.39)
e: you- you de shi jihui.
um have have GEN COP opportunity
’Um, there- there will be plenty of opportunities.’

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

This study of laughter in delicate talk between unacquainted speakers contributes to the research on laughter in
multiple aspects. First, our findings show that laughter might be a universal device to navigate delicate actions
regardless of social relationships. Second, the frequencies of certain types of laughter and their interactional
environments vary based on the social distance and power dynamics between the speakers. Our findings based
on Mandarin conversations also contribute to the understanding of laughter in delicate talk across different
languages and cultures.

747
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Laughter and Affective Common Ground: How to get


acquainted with a stranger in Covid-19 conversations in Thai

Panel contribution

Dr. Yingyot Kanchina 1 , Dr. Ratchadaporn Phonyarit 2 , Prof. Shoichi Iwasaki 3


1. Mahidol University, 2. Walailak University, 3. UCLA

Using ten Thai conversations collected under the “Multilingual Covid-19 Conversation” project, this paper ex-
amines how laughter is used when two formerly unacquainted speakers interact with each other.
We employ the notion of ‘mutual common ground’ in this study, defined as ‘the sum of (interlocutors’) mutual
knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual suppositions at the moment (H.H. Clark: 1996b: 327). Unacquainted
speakers by definition do not share any ‘personal common ground,’ but they understand they share ‘communal
common ground’ as soon as they recognize they belong to the same social, professional, linguistic or other group.
Although the focus of Clark’s ‘mutual common ground’ is epistemic in nature, we will show that a different type
of common ground called ‘affective common ground’ plays a crucial role for carrying out an engaged conversa-
tion (e.g., Enfield 2013). While epistemic common ground is based on the shared knowledge, affective common
ground is based on shared interpretation of, or stance towards, such knowledge. Participants form emotional
affiliation when they establish affective common ground.
While epistemic common ground knowledge such as “Fah Talai Jone,” the name of popular herbal medicine
believed to be effective against Covid-19, can often be assumed without hesitation among the active members
of the Thai speaking community, the affective common ground needs to be created locally between the partici-
pants.
Laughter acknowledges discovery of such affective common ground. There are three distinct types of affective
common ground discovery we have identified so far. (Note: In the examples below, the Thai script is omitted;
@ represents one beat of laughter token; <@ @> means laughter is added over words.)
(1) Affective common ground can be created when speakers recognize they hold a similar stance towards a
stance object (Du Bois, 2007). After Speaker A said “Talking about vaccines makes me angry,” Speaker B re-
sponded with an utterance followed by laughter, ‘Umm, angry. Angry every time @@’ .
(2) Affective common ground can also be created when speakers realize they belong to a common community
with like-minded participants. One speaker compared her pre-Covid, busy morning ritual before going to work
with her easy preparation during the Covid-period (C: Taking a shower and doing your hair, setting your hair up
nicely, and now we have (online) apps that like (make) us look beautiful. @@@. D: Right @@@.) In this case, the
two participants who had discovered that they belong to a community of working women assume they share
some affective common ground.
(3) Another environment is when participants accidentally discover a shared object during a conversation.
Speaker E suspected that Speaker F knew her friend. After F confirmed this, E uttered a turn with laughter
(<@She is my friend@>.’).
As these examples above show, affective common ground is built upon shared epistemic common ground, and
laughter indexes the existence of the former. While it may be possible to work only on the epistemic common
ground by confirming each other’s knowledge (as in Clark’s experiments), participants in a naturalistic setting
attempt to achieve affective common ground as laughter indicates.

748
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Laughter and quotation of thought in Japanese conversation

Panel contribution

Prof. Tomoko Endo 1 , Ms. Satsuki Iseki 1 , Prof. Shoichi Iwasaki 2


1. The University of Tokyo, 2. UCLA

Laughter has been the target of analysis since the very beginning of conversation analysis (Jefferson 1979, 1984,
1985). Recent studies of laughter have touched upon various aspects including the phonetic variations, positions
in turn, and identity established by laughter (Glenn and Holt 2013). This study adopts the methodology of Inter-
actional Linguistics and aims to further deepen the understanding of the functions of laughter in conversation,
with a special focus on the syntactic structure of quotation of thought in Japanese. The data for this study consist
of eight conversations taken from the Multilingual COVID-19 Conversation Corpus. For each conversation, two
unacquainted participants talked with each other about their COVID-19 experience for 20 minutes on Zoom.
Speakers often used the ‘omou (think) construction’ when reporting their thoughts. This construction consists
of the reported thought with a quotative particle (QT), to or tte, and the cognition quoting verb omou. Unlike I
think in English, which can be placed either before or after the reported thought, omou invariably follows the
reported thought, taking the following format:
[ Reported Thought - QT] + [ Quoting Expression (omou) ]
Laughter can occur either within the reported thought as in (1) or within the quoting expression as in (2). [Note:
(h) indicates an interspersed laugh token; <@ @> indicates an utterance said with overlaid laughter.]

• (1) [nanka mukatsu(h)ku(h) na tte ] [ omoinagara ]

somehow get.upset PP QT think.while


‘(I) thought [that it’s upsetting somehow].’

• (2) [sore to nani ga chigaun daroo na tte] [ mata @< omoi @> nagara ]

that with what NOM different EVI PP QT also think,while


‘[ (I) also thought (=wondered) ] how it is different from that,’
The implication of laughter in the two cases is different. We first note that the types of information expressed in
the reported thought are different between the patterns represented by (1) and (2). When the reported thought
appears with laughter as in (1), it tends to present the speaker’s evaluation/stance towards some fact. The
speaker of (1), for example, is expressing his frustration towards restrictions imposed by the pandemic poli-
cies. Predicates appearing in pattern (1) include adjectives such as ‘difficult, not necessary, easy to live, rough,
the best.’ Expressing one’s evaluation needs to be modulated in a conversation with an unacquainted partner,
and laughter assumes such a role. In studies on laughter in troubles-talk in English conversation, speakers of-
ten use laughter to avoid the implication that they are in a pitiful situation. Laughter used in patterns like (1)
eliminates the unnecessary implication associated with the speaker’s personal evaluation more generally.
When laughter appears with the quoting expression, omou ‘think’ as in pattern (2), the reported thought tends
not to be a personal evaluation, but presenting a fact (e.g. ‘(COVID cases) are decreasing, you are wearing a
mask, who is contracting the virus?’ etc.) In such cases, laughter mitigates the force of the quoting verb omou,
and presents the fact as his/her hedged, personal opinion.

749
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Laughter in opening sequences of initial conversations in


English and Mandarin

Panel contribution

Dr. Liz Carter 1 , Dr. Yan Zhou 2


1. Vassar College, 2. Northwestern University

In initial interactions between two unacquainted speakers, interlocutors must establish common ground (Clark
1996) - including communal knowledge of cultural practices, personal information, and affective common
ground driven by the affiliation imperative (Enfield 2008). In these interactions, laughter is observed to index
interactional troubles as laughable, such as following extended lapses (Haul and Musgrave 2019) and in disaf-
filiative responses requiring remedial work (Flint et al. 2019). Drawing on English and Mandarin conversations
from different regions, this study explores how cultural differences and countries of residence contribute to dif-
ferences in the deployment of laughter in the opening sequences of initial conversations, where conversational
norms and affective stance are unclear.
Our data consists of 90 Zoom recordings of 20-minute semi-free conversations in six different languages with
the given topic of COVID-19 experiences. Participants include English native speakers based in the U.S. and
Mandarin native speakers based in mainland China, the U.S., Taiwan, and Japan. Adopting an interactional lin-
guistic approach, we examined fifteen recordings (four English, eleven Mandarin) and found noticeable differ-
ences across languages and regional subgroups regarding the sequential position of laughter and the recipient’s
responses.
In the English data, speakers’ initial and reciprocated laughter occur in all four conversations following greet-
ings and prior to the first questions seeking personal common ground.
(1): EC0 #003 English
1 A: <okay> ((smiles))
2 hi ((raises hand to mouth))
3 A: ha[ha
4 B: [he-, hi::
5 A: umm are you at UCLA too?
6 B: N=o I’m not.((Covers mouth with hand))
The Mandarin data varies regionally. U.S.-based Mandarin speakers tend to begin conversations by explic-
itly noting the situation’s awkwardness or proposing to start the chat, and then laugh. The Japan-based Man-
darin speakers, like the English speakers, share initial laughter after exchanging greetings, often while waving,
demonstrating a potential influence of the L2 or the country of residence on the L1.
(2)MCO#002 (U.S.-based Mandarin)
1 A: aiya. zhege kanbujian ziji zhende hahaha.
Wow, not being able to see [my] self is really@@@
2 B: haha hao qiguai haha
(It’s) really weird.
(3) MCO#010 (Japan-based Mandarin)
1 B: Hi nihao hehehe
Hi, hello.
2 A: kaishi le shi ba,haha
3 (It) has started, is it?
4 A/B hahaha ((joint laughter))
5 A: nihao nihao.

750
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hello hello.
Our findings on English and Mandarin data show that participants universally use laughter to establish solidar-
ity and affective common ground in their shared stance toward the awkwardness of the situation, but do so in
different ways. The regional variation within the Mandarin data shows that country of residence also impacts
what speakers consider to be communal ground. Previous studies have found that language practices such as
turn-taking display both universal and culturally specific features (Stivers, et al. 2010). Our study contributes to
a more nuanced understanding of how laughter is used differently in initial interactions between unacquainted
speakers depending on regional or linguistic background.

751
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Smiles and Laughter with Style-shift: Mitigating Speakers’


Face-Threatening Acts

Panel contribution

Mr. Yeonseob Lee 1 , Mr. Hanbeom Jung 1


1. University of California, Los Angeles

This study analyzes Korean speakers’ use of smiles and laughter as a device to modulate the level of polite-
ness in conversation. While previous studies have discussed their function as a mitigator of a potentially face-
threatening act (Haakana, 2001; Romaniuk, 2013; Wilkinson, 2007), the Korean data provides interesting exam-
ples of interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic modalities.
The Korean language uses intricate honorific systems and various speech levels to index speakers’ awareness
of politeness toward the addressees, and speakers shift their speech levels during conversation by using differ-
ent verbal suffixes or sentence-enders (Brown, 2015; Kim, 2016; Koo and Rhee, to appear; Sohn, 1999; Strauss
and Eun, 2005; M-J Park, 2017). However, this kind of speech level shifting, often known as style-shift, is a
double-edged sword because it signals that style-shift initiator indicates his/her willingness to build closer so-
cial relationship with the conversation partners, but if the partners are not agreeable with such a move, it may
threaten both the initiator and the recipients’ face.
Our research shows that speakers employ smiles and laughter to alleviate such face threatening moments. We
examined smiles and laughter co-occurring with style-shift in conversation between five unacquainted pairs.
Participants in each dyad engaged in a 20-minute conversation, totaling 100 minutes of recorded conversation
on Zoom. Since the conversation participants had never met each other before, in order to be seen as polite
to their conversation partners, they tended to employ the sentence-ender -yo, a marker of polite speech level.
However, after some time passed in the conversation, with smiles and laughter some speakers switched their
speech level from polite to either intimate, plain or neutral by dropping the polite sentence-ender -yo (marked
as -ø in examples below) or replacing it with intimate sentence-ender -e, plain or neutral sentence-ender -(n)ta,
-na, -(n)ka, or sentence-final particle -kwuna.
We found that some speakers switched their speech levels while smiling or laughing especially when they re-
acted to their conversation partners’ utterances. Notice in the following examples the null marking of politeness
(-ø), or sentence final particle -kwuna: (i) when speakers showed that they completely agreed with their inter-
locutors (e.g., <@ a maca-ø maca-ø @> ‘You’re right. That’s what I wanted to say.’); (ii) when speakers indicated
that they just accepted new information (e.g., <£ a kulen key iss-kwuna £> ‘Oh, I’ve never thought about it.’);
(iii) when speakers declined their interlocutors’ offer indirectly (e.g., cikum kholona ttaymwuney-ø <@ ha-
haha @> ‘(oh yeah, but I can’t.) Because, you know, we are in a pandemic…’) [note : <£_£> and <@_@> indicate
an utterance with smiley voice and that with laughter.]
Thus, we suggest that non-linguistic behaviors such as smiley voice and laughter are used as an interactional
resource for offsetting potentially face-threatening acts caused by the linguistic markings which speakers em-
ploy to change their speech styles. This is a useful recourse that Korean speakers can use when negotiating
appropriate interpersonal relationships in conversation with unacquainted conversation partners.

752
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Using Laughter as a Stance Marker to Negotiate Group Identity

Panel contribution

Ms. Ariel Chan 1 , Ms. Cheer Wu 1


1. University of California, Los Angeles

This paper addresses laughter’s identity revealing function in conversations between pairs of unacquainted
Cantonese speakers. Previous studies (e.g., Glenn & Holt 2013; Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain 2013) have focused
on the role of laughter in identity construction in conversations with family and friends, or professionals and
clients in institutional contexts. For example, in the case of the construction of place identity, Liebscher and
Dailey-O’Cain (2013) observed that solo laughter was employed to resist a membership category assigned by the
other participant and indicate misalignment while shared laughter was used to construct common identity and
achieve alliances. However, little is known whether laughter is used in this way, or employed at all for identity
work in other contexts. To fill this gap, the current paper examines laughter used by non-acquaintances in
non-institutional settings.
Drawing on conversational data collected from 10 pairs of unacquainted dyads of Cantonese native speakers
from the Multilingual COVID-19 Conversation Data Analysis project, we examine how unacquainted speakers
use laughter to manage affiliation and disaffiliation with each other via their assumed common ground identity.
In particular, we focus on place and language identities, where the former refers to the identity related to a
geographical location and the latter refers to the identity related to use of a language. In both cases, we consider
not only instances that directly comment on the shared identity (e.g., Nei5 dou1 hai6 hoeng1gong2 jan4 “You are
also a Hongkonger”) but also a more subtle form of identity expression such as a mention of language practices
(e.g., Nei5 tung4 nei5 fu6mou5 kau1tung1 dou1 wui3 jung6 gwong2dung1waa6 ge3 hai6mai3? “You use Cantonese
to communicate with your parents too, right?” ).
To explore the function of laughter in identity negotiation in the data, the current study focuses on the use of
laughter in responding to an assumed or proposed in-group identity by another interlocutor. For example, when
one speaker initiates an identity-related topic to establish common ground with another speaker, they may add
laughter on their utterance (e.g., ‘You are also a Hongkonger’, ‘as you already knew’), to signal their inclusion of
the addressee as an in-group and invitation for affiliation. To show affiliation with their conversation partner,
the addressee may either reciprocate the laughter with the same or upgraded intensity or respond with a verbal
expression with a smiley voice. By contrast, the addressee may disaffiliate with the speaker using different
epistemic downgrading strategies, including laughter with a lower intensity and no verbal elaboration, minimal
response, evasion (e.g., look to the other side of the screen), or body gestures (e.g., leaning back to the chair). By
disaffiliating with the speaker, the addressee negotiates the nuances or extent of the common ground shared
by the assumed in-group identity or rejects the assumed in-group identity altogether. Findings of our study
show that similar to other epistemic markers such as sentence final particles and classifiers, laughter can also
be employed as a strategy to negotiate a stance towards participants’ identity in conversation.

753
New trends in
reformulation: Theory,
methods and challenges
(organized by Salvador
Pons Bordería, Shima
Salameh Jiménez, Adrià
Pardo Llibrer)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Diachronical Study of the


(Re)formulative Discourse Marker “esto” in the Course of the
Twentieth Century

Panel contribution

Dr. Elena Pascual 1


1. Universitat de València

Linguistic change is dynamic and can take place in a short space of time. Owing to the proliferation and avail-
ability of oral and written corpora, the twentieth century offers a window onto diachronical changes in refor-
mulative discourse markes that cannot be traced in other periods of history (Pons Bordería 2014; Pons & Llopis
2020). This paper analyses the rise and fall of the Spanish discourse marker (henceforth DM) “esto” in order to
illustrate how the use of an oral DM evolves over the course of a single century.
The DM “esto” is a (re)formulative maker used to express hesitation. It is found at the beginning (a) or in the
middle (b) of a speech act and shows the effort made by a speaker in solving communicative problems (Antos
1982, 1989; Gülisch & Kotschi 1995, 1983):

1. B.— […] I am reading at the same time a book by… by Ismael Quiles, [a] esto… What is it called…? “Sartre
and his existentialism” that more or less, [b] esto, has an introduction where the characteristics of exis-
tentialism are analysed (translated from Esgueva & Cantarero 1981: 291).

This study contrasts two micro-diachronic corpora (1980-1985 and 2010-2015) to show the evolution and loss
of peninsular Spanish “esto” in everyday use and explores whether competing linguistic solutions are being
adopted by language users in the twenty-first century. The function, position and frequency of “esto” are anal-
ysed in both corpora and quantitative techniques are applied to determine the decline in the frequency of this
DM.
The study offers quantifiable and representative results, which can be used to trace the evolution of “esto” in
contemporary peninsular Spanish. Pons (2014) suggests that a diachronic study of the twentieth century is
suitable for proving the intuition of linguistic change, and this study demonstrates the validity of this assertion.
Antos, G. (1982): Grundlagen einer Theorie des Formulierens. Textherstellung in geschriebener und gesprochener
Sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Antos, G. (1989): “Textproduktion: Ein einführender Überblick”, in Antos, G. y Krings, H. P. (eds.): Textproduk-
tion. Ein interdisziplinärer Forschungsiiberblick. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 5-57.
Esgueva, M. A. & Cantarero, M. (eds.) (1981). El habla de la ciudad de Madrid. Materiales para su estudio. Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Gülich, E. & Kotschi, T. (1983): “Les Marqueurs De La Réformulation Paraphrastique”. Cahiers de Linguistique
Française, 5, pp. 305-351.
Gülich, E. & Kotschi, T. (1995): “Discourse Production in Oral Communication. A Study Based on French”, in
Aspects of Oral Communication. Reprint 2011. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 30-66.
Pons Bordería, S. (2014): “El siglo XX como diacronía: intuición y comprobación en el caso de ‘o sea’ ”, Rilce, 30
(3), pp. 985-1016.
Pons Bordería, S. & Llopis Cardona, A. (2020): “Some reflections on semantic-pragmatic cycles”. Journal of His-
torical Pragmatics, 21, (2), pp. 317–348.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversión, atenuación y refuerzo argumentativo en las


enunciaciones reformulativas Decí que Y (que si no X) en el
español del Río de la Plata

Panel contribution

Dr. Maria Marta Garcia Negroni 1 , Dr. Manuel Libenson 1


1. Universidad de San Andrés

En esta presentación, proponemos un análisis dialógico-argumentativo de las reformulaciones introducidas


por el marcador rioplatense Decí que. Los fragmentos (1) a (3) ejemplifican los tres valores fundamentales
vehiculizados en este tipo de reformulaciones:

1. Todo ese tiempo que estuvo sopre, no la habrá pasado nada bien // Y no. La cárcel no es para cualquiera.
Pero decí que el tipo, para esa altura, ya tenía su reputación. Y un poco lo respetaban, que si no… - -
(Corpus Davies)
2. Me encanta bailar, me encanta tomar. Me gusta reunirme con mis amigas. Decí que ahora estoy un poco
grande. (Corpus Davies)
3. NORMA: ¿Sabés cuánto costó una docena de huevos hoy, sabés? //NELLY: ¿Cuánto? //NORMA: ¡Seis mil
pesos! // NELLY: ¿Seis mil pesos? // NORMA: Seis mil. Y decí que camino las dos cuadras hasta la feria,
que no soy vaga, que si no, no sé cuánto pagaríamos la docena de huevos. (CREA)

Las reformulaciones con Decí que materializan un determinado posicionamiento de respuesta frente a una
formulación previa X, propia o ajena, que retroactivamente queda vista como insuficiente (Roulet, 1987; Rossari,
1990; Pons Bordería 2013). Mostraremos que la nueva formulación Y constituye un argumento relevante que,
bajo la forma de una salvedad, un reparo o un comentario suplementario, obliga a releer la argumentación
externa (AE) (Carel y Ducrot, 2005) evocada por X como problemática y a reemplazarla por otra. Nuestro análisis
revela que Decí que Y puede o bien supender la AE a la derecha de X (reformulación por conversión, cf. (1)), o
bien atenuar la AE a la derecha de X (reformulación por atenuación, cf. (2)), o bien reforzar la AE a la izquierda
de X (reformulación por refuerzo, cf. (3)). Por otra parte, y tal como se observa en (1)-(3), Decí que Y habilita la
ocurrencia de una construcción causal de la forma que si no Y, X, la que evoca un escenario contrafáctico en el
que, de no haberse presentado Y, la argumentación evocada por X quedaría totalmente vigente.
A la luz del enfoque dialógico de la argumentación y la polifonía (García Negroni, 2019 y García Negroni y
Libenson 2022), en el que se inscribe nuestro trabajo, daremos cuenta de los diferentes posicionamientos de
respuesta asociados a los tres casos ejemplificados. Para ello, caracterizaremos la relación argumentativa en-
tre dichos posicionamientos y la representación de la causa dialógica que explica y justifica las propiedades
lingüístico-discursivas que manifiesta la reformulación Y en cada caso.
Carel, M. y Ducrot, O. 2005. La semántica argumentativa. Colihue.
García Negroni, MM. 2019. El enfoque dialógico de la argumentación y la polifonía, puntos de vista evidenciales
y puntos de vista alusivos, Rilce. 35(2), 521-549.
García Negroni MM. y Libenson, M. 2022. On the dialogical frames of mirative enunciations. Pragmatics 32 (3):
329-353
Pons Bordería, S. 2013. Un solo tipo de reformulación. Cuadernos AISPI, 2, 151-169
Roulet, E. 1987. Complétude interactive et connecteurs reformulatifs. Cahiers de linguistique francaise, 8, 111-
139-210.
Rossari, C. 1990. Proyet pour une typologie des operations de reformulation, Cahiers de linguistique francaise,
11, 345-359.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Genre variation in reformulation: Italian marker ovvero ‘or’


in legal vs journalistic texts

Panel contribution

Prof. Jacqueline Visconti 1 , Prof. Maria Cuenca 2


1. University of Genoa, 2. University of Valencia

Reformulation is a pragmatic function of textual re-interpretation by which a segment is presented in a different


way, both formally and discursively (e.g. Rossari 1994, Cuenca & Bach 2007, Pons Bordería 2017). Although
it can be seen as an equivalence operation, aimed at facilitating “the hearer’s understanding of the original”
(Blakemore 1993: 107), reformulation can be strategically used to introduce the addressor’s point of view for
argumentative purposes (Fløttum 1995, Mazzi 2011).
Reformulation has received attention from different perspectives (see e.g. the state of the art in Salameh 2021).
However, some aspects, such as genre variation, are still understudied. In this presentation, we look into the
effects of genre in the use of the Italian DM ovvero ‘or’ by comparing its uses in legal texts (both normative and
courtroom proceedings) and in journalistic texts.
The corpora include La Repubblica, a large corpus of Italian newspaper text (approximately 380M tokens); the
LLI archive of Italian legislative texts (2.5M tokens); the ClearAct database of Italian court proceedings (1.8M
tokens). From each corpus, 200 examples from 1980 to 2000 were selected and classified according to the differ-
ent types of reformulation (see, e.g., Fløttum 1995 distinction between equivalence or inclusion reformulation
relations or Gülich and Kotschi 1995 distinction between paraphrastic and non-paraphrastic reformulators).
The analysis highlights the impact of variation on reformulation: whereas in newspapers (non-specialized texts)
ovvero is frequently used as a paraphrastic reformulator, in legal texts its predominant use is that of alternative
and non-paraphrastic reformulation.
We conclude that the differences in the use of ovvero relate to specificities of normative settings and courtroom
interaction (Hansen 2008, Mazzi 2011), in contrast with a more general use deployed in newspapers.
This research focuses on reformulation with a new type of data (legal vs journalistic texts) within a language,
Italian, in which, to our knowledge, reformulation has not been much investigated (see, e.g., Lumbelli & Mortara
Garavelli 1999).
References
Blakemore, D. (1993). The relevance of reformulations. Language and Literature 2(2): 101-120.
Cuenca, M. J. & C. Bach (2007). Contrasting the form and use of reformulation markers. Discourse Studies 9(2):
149-175.
Fløttum, K. (1995). Dire et redire. La reformulation introduite par c’est-à-dire. Stavanger: Hogskolen and Sta-
vanger.
Gülich, E. & T. Kotschi (1995). “Discourse production in oral communication”, in Quasthoff, U.M. (ed.): Aspects
of oral communication. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 30-66.
Hansen, M. (2008). On the availability of ‘literal’ meaning: Evidence from courtroom interaction. Journal of
Pragmatics 40(8): 1392-1410.
Lumbelli, L. & B. Mortara Garavelli (eds.). Parafrasi. Dalla ricerca linguistica alla ricerca psicopedagogica.
Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999.
Mazzi, D. (2011). “In Other Words, …”: A Corpus-based Study of Reformulation in Judicial Discourse. HERMES
24(46): 11–24.
Pons Bordería, S. (2017). Volviendo sobre un solo tipo de reformulación: Una respuesta a Silvia Murillo. Cuader-
nos AISPI 10:153–172.

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Rossari, C. (1994). Les operations de reformulation: analyse du processus et des marques dans une perspective
contrastive français-italien. Berne: Peter Lang.
Salameh, S. (2021). Reframing reformulation. A theoretical-experimental approach through the Spanish Discourse
Marker o sea. Berne: Peter Lang.

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Performing reformulation in substandard Italian

Panel contribution

Dr. Giulio Scivoletto 1


1. Department of Humanities (University of Catania)

This study explores the topic of reformulation in the perspective of sociolinguistic variation, addressing the case
of a substandard social variety of Italian, italiano popolare (lit. ‘popular Italian’; IP).
Italiano popolare is “a substandard social variety spoken and written by uneducated or low educated people,
who use dialect as their mother tongue and as their usual means of communication” (Alfonzetti 2017: 250).
It stems from the popularization of the national standard, which spread as a common language after Italy’s
unification in 1861. As it is performed by uneducated people who use Italoromance dialects as first language,
this variety encompasses great diatopic variability (according to each geolinguistic area) but little diaphasic
one (it is the formal variety in the repertoire of the individual). Compared to the standard, italiano popolare is
characterized by simplification of structures, and by interference of the underlying Italoromance dialect.
In a sociolinguistic perspective, the analysis is based on an original corpus: about two hundred texts from the
postal correspondence exchanged by several members of a Sicilian family of illiterate peasants during World
War I (Scivoletto 2021).
The aim of the study is to observe how users of italiano popolare reformulate in their texts, reflecting on how
these data can contribute to a deeper understanding of reformulation. On the basis of the instances of reformu-
lation identified in the texts, the actual forms are analysed, comparing them to those used in standard Italian
(Bazzanella 1995), namely cioè (Dal Negro/Fiorentini 2014); ossia (Rossari et al. 2023), anzi (Visconti 2021),
and voglio dire (Fiorentini/Sansò 2017). Moreover, it is assessed whether reformulation in italiano popolare
is affected by orality, and to what extent it involves simplification or interference. Finally, the very function
of reformulation is considered, assessing how its performance in a substandard sociolect appears to relate to
contiguous discourse functions such as paraphrase and correction (Pons 2013).

References
Alfonzetti, Giovanna (2017). Sociolinguistic research in Italy: A general outline. Sociolinguistic Studies 11/2-4:
237-270.
Bazzanella, Carla (1995). I segnali discorsivi. In L. Renzi, G. Salvi, A. Cardinaletti (eds.), Grande grammatica
italiana di consultazione, 3 voll., Bologna: il Mulino, I: 225-257.
Dal Negro, Silvia / Ilaria Fiorentini (2014). Reformulation in bilingual speech: Italian cioè in German and Ladin.
Journal of Pragmatics 74: 94-108.
Fiorentini, Ilaria / Andrea Sansò (2017). Reformulation markers and their functions: Two case studies from
Italian. Journal of Pragmatics 120: 54-72.
Pons Bordería, Salvador (2013). Un solo tipo de reformulación. Cuadernos AISPI 2: 151-70.
Rossari, Corinne / Jessica Chessex / Claudia Ricci / Linda Sanvido (2023). La reformulation paraphrastique dans
le discours a visee informative: etude sur corpus avec une perspective comparative français-italien. Études de
linguistique appliquée 207.

Scivoletto, Giulio (2021). Italiano popolare in Sicilia nella Grande Guerra: nuove acquisizioni e prospettive di
analisi. Bollettino del Centro di studi fiologici e linguistici siciliani 32: 165-190.
Visconti, Jacqueline (2021). Anzi: dalla realtà eventiva all’interazione. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e
Applicata 50/1: 196-211.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reformulation Markers in Spanish and Korean

Panel contribution

Dr. Heejung Kim 1


1. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

This paper sets out to explain a corpus-driven contrastive study of Reformulation Markers (RMs) in Spanish
and Korean. In order to carry out the analysis, following a line of previous research articles in Murillo (2007,
2012, 2018), the cases of RMs found in Spanish and Korean journalistic corpus were studied. The selected RMs
were four items for each language: es decir, o sea, esto es and a saber (Spanish), jeuk, got, geureonikka and
malhajamyeon (Korean). These items had previously been considered as RMs in the references addressed in
both languages (Murillo, 2012; Portolés, 2016; Seo, 1995; Li, 2013).
Research on RMs in Korean is still in its early stages which is something that needs to be taken into consid-
eration (Li, 2013; Kim, 2021). For this reason this paper seeks to ask whether there are any new features of
reformulation and its markers in Korean in comparison to Spanish, and moreover to establish similarities and
differences of reformulation and its markers observed in Spanish and Korean corpus data. These questions are
approached from the perspectives of linguistic typology (Moreno Cabrera, 2021) and contrastive/intercultural
rhetoric assumptions (Kaplan, 1966; Hinds, 1987; Connor, 2008; Cuenca, 2003, Murillo, 2007, 2012).
Finally, I discuss the origins and diachronic data of RMs in Korean (Yang, 2017; Seo, 2021) in comparison to
those of Spanish RMs (Pons, 2013, 2017), in order to observe the relation between reformulation and other
discursive functions (paraphrase, conclusion, consequence, etc.).

References

Cuenca, M. Josep (2003). Two ways to reformulate: A contrastive analysis of reformulation markers. Journal of
Pragmatics 35, 1069-1093.
Hinds, John (1987). Reader versus writer responsibility: A new typology. In Connor, Ulla and Robert B. Kaplan.
eds., Writing across languages: Analysis of L2 texts. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 141-152.
Kaplan, Robert B. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language Learning 16, 1-20.

Kim, Heejung (2021). Estudio comparativo de los marcadores discursivos de reformulación explicativa en español
y en coreano. PhD dissertation. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Li, Hong-Mei (2013). A study on Korean paraphrasing sentences. Korean Semantics 40, 219-248.
Murillo, Silvia (2007). A Contribution to the Pragmalinguistic Contrastive Study of Explicatory Reformulative
Discourse Markers in Contemporary Journalistic Written English and Spanish. PhD dissertation. Universidad de
Zaragoza.
Murillo, Silvia (2012). The use of reformulation markers in Business Management research articles. An inter-
cultural analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(1), 64-90.
Pons, Salvador (2013). Un solo tipo de reformulación, Cuadernos AISPI 2, 151-170.
Pons, Salvador (2017). Volviendo sobre un solo tipo de reformulación: una respuesta a Silvia Murillo, Cuaderno
AISPI 10, 153-172.

Seo, Ban-Seoc (2021). A study on conjunctive adverb geureonikka of ‘result’ and ‘expository’, Journal of Korean
Linguistics 100, 141-174.
Yang, Yan (2017). A probe into the translation paradigm of ‘則’ (jeuk) in Korean annotation of Chinese Classics,

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Korean Language & Literature 102, 91-115.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reframing reformulation from negation: correlates between


formal and experimental results in Peninsular Spanish.

Panel contribution

Dr. Shima Salameh Jiménez 1 , Dr. Adrià Llibrer 2


1. Complutense University of Madrid, 2. University of Salamanca

Recent works have established a distinction between reformulation and other closer functions, usually ad-
dressed as sub-types of reformulations (e.g., paraphrase, conclusion, summary, specification, etc.). These func-
tions have been approached as part of a continuum in which paraphrase is placed to the left for identity (α =
β) and correction to the right for negation (~α, β) (Pons, 2013). Such distinction is based on semantic-pragmatic
properties (Pons, 2017). Further studies support this idea experimentally (Salameh, 2021).
Specifically, reformulation and correction overlap because of their negation nature: the notion of distance be-
hind reformulation involves a contextual inferential negation between formulations (Charolles & Coltier, 1986;
Roulet, 1987). In turn, invalidation in correction leads to a complete cancellation of the old formulation and
presents the new one as the most appropriate (Gülich & Kotschi, 1987; Murillo, 2007). In Horn’s terms, negation
in correction is meaning-based, i.e., depends on both the propositional content and the aim of changing the
discourse orientation (Ad Foolen, 1991, 222). As a result, some works tend to address them as subtypes or even
identical functions (see Fuentes, 1993; Garcés, 2006, among others).
This presentation focuses on establishing boundaries between reformulation and correction by addressing their
negation basis. To do so, two approaches are proposed: (i) formal and (ii) experimental. These approaches are
applied (but not restricted to) Peninsular Spanish:
(i) Formal approaches define how the negation basis behind reformulation and correction is: correction builds
implicatures based on negative presuppositions and metadiscursive denial. Reformulation, in turn, leads to a
contextual analysis based on a propositional cancellation (Du Bois, 1974; Nolke, 1992; García Negroni, 1998).
Distinguishing preposition and cancellation formally involves a distinction between both functions.
(ii) Experimental approaches build a bridge between theory, cognition and data: specifically, they contribute
to determine how reformulation and correction are assimilated by naïve speakers and, specifically, how their
negation basis is processed. To do so, eye-tracking techniques measuring ocular movements in online experi-
ments have been employed (Rayner, 1998).
To sum up, formal and experimental approaches constitute new, unexplored dimensions for the analysis of
reformulation and correction, with special interest on negation: on the one hand, the formal approach clarifies
the relationship between negation and reformulation mechanisms through a set of propositional processes
complementing the discursive analysis. On the other hand, the experimental approach supports the distinction
between reformulation and correction with new data complementing theory and corpus-based studies, and
provides a clearer picture on the negation basis in terms of reading times and types of ocular movements, in
line with recent works (Larrivée & Lee, 2016).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

TOTAL and O SEA: Viral transmission of conclusive meaning?

Panel contribution

Dr. Salvador Pons Borderia 1


1. University of Valencia

Reformulation is a discourse function (Fuchs 1994) whose limits are disputed, ranging from a narrow inter-
pretation, where reformulation is strictly delimited (Pons Bordería 2013), to a broader interpretation, where
reformulation blurs its boundaries and mixes with other functions, such as ‘concluding’, ‘summarizing’ or even
‘correcting’ (Gülitsch and Kotschi 1995). Although the theoretical question of what reformulation is has gained
attention at least since (Antos 1982), the question of why reformulation markers often develop polysemies re-
garding conclusion or correction has hardly been addressed (Murillo 2016).
This presentation analyzes the development of conclusive meanings in the Spanish discourse markers total and
o sea, and explores the possibility of meaning transfer from the first to the second. Total is a Spanish adjective
meaning ‘whole’ and also a discourse marker meaning ‘conclusion’. This conclusion is the result of taking into
account the whole of a pragmatically determined set of contextual assumptions.
The analysis of the contexts in which total develops its conclusive meaning shows that o sea could acquire this
meaning through co-occurrence in the same environments. A corpus analysis is used to determine whether
such transmission could have taken place.

763
On pragmatics and ’Peach
Tree Dishes’: Discourses
of far-right extremism,
conspiracy, and solidarity
(organized by Catherine
Tebaldi, Dominika Baran)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

*coof coof*: Metapragmatics and Narrative at the Intersection


of 4chan’s /pol/ and COVID Conspiracy

Panel contribution

Dr. Dillon Ludemann 1


1. University of South Carolina

This paper examines the metapragmatic frameworks by which early COVID-19-pandemic discourse was framed
within one of 4chan’s most infamous boards, “Politically Incorrect,” or /pol/ for short. This board, known for its
constant circulation of far-right rhetoric, racializing and racist language, and a lauding of chaos and discursive
violence, had become a nexus point for discussing COVID-19 conspiracy theories during the start, and peak of
the pandemic, where users participated in a broad array of related conversations and threads. Drawing from
data gathered between January and June of 2020, I highlight examples which demonstrate the mobilization of
conspiracy-theory related discourse within the board. Expanding on research engaged with digital narrative
analysis and media discourse, I outline the ideological and metapragmatic underpinnings of COVID-19 conspir-
acy theory as it emerged and was engaged with on this anonymous, lightly moderated, politically incorrect
imageboard, and compare it between the arguably “lighter” contemptuous attitude of /pol/, and the “heavier”
seriousness that conspiracy theory is frequently framed through. Further, I show how these users create soli-
darity amongst themselves first by circulating and weighing in on these shared narratives, oriented in a digital
landscape of paranoia, contempt and derision for those who followed state and local mandates, and second by
participating in uniquely 4chan practice of “general” threads. I will do this by connecting research and litera-
ture related to the discursive processes of conspiracy theory circulation and embodiment, and more specifically
through rhetoric related to the broader reconfiguration of QAnon rhetoric and narratives. I argue, through these
frameworks and examples, that the digital nature of 4chan, and the unique discursive environment of /pol/ more
specifically, offers powerful insights into locating conspiracy talk, narrative, and general views online, and how
potentially disparate users unite to troll, harass, and otherwise maintain a social and discursive reality on the
website that has been historically described as “the place where the internet is born, and goes to die.”

765
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A “victory for white life”: Strategic mainstreaming of far-right


conspiracy claims in abortion discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Kristen Fleckenstein 1


1. Coastal Carolina University

On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) released its decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson
Women’s Health Organization, which effectively ended federal protection for abortion rights. In the wake of
this decision, far-right conspiracies regarding the “great replacement” theory – the white nationalist conspiracy
theory that white populations are culturally and demographically being replaced by people of color – gained
new traction and began moving from fringe to more mainstream political discourse as anti-abortion groups
and politicians took on new efforts to encourage states to make abortion illegal; Illinois Representative Mary
Miller, for instance, called the Dobbs decision a “historic victory for white life,” and while her spokesperson
later issued a statement that she intended to say a “victory for a right to life,” during the speech, Miller made
no attempts to initiate a repair sequence.
Previous research on the great replacement theory has found that it is a flexible political discourse, equally
capable of being used by far-right and more mainstream right-wing political actors (Ekman 2022). Addition-
ally, these kinds of far-right conspiracy theories are known to spread through intertextual and interdiscursive
dimensions (Nilsson 2022; Rheindorf & Wodak 2019; Tebaldi 2020; Kosse 2022). The present study adopts these
perspective and will apply corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Baker et al. 2008) to data collected
from Twitter to examine how this ideology surfaces in anti-abortion tweets from far-right politicians in the U.S.,
as well as how it surfaces in far-right discourse from the general public, with a goal of examining how this con-
spiracy has become an increasingly mainstreamed part of abortion discourse. In addition, a separate corpus
of tweets from reproductive-justice advocates will be collected and analyzed to determine how online commu-
nities discursively resist and push back against such dangerous and harmful ideologies while continuing their
advocacy for the people most affected by abortion restrictions – often the very people that great replacement
theory stokes fear against.

766
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analyzing political discourses: Argumentative strategies used


by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to structure fear-based
arguments during the Covid-19 pandemic

Panel contribution

Ms. Fatima-Zahra Aklalouch 1 , Dr. Laure Lansari 2


1. Universite Paris Cité, 2. Université Paris Cité

In times of pandemics, leaders employ different argumentative strategies for the purpose of persuading the
citizens to follow sanitary measures to fight the pandemic. Therefore, the language of fear is widely used in po-
litical discourses during sanitary crises (Plantin, 2000; Cislaru, 2012; Pennec, 2021). This study is based on the
results of a prior work (Aklalouch & Lansari, 2022) in which we used the software DocuScope. The latter, which
is specialized in corpus-based rhetoric analysis, was used to extract 100 fear-related occurrences from each of
the political discourses of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump between September 2019 and December 2020. The
words that were extracted refer explicitly to fear such as fearful, afraid, scared, etc. According to Plantin (2012),
these words are categorized as emotive words (termes d’émotion). This research is now concerned with the
context in which these words occur and more specifically with modal auxiliaries and periphrases (e.g. will/be
going to), adverbs, adjectives, negation markers, etc. We will also analyze words that implicitly refer to ei-
ther a positive or a negative emotion such as war, pandemic, victory, prosperity, etc., which are called énoncés
d’émotion according to Plantin (2012). Moreover, based on prior research demonstrating that fear is linked to
the epistemic stance of uncertainty, and to the related notions of unpredictability and uncontrollability, which
arouse the emotion of fear, we will examine whether the language used by the two leaders includes different
representations of fear (Wierzbecka, 1999; Zvolensky, Eifert, Lejuez, Hopko, & Forsyth, 2000; Scherer, 2005;
Armfield, 2006). All these aspects will determine the different argumentative strategies and the different epis-
temic stances (e.g. certainty or uncertainty) that were chosen by the two leaders to either arouse or reject the
emotion of fear. The findings will show how leaders use the language of fear to manipulate public opinion for
the purpose of imposing certain regulations.
Keywords: Political discourse, Fear, Argumentation, Covid-19, Epistemic stances

767
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Anti-vaccine activism and the pragmatics of expertise

Panel contribution

Mr. James Slotta 1


1. The University of Texas at Austin

The communication of expertise in the public sphere poses a vexing pragmatic challenge (Collins and Evans
2002; Turner 2003; Callon et al. 2011): how can expertise be effectively communicated to a public that does not
have the specialist knowledge to understand and evaluate it? This pragmatic dilemma has received increasing
attention in recent years thanks to the explosive growth of post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, and online
misinformation, which have heightened concerns about the ability of the public to weigh expertise competently.
Rather than trust the science, it appears that a sizable portion of the public is attracted more to claims that are
novel (Vosoughi et al. 2018) and emotionally charged (Weeks 2015).
But it is important to note that the online world of conspiracies and misinformation is hardly devoid of experts
of its own. QAnon, alt-right media, and the anti-vaccine movement among others are all characterized by a
social division of knowledge that distinguishes some participants as expert sources of richer and truer insights.
In this presentation, I explore one form of expertise prominent in the anti-vaccine movement that has proven
particularly effective: expertise about scientists, doctors, and the process of scientific knowledge production.
Many anti-vaccine experts are themselves (former) scientists and doctors, and the expertise they provide in their
much-watched videos and documentaries often draws on their first hand experience to bring into question
the reliability of scientific knowledge. In effect, anti-vaccine experts provide not only purportedly scientific
expertise about viruses and vaccines, but “social scientific” expertise about scientists and scientific knowledge
production.
As I show in this presentation, this use of a “knowledge of people” (e.g., scientists, experts) to gain “a knowledge
of things” (e.g. vaccines, viruses) is hardly confined to anti-vaccine activism; it is a common way that scientists
and journalists negotiate the vexed pragmatics of expertise as well (Shapin 1994). In that respect, anti-vaccine
messaging more closely mirrors scientific and medical communication in the public sphere than is often appre-
ciated.

768
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Beauty, Bro-scientists and the end of men

Panel contribution

Dr. Catherine Tebaldi 1 , Dr. Scott Burnett 2


1. University of Massachusetts, 2. university of Gothenburg

This analysis explores the pragmatics of “the end of men” - the ways in which academic registers are mobilised
by far righ “bro-scientists” and “raw egg nationalists” who advocate eating raw eggs or raw meat and weight
lifting to become ideal white men. Particularly it looks at 4 books written by the the anonymous bro-scientist
“raw egg nationalist”, and all 8 issues of his fascist bodybuilding magazine Man’s World as a register, part of
the discursive construction of heroism and redeeming both a hard manliness and a masculine civilisation. It
looks at what Gal (1993) called the “moral flavor” or how the ideological and the sensual intersect in fascist
discourses; supremacist ideologies imbue everyday practices with deep meaning, while these practices provide
a cluster of qualities which shape ideology. It further explores how these practices are metapragmatically
regimented (Silverstein 1993) into two discourses: a science of desire which proposes white male beauty
as the pinnacle of civilisation and platonic ideal, and a mythology of desire which posits male beauty as the
redemptive force of the west under threat by the “soy globalists”.
Crucially, these “bro-scientists” mobilise multiple academic discourses from both biology and economics in
their science of desire, to anthropology and folklore in their white male mythology. They cite James Scott on
civilisation and nutrition studies from dentist turned pseudo-anthropologist Weston Price, but even invoke
the concept of moral flavour when they explain the raw egg has both nutritional and symbolic value. In this
presentation a close look at their use and abuse of academic registers, and the broader questions of far right
alternative forms of knowledge production and circulation.

Gal, S. (2013). Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs. Anthropological Theory, 13(1–2), 31–48.
https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996134833

Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In J. Lucy (Ed.), Reflex-
ive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics(pp. 33-58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
doi:10.1017/CBO9780511621031.004

769
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourses of climate-denial and capitalism at COP26: A


critical ecolinguistic analysis

Panel contribution

Ms. Kelsey Campolong 1


1. Ulster University

As the catastrophic effects of human-propelled global warming have become more difficult to ignore, the annual
United Nations Climate Change Conferences have received more attention from politicians and the concerned
public. With a stated purpose of “uniting the world to tackle climate change,” the 2021 conference in Glasgow,
Scotland (aka COP26) resulted in the Glasgow Climate Pact, the largest international agreement on the topic of
climate change since the 2015 Paris Agreement. By the conference’s own admission, “many believed [COP26]
to be the world’s best last chance to get runaway climate change under control” (ukcop26.org), largely due to
scientists’ identification of ever-hastening climate “tipping points” (Lenton et al. 2019). However, despite the
lofty goals of the UN’s various climate-related bodies—including the UNFCCC (which provides the framework for
COPs) and the widely-lauded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—these bureaucratic entities
routinely adopt, normalize, and homogenize the fundamentally incompatible (cf. Ritchie et al. 2020; Wiedmann
et al. 2020) discourses of capitalism and development economics into their own discourse surrounding climate
activism (Higgs 2019; Kanerva & Krizsán 2021). This presentation explores how mandatory growth ideology, a
cornerstone of Western neoliberalism, permeated the discourse of COP26, despite an increasingly widespread
body of research arguing for degrowth (or a-growth) alternatives (Gumbert et al. 2022).
Adopting an ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse analysis (Stibbe 2014), I conceptualize COP26 in Glas-
gow as a discursive, semiotic space that ostensibly positions itself in favor of the protection of the planet, yet
nevertheless uncritically adopts the language of capitalism and fossil fuel corporations (i.e. climate-denialism).
By analyzing various aspects of the COP26 discursive space, including the official website, speeches, texts, and
other features of the physical conference, I discuss how the UK/UN organizers allowed harmful, climate-denying
discourses to undergird, and thus delegitimize, the stated goals of the conference. This includes, for example, the
discursive framing of economic priorities, elements of “greenwashing” (Lamb 2008; Coppolecchia 2010; Budin-
sky & Bryant 2013) in the conference menu, corporate sponsorship, and right-wing political posturing (e.g. in
introductions from the UK’s Boris Johnson and Prince Charles). At COP26, both the challenges and solutions of
the climate catastrophe are firmly rooted in obstinate acceptance of the capitalist status-quo, including heavy
reliance on “partnership” with private corporations, the current distribution of post-industrial/post-colonial
wealth inequality, expansion of the energy industry (and associated wage labor, aka “green jobs”), and increased
consumption of so-called “green” products, like electric vehicles. Indeed, the most commonly proposed solution
to the climate crisis uses the discourse of capitalism as its primary metaphorical framing (i.e. “carbon markets”).
Ecolinguistics researchers have increasingly focused on language relating to the climate crisis, identifying its
popular discursive frames (Lakoff 2010; Plec & Pettenger 2012; Zeniakin 2022), stances (Poole & Hayes 2022),
and other linguistic features (Niceforo 2021; Nielsen 2022). This presentation’s critical discourse analysis of
COP26 sheds light on the ways in which our “best last chance” to combat irreversible climate catastrophe was
unfortunately marred by complicity (Verschueren 2021) in the very discourses that brought us to the brink.

770
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discovery by Design: Toward a Semiotics of Found Contrarian


Knowledge

Panel contribution

Prof. Mark Peterson 1


1. Miami University

Semiotic analysis often assumes a performative model in which senders craft messages for particular audiences
using radial transmission or other forms of top-down distribution to “send” messages to the target audience. In
the case of contrarian and conspiratorial claims, it is often assumed that message recipients are persuaded by
the authority of speakers or the illocutionary force of the claims. The rise of Internet-based practices of mes-
sage reception such as Alternate Reality Games (Kim et. al. 2009) and “doing my own research” (Tripodi 2018)
reveals new genres of message construction in which networks of messages are laid out as potential nodes in
webs driven by links and algorithms. In this paper, I analyze a 2017 blog post by an American conservative
scholar who utilizes my work and well as that of Mary Poovey and Sally Engle Merry to construct a defense
of the concept of the “alternative fact” (Turley 2017). Discursively, the post utilizes a radical recontextualiza-
tion of the source texts which elides reference to the political economic and historic contexts in which facticity
arose and retains importance, as well as those within which modern journalism has been practiced. More sig-
nificantly, the actual argument is secondary to a frame that dismisses mainstream media in favor of alternative
informational sources. I will argue that this blog post is best seen not only as a specific performance for a partic-
ular audience, but also as a node in a web of algorithmically linked similar texts that function to expose Google
searchers engaged in evidentiary quests to contrarian alternative belief systems in which they can be “exploited
by bad actors seeking to monetize such intellectual pursuits” (Tripodi 2018). The agentive process of searching
for information, and the discovery of web texts offering and supporting claims provide persuasive power for
contrarian and conspiratorial narratives.
Kim, J., Lee, E., Thomas, T., & Dombrowski, C. (2009). Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality
games, 2001–2009. First Monday, 14(6). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v14i6.2484
Merry, Sally Engle. 2014. “Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance,” in Ruth
Buchan, et al (eds.) Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice. Pp. 141-165. Oxford:
Hart Publishing.
Peterson, Mark Allen. 2017. “Media, Markets and Political Economy: Examining and Analyzing Power.” Rout-
ledge Handbook of Language and Media. Colleen Cotter and Daniel Perrin, eds. Pp. 151-163. Routledge.
Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tripodi, Francesca. 2018. Searching for alternative facts. Data & Society
[https://datasociety.net/library/searching-for-alternative-facts/] [accessed Nov. 4, 2021]

771
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rightwashing resistance: The pragmatics of “protest”


co-option and the colonization of leftist discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Addie Sayers 1 , Mr. Hanson Egerland 1


1. University of North Carolina Wilmington

Creators of right-wing discourses utilize language to centralize and highlight Americans’ fears and to juxtapose
them with so-called dangerous progressive ideas. Seemingly innocuous everyday items and concepts, includ-
ing vaccines, masks, vegetarianism, immigrants, electric cars, critical race theory, and books, become framed as
weapons wielded by woke snowflakes who are coming to take right-wingers’ guns, money, and freedom. Even
leftist protest discourses and counterhegemonic stances are co-opted to fight right-wing fears, including I can’t
breathe from Black Lives Matter protests of police violence and My body, my choice from reproductive, abortion,
and gender rights campaigns (Sayers, 2022). In this project we examine the pragmatic and discursive moves of
the rightwashing of resistance. That is, we explore how right-wing discourses co-opt, resemiotize, and shift the
indexical fields (Eckert, 2008) of originally leftist protests, rhetoric, and political stances, as not just co-option,
but as discursive colonization. Adding to the research about transgressive ways to promote and normalize au-
thoritarian political agendas (Tebaldi et al., 2022), we specifically analyze the micropragmatic moves in a corpus
of Twitter data around the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of the House Democrat Nanci Pelosi.
Utilizing a multimodal critical discourse framework (Jewitt, 2016; Fuchs, 2019), we demonstrate how right-wing
commentators utilize presupposition, implicature, information structure, symbolism, multimodal paralinguis-
tic cues (emojis and creative misspellings), deixis, and flows of reference to frame, reframe, and reify rhetoric
into right-wing stances. We connect these micropragmatic moves to larger macrolevel discourses, asserting that
commentators simultaneously remove the counterhegemonic semiotics of protest, resemiotize such stances as
right-wing ideologies, and then create intertextuality and braid these ideas into already established right-wing
discourses which situate right-wingers as victims to leftist discursive and political tyranny. To do this, we trian-
gulate our analysis with two different corpora – our randomly collected dataset from QAnon Reddit posts and
a corpus of analog anti-vaccine protest signs – to show how Paul Pelosi’s attack interdiscursively mirrors racist,
homophobic and transphobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-science rhetorics. We ultimately argue for the importance
of micropragamic analysis for understanding the mechanisms of right-wing political propagation.
Bezemer, J., & Jewitt, C. (2018). Multimodality: A guide for linguists. Research methods in linguistics, 28, 1-3.
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field 1. Journal of sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453-476.
Fuchs, C. (2019). Nationalism on the Internet: Critical theory and ideology in the age of social media and fake
news. Routledge.
Sayers, A. (2022). Give Me Liberty or Give Me a Mask. Disaster Pedagogy for Higher Education: Research, Criti-
cism, and Reflection
Tebaldi, C., & Nygreen, K. (2022). Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era.
Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 22(2), 143-153.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The discursive construction of “truth” and “facts” in emails


from a Polish ultraconservative NGO, Centrum Życia i Rodziny

Panel contribution

Dr. Dominika Baran 1


1. Duke University

Since “the outbreak of the ‘war on gender’ in the Polish context” in 2012 (Korolczuk and Graff 2018: 800), right-
wing politicians, media, and the Catholic Church have been demonizing the LGBTQ+ community as promoters
of the so-called “LGBT ideology,” a substitute term for “gender ideology” in Poland. The vitriolic anti-LGBTQ+
discourse has become a central resource in the right-wing construction of Polish patriotism and national iden-
tity. This discourse, adopted by many mainstream conservative public figures, is also part of the global anti-
genderism register (Borba 2022) that has been taken up by local as well as transnationally linked actors and
institutions. In Poland, right-wing actors have been promoting a historicized narrative that sees Poland as the
perpetual savior of Christian Europe from invading enemies: the Muslim Ottomans, the communist Bolsheviks,
and currently the “gender/LGBT ideology” (Author, forthcoming). In this paper, I adopt Wodak’s (2021), Reisigl
and Wodak’s (2016), and Wodak and Boukala’s (2015) Discourse Historical Approach, in addition to CDA meth-
ods (Machin and Mayr 2012), to examine how anti-genderist actors in Poland construct the opposition between
“us,” the “true Poles” who are loyal to the imagined notion of Poland as inherently and unquestionably Catholic,
and “them,” the “anti-Polish” supporters of “gender/LGBT ideology.”
The data in this paper consists of two and a half years of emails, in newsletter format, from the ultraconser-
vative NGO, Centrum Życia i Rodziny (Center for Life and Family), whose explicit goals are promoting an anti-
reproductive rights, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda. Crucially, unlike typical anti-intellectual rhetoric of
populist rightwing discourses (Wodak 2021), the authors of the Center’s messages (and in particular, its leader,
Paweł Ozdoba) adopt the language of scientific argumentation, historical “facts,” appeals to academic authority,
and pseudo-linguistic analysis trying to “unmask” the “true” meaning behind liberal discourse, and resignifying
terms and concepts used by liberal, feminist, and queer discourses (Borba 2022). Some of the linguistic strate-
gies they adopt include the use of deixis, suppression and lexical absence, presupposition, metalanguage, direct
appeals to the audience as sharing the author’s views, and the use of quotation marks as a delegitimization tac-
tic, as in the phrase same sex “marriage.” Through these methods, they construct their anti-genderist stance as
rooted in “true” knowledge. Combing CDA and DHA methods, I analyze the discursive construction of “truth” in
the emails sent out by the Center, situating this analysis in the broader context of the anti-genderist movement
in Poland.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Women deserve better”: An analysis of Generation Z pro-life


‘feminist’ discourses

Panel contribution

Dr. Polina Shvanyukova 1


1. Università degli Studi di Udine

This paper takes up the notion of ‘discourse capture’ as elaborated by Lewin (2021) in order to examine the
linguistic mechanisms of resignifying, shifting, mimicking, and twisting employed by American Generation Z
pro-life activists (Kingsberry 2022) . As Lewin explains, “[d]iscourse capture involves the intentional resignifica-
tion, shifting, mimicking, or twisting of existing concepts and terminologies, with the result that their dominant
meaning and ideological underpinnings are altered, or replaced” (2021: 255). In the case of the so called pro-life
feminism, the linguistic work of discursive capture can be performed, for example, through the resignification
and the shifting of feminist discourses of empowerment and women’s rights. By analysing examples of pro-life
rhetoric disseminated through dedicated digital channels (e.g., personal FB pages of individual Gen Z activists;
the content tagged #prowoman #prolife #womensmarch #roevwade on TikTok and Instagram), I investigate the
ways in which anti-choice actors exploit the affordances of these platforms to attack reproductive freedom. I
am especially interested in the ways in which pro-life discourses interact with and feed off global anti-gender
discourses (Borba 2022), operationalised as “a body of knowledge and worldview [reflecting] an ambitious plan
to establish a new paradigm in social sciences, based on a religiously grounded set of fundamental truths about
human nature, sexuality, family and society” (Graff & Korolczuk 2022: 61-62).
References
Borba, Rodrigo. “Enregistering “gender ideology”: The emergence and circulation of a transnational anti-gender
language.” Journal of Language and Sexuality 11.1 (2022): 57-79.
Graff, Agnieszka, and Elżbieta Korolczuk. Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Routledge, 2022.
Kingsberry, Janay. “Gen Z is influencing the abortion debate – from TikTok”. The Washington Post, June 28th
2022.
Lewin, Tessa. “Nothing is as it seems:‘discourse capture’ and backlash politics.” Gender & Development 29.2-3
(2021): 253-268.

774
Opening up sociality:
Languages and bodies in
chance encounters
between unacquainted
persons (organized by
Elwys De Stefani, Lorenza
Mondada)
Performing compliments
in a variationist
perspective (organized by
Marina Castagneto,
Chiara Meluzzi)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Compliment Response and Chinese Modesty Revisited:


Evidence from Corpus-based Metapragmatics and
Experimental Design Research

Panel contribution

Dr. Mian Jia 1


1. The University of Texas at Austin

Researchers have identified two conflicting constraints in compliment responses. Following the Agreement
Maxim, complimentees are expected to agree with the complimenter; following the Modesty Maxim, on the
other hand, they are expected to avoid self-praise (Leech, 1983; Pomerantz, 1978). Previous research has shown
that English speakers tend to uphold the Agreement Maxim, whereas Chinese communicators favor the Modesty
Maxim which is often represented by depreciating and devaluing self-achievement (Gu, 1990; Lee, 2009; Yu,
2003; Gao & Ting-Toomey, 1998; Zhou & Zhang, 2018). Recent studies, however, suggested an evolving pattern of
preferring rejection (Chen, 1993) to preferring deflection/evasion (Ye, 1995; Yu, 2004; Yuan, 2002) to preferring
acceptance (Chen & Yang, 2010; Tang & Zhang, 2009) and even self-praise (Ren & Guo, 2020), especially among
college students. Given these mixed findings, this paper reports two studies that examine the metapragmatics
of Chinese modesty and people’s perception of various compliment response strategies.
Using corpus-based metapragmatics, study 1 explores layperson’s understanding of the Chinese term 谦虚 “mod-
esty” by examining its collocations in a large-scale web corpus with Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014). First,
the Word Sketch function presents a concise summary of 27 possible lexico-grammatical relations of a search
word. Second, the Distributional Thesaurus function can generate a list of words that share a significant num-
ber of common collocates with a search term. The corpus used in this study is zhTenTen17 which contains 16.6
billion tokens of Chinese words that were collected from the Internet in August and November of 2017. The
results show that while modesty is typically associated with expressions such as low-key, forbearance, humble,
and yield, they are also associated with negative evaluations such as pretending, arrogant, and hypocritical.
Using experimental design, study 2 investigates college students’ evaluations of different responses to compli-
ments. A 3 Strategy (accept, deflect, reject) X 3 Topic (English proficiency, public speaking, dressing) between
subject experimental design was conducted. 518 college students from China’s Mainland were randomly as-
signed to one of the nine conditions. After reading the material, they were asked to rate the compliment re-
sponse message on its appropriateness, conceitedness, and impression of the speaker on five-point scales. The
results showed that across scenarios, acceptance strategies were rated as more appropriate, less conceited, and
leaving a better impression than rejection strategies. Moreover, while rejection strategies were predominantly
rated as expressions of modesty, acceptance strategies were predominantly rated as not related to modesty.
Taken together, these two studies consistently show a split between Chinese people’s metapragmatic evaluation
of modesty and their evaluation of pragmatic behaviors in action. On the one hand, modesty is characteristically
recognized as being humble and responding to compliments with rejections; on the other hand, invoking the
modesty maxim may also yield negative communicative outcomes. This study seeks to contribute to this panel
by demonstrating the utility of using a mixed methods approach to pragmatics research.

777
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender-based variability in the prosodic realization of Italian


compliments

Panel contribution

Prof. Patrizia Sorianello 1 , Dr. Glenda Gurrado 2


1. University of Bari (Dept DIRIUM), 2. University of Bari

To date, several studies have investigated the speech act of compliments and compliment responses (CRs) from a
pragmatic and a communicative view (among all, Manes & Wolfson 1981; Sifianou 2001; Alfonzetti 2009; Castag-
neto & Ravetto 2015). From the wide literature on this subject, emerges that compliment response types differ
across cultures and are affected by a certain degree of variability caused by sociolinguistic and interactional
conditioning.
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the realization of Italian compliments from a prosodic perspec-
tive. The literature focused on compliments has paid little attention to the prosodic component so far (Voyer &
Du 2016), without any consideration for Italian. Nevertheless, intonation and duration seem to play a crucial
role in the production of compliments and in the distinction of CR types.
To this aim, a sample of compliments was analyzed with particular attention to the gender variable (Holmes
1988; Parisi & Wogan 2006; Castagneto 2016). 15 texts were designed to perform oral Discourse Completion
Tasks (DCT): each scenario described a contextual situation that led the speaker to produce a compliment. Com-
pliments were organized according to: 1) topics (physical appearance, owned object, abilities), 2) gender (males
and females speakers), 3) participant roles; as compliments are more frequent in a relationship between equals,
all compliments were specified as [+ knowledge] and [– social distance].
Ten young speakers of Bari Italian (5 M, 5 F) were asked to read the DCTs and to realize an utterance suitable
for the situation described. The corpus was acoustically analyzed. According to the preliminary results, com-
pliments are mostly realized by means of an exclamative act, although the degree of intensity and expression
force vary considerably. Female and male speakers opted for different prosodic schemes but expressive and
paralinguistic choices showed some differences too. These linguistic strategies modified the overall effect by
suggesting the existence of a sort of illocutionary hierarchy of compliments.
Alfonzetti G. 2009, I complimenti nella conversazione, Editori Riuniti University Press, Roma.
Castagneto M. 2016, Le risposte ai complimenti in Italia: questioni di gender, Atti del Sodalizio Glottologico
Milanese voll. VIII-IX n.s. (2013-2014), Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria, 169-179.
Castagneto M., Ravetto M. 2015, The variability of compliment responses: Italian and German data, in Gesuato
S. et al. (ed.), Teaching, learning and investigating pragmatics: Principles, methods and practices, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 387-413.
Holmes, J. (1988). Paying Compliments: A Sex-Preferential Politeness Strategy, Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 445-
465.
Manes J., Wolfson N. 1981, The Compliment formula, in Coulmas F. (ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations
in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 116-132
Parisi C., Wogan P. 2006, Compliment topics and gender, Women and Language 29, 21-28.
Sifianou M. 2001, ‘Oh! How appropriate!’ Compliments and politeness, in Bayraktaroğlu A., Sifianou M. (eds.),
Linguistic politeness across boundaries: the case of Greek and Turkish, Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia,
391-430.
Voyer D., Vu J.P. 2016, Using Sarcasm to Compliment: Context, Intonation, and the Perception of Statements with
a Negative Literal Meaning, Journal of Psycholinguist Research 45, 615-624.

778
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How gender affects compliments in Italian

Panel contribution

Prof. Giovanna Alfonzetti 1 , Dr. Giulio Scivoletto 1


1. Department of Humanities (University of Catania)

The main aim of our research is to verify the impact on compliments in Italian exerted by gender, one of the
macro-sociolinguistic factors that most influence communicative language use, and especially compliments.
This is shown by many studies on this subject, but has largely been neglected in Italian (few exceptions being
Castagneto 2016, Castagneto/Sidraschi 2020). The research adopts the perspective of variational pragmatics,
mainly at actional, topic, and interactional levels (Schneider/Baron 2008), as the focus is on compliment real-
izations, functions, objects and responses.
Drawing on previous research (Alfonzetti 2009), this work is based on the analysis of spontaneous conversa-
tions recorded in Catania (Sicily) and Rome, showing that compliments are mainly conceived and treated as
face-enhancing-acts. Italian is thus ascribable to the “American pattern” rather than to the hypothesized supra-
national Northwestern European one, where compliments are less frequently used as social lubricants and
often mitigated (Kasper 1990).
However, this conclusion assumes the idealization underlying much cross-cultural pragmatic research, i.e.,
speech communities are homogeneous wholes, dismissing sociolinguistic variability. On the contrary, the
current stage of research (already started in Alfonzetti 2017) assumes that speech acts differ not only cross-
culturally but also between regional and social varieties of the same language (Wierzbicka 1985).
In particular, we intend to test whether Italian compliments confirm the existence of some gender-based pat-
terns, which according to many studies would overcome cultural differences (Rees-Miller 2011), i.e.:

• frequency – women seem to give and receive more compliments;


• function – compliments are used as positive politeness strategies by women, whereas men conceive them
more referentially or as face-threatening acts;
• topic – women seem to receive more compliments on physical appearance, rather than possessions or
performances;
• response – women tend to use different strategies;
• modulation – women tend to strengthen compliments more than men.

As to data collection, different techniques have been employed, integrating field and laboratory methods (Jucker
2009):

• naturally occurring compliments will be collected through the notebook method;


• a questionnaire will be submitted to a sample of university students balanced by gender; the question-
naire includes both open questions and DCT.

Alfonzetti, Giovanna (2009). I complimenti nella conversazione. Roma: Editori Riuniti University Press.
Alfonzetti, Giovanna (2017). Questioni di (s)cortesia: complimenti e insulti. Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie.
Castagneto, Marina (2016). Le risposte ai complimenti in Italia: questioni di gender. Atti del Sodalizio Glotto-
logico Milanese 8-9: 169-179.
Castagneto, Marina, Diego Sidraschi (2020). Paese che vai, complimenti che trovi. In A. De Meo, F. M. Dovetto
(eds.), La comunicazione parlata / Spoken Communication, Rome: Aracne, 91-110.
Jucker, Andreas H. (2009). Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compli-
ments. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1611-1635.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Kasper, Gabriele (1990). Linguistic politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (2): 193-218.


Schneider Klaus, Anne Barron, eds. (2008). Variational Pragmatics. A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric
languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Rees-Miller, Janie (2011). Compliments revisited: Contemporary compliments and gender. Journal of Pragmat-
ics 43: 2673-2688.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). “Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English”.
Journal of Pragmatics 9 (2/3): 145-178.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodality and Speech Act Perceptions across Cultures:


The Case of Compliments

Panel contribution

Ms. Fang Xie 1


1. University of Zurich

Compliments have received a lot of attention for years and are perhaps one of the most investigated speech
acts. Various aspects of compliments have been studied, which include the structure of compliments, the demo-
graphics of complimenters and complimentees, the compliment responses, etc. Researchers have used a large
range of different methods, from discourse completion tasks and role plays to corpus methods, to investigate
these topics. However, few studies, so far, have focused on the evaluations or perceptions of compliments. As
any other speech act, compliments contain multimodal information such as tone of voice, gestures and facial
expressions in addition to verbal language and they can be carried out in written form and/or through emo-
jis and memes. These multimodal aspects cannot be ignored because they may influence people’s perceptions
of compliments. Speech act perception is a recent and promising research interest in the field of speech act.
Still, few existing studies mainly focus on the linguistic mode of the speech act itself, without considering the
accompanying non-verbal information. This study, therefore, examines English, Swiss German and Chinese L1
speakers’ perceptions of compliments in multimodal forms and compares them across the different language
groups, age groups, gender groups, personality groups, etc.
The perception experiment is the most suitable method for this study because it can effectively investigate
people’s perceptions of multimodal compliments. Four modes of the same compliment are used in this study,
including a monomodal text compliment, a bimodal text compliment with emojis and a meme, a monomodal au-
dio compliment online through social media, and a multimodal video compliment including facial expressions
and gestures. The data of this study are collected from 88 English L1 speakers, 137 Swiss German L1 speak-
ers and 170 Chinese L1 speakers through online experiments and retrospective interviews. The compliment
perceptions of various dimensions, such as sincerity, politeness, appropriateness, likeability, pleasantness, etc.,
and participants’ rationales to warrant their evaluations are investigated in this study.
Through the quantitative analysis, the language groups are the most significant influential variable compared
with other social variables. The text compliment with emojis and a meme shows the most significant perception
differences among the three language groups, followed by the audio compliment and the multimodal video
compliment, with no significant differences for the text compliment. Additionally, the qualitative analysis of
the rationales shows that the Swiss participants have a wider range of rationales, and all three groups like
to use the pattern “something good but something bad” to justify their neutral evaluations. In general, the
perception experiment shows a new paradigm-shifting from production to reception and a multidimensional
view of speech acts, which is a relatively new attempt in experimental pragmatics.

781
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rapport Management and Complimenting in Chinese

Panel contribution

Ms. Yilin Chai 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

In this talk, we examine how the speech act of complimenting tends to build rapport in Chinese workplaces,
by devoting special attention to the role of complimenting in symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships. By
so doing, we fill a knowledge gap because to date little research has been done on complimenting in Chinese
in workplace settings. We believe that the study of this topic also contributes to research on performing com-
pliments in a variationist perspective because in Chinese workplace settings complimenting is a key pragmatic
behaviour through which power relationships are indicated. In our study, we analyse the speech act of compli-
menting through an interactional typology of speech acts (Edmondson & House 1981; Edmondson et al., 2022).
Using this finite and interactional typology allows us to rigorously identify conventionalised manifestations
of complimenting in a corpus of transcribed TV programmes. We use Rapport Management Theory (Spencer-
Oatey 2000, 2005, 2008 ) to systematically interpret Chinese complimenting moves in varying relationships in
our corpus.
Reference
[1]Edmondson, W. & J. House. 1981. Let’s Talk and Talk About It: A Pedagogical
Interactional Grammar of English. München: Urban & Schwarzenberg.
[2]Edmondson, W., House, J., Kádár, D. 2022. Speech Acts, Discourse, and Interaction: An Integrative Pedagogic
Grammar of English. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
[3]Spencer-Oatey, H. 2000. Rapport management: a framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey (ed.). Cultur-
ally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, 11-46.
[4]Spencer-Oatey, H. 2005. (Im)politeness, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their bases and inter-
relationships. Journal of Politeness Research, (1): 95-119.
[5]Spencer-Oatey, H. 2008. Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In H. Spencer-Oatey (ed.). Culturally Speaking:
Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, 11-47.

782
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social Meanings of Congratulations: A Variationist Perspective

Panel contribution

Ms. Anna-Marie Sprenger 1


1. University of Chicago

Third wave sociolinguistics has theorized social meanings as attaching to variables through an indexical rela-
tionship (Eckert 2012), but larger units of discourse remain undertheorized as to their potential to accrue social
meanings. Speech acts have been discussed in pragmatics with respect to their illocutionary force (Searle 1965,
Austin 1975). This project treats speech acts as a sociolinguistic variable to ask: In addition to illocutionary
force, do speech acts have social meanings, and how might these social meanings function differently from
those attaching to other forms? Results from a matched-guise study reveal that congratulation speech acts can
have different social meanings than non-congratulations and pattern differently across gender.
In a matched-guise design, participants read a written two-turn dialogue between two coworkers, in which the
first speaker mentions a recent accomplishment, and the second speaker responds. The gender of each speaker,
the scenario (competitive–where the first speaker receives a promotion both participants were considered for,
or canonical–where the first speaker brings on a new client), and the response type of the second speaker (the
congratulatory responses: “Congratulations!” “I’m proud of you”, or the non-congratulatory response: “When
did you hear?”) were varied. In this between-subjects design, 1440 participants recruited from Prolific each
viewed one dialogue and rated the second speaker for qualities like friendly or competent.
We find that non-congratulatory speakers are perceived as significantly less polite, friendly, professional, colle-
gial, trustworthy, likable, easygoing, sincere, kind, emotionally expressive (at the p <.001 level), and hardwork-
ing, and competent (at the p <.05 level). These results suggest that the act of congratulating, though it can be
performed through many different utterances, has various kinds of social meanings depending on the response
type deployed in interaction.
We also find women addressing other women with the non-congratulatory response were perceived as less
collegial ( p <.01) than male counterparts. In competitive scenarios, women addressing other women with the
non-congratulatory response are perceived as less polite (p <.05) and women addressing other women with I’m
proud of you are viewed as less sincere (p < .05) than their counterparts. To explain these results, we highlight
the expectations regarding women’s homosocial behavior and stereotypes of women as catty. Further, we argue
that non-congratulatory responses are not linked to women due to frequency of use as for other sociolinguis-
tic variables, but rather that the felicity conditions of congratulations and ideologies around who is an ideal
congratulator contribute to the social meaning of the speech act.
The results suggest that speech acts can have fluid social meanings and indexical fields (Eckert 2008), and the
person performing the speech act affects which areas of the field become salient in the moment. Furthermore,
the nature of speech acts’ social meanings might begin with ideologies around the ideal conditions for the com-
pletion of the act, rather than emerging from a frequency-based origin by a particular demographic. Speech acts
can be studied as sociolinguistic variables, but like morphosyntactic and semantic variables, they may need to
be accounted for with different mechanisms than phonological variables.

783
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The linguistic act of complimenting in foreign language Italian


textbooks

Panel contribution

Ms. Giuliana Santoro 1


1. University of Basel

How to learn to compliment in Italian and ”in the Italian way”? What to compliment for, in what situation and
how to do it successfully according to the rules of pragmatics? Or how to react appropriately to a compliment
when interacting in Italian?
Starting from the assumption that pragmatic competence does not seem to be intuitively learnable and therefore
needs adequate instruction, the contribution investigates the didactics of the linguistic act of complimenting in
Italian in a corpus of 6 foreign language Italian textbooks for German-speaking learners from level A1 to level
C1 and a platform for the teaching of pragmatics, called LIRA (http://lira.unistrapg.it/?q=node/1006 ).
The 6 selected textbooks are among those most widely used in German-speaking areas (Switzerland, Germany
and Austria) and are designed for three different audiences: adolescents, university students, adults. The choice
of analysing textbooks is due to the fact that textbooks are still, in most cases, the main tool and first approach
to learn pragmatics. The analysis will focus in particular on the variation of pragmatic input in compliments
both in the transition from lower (A1-A2) to higher (B2/C1) levels and in the comparison between the manuals
and the LIRA digital platform.
Since, however, the input in the manuals would seem to be limiting to the learning of such an extensive subject
as the pragmatics of language acts, the “pars construens” of the paper will focus on the presentation of didactic
strategies to deepen and broaden the learning of pragmatics, such as the use of native corpora and filmic speech.
References
Alfonzetti G. (2009), I complimenti nella conversazione, Editori Riuniti, Roma.

Brown, P.,Levinson, S.C., (1987), Politeness. Some universals in language usage,


Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Castagneto, M. & Ravetto, M. (2015) The variability of compliment responses: Italian and German data, in S. Gesu-
ato, F. Bianchi & W. Cheng (eds.) Teaching, learning and investigating pragmatics: principles, methods and prac-
tices, Cambridge, CUP: 387-413.
Castagneto M. - Sidraschi D. (2018), “Strategie di risposta ai complimenti sull’aspetto fisico in italiano”, in Gille
J. - Norén C. (eds.) Self and Other in Dialogue. Romance Studies on Discourse and Interaction, Peter Lang, Berlin:
59-90
Castagneto, M.; Sidraschi, D. (2020) “Paese che vai, complimento che trovi. La variazione diatopica del com-
plimento in Italia”, in: A. De Meo, F. M. Dovetto (eds.), La comunicazione parlata, Canterano (RM), Aracne, pp.
91-110.
Castagneto M. (2016), Le risposte ai complimenti in Italia: questioni di gender, in Atti del Sodalizio Glottologico
Milanese VIII-IX n.s. (2013-2014), Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria: 169-179.
Frescura M. (1996), The conflictual behavior of Italian speaker in responding to compliments, in Rassegna Italiana
di Linguistica Applicata 28: 89-110.
Ravetto M. (2012a), Le risposte al complimento in italiano e in tedesco. Analisi di corpora di parlato, in SILTA XLI,
1/nuova serie: 85-122.
Ravetto M. (2012b), “Compliment responses in Italian and German”, in International Journal of Innovative
Interdisciplinary Research 2: 77-100.

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Sidraschi D. (2016), “Sintassi dialogica del complimento”, in Andorno C. - Grassi R. (eds), Le dinamiche
dell’interazione, Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Milano: 29-44.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Variational Pragmatics in Chinese compliment responses: The


impacts of age and gender

Panel contribution

Dr. Yuqi Wang 1


1. Beihang University

Compliment responses (CRs) are defined as the hearer’s replies to the speaker’s positive comments (Zhang 2021).
CRs are worthy of being investigated in the present study, since compared to other pragmatic features, CRs are
prevalent but frequently problematic (Yu, 2003), especially for EFL learners (Golato, 2002). Among the macro-
social factors investigated in variational pragmatics (VP), region has received the most attention in relation to
CRs (Lin et al. 2012). To date, however, age-based differences have not been examined much in CRs studies
within VP, with sometimes involving gendered nature (e.g., Cai 2012) among Chinese and American college stu-
dents and both variables together among Iranian EFL learners (e.g., Allami and Montazeri 2012). Social status
(SS) is frequently observed as a crucial internal factor affecting the pragmatic production of compliment re-
sponses, but few studies have explored the interaction between social status and macro-social factors, including
age and gender, particularly among Chinese middle and high school learners. Therefore, this study investigates
the effect of age, gender, and social status on CRs among Chinese learners based on two grouping variables, that
is, different ages (50 younger vs. 50 older) and gender (50 male vs. 50 female). A total of 100 Chinese participants
(50 middle school students vs. 50 high school students) were recruited in this study. The data were collected
through a 4-item Chinese DCT (2 higher-SS scenarios vs. 2 lower-SS scenarios) to which Chinese learners were
asked to provide short Chinese CRs, contributing 400 CRs in sum. CRs were classified and coded based on actual
findings and previous literature (ref. Danziger 2018). Mann-Whitney U and Chi-square tests were employed for
quantitative analyses. The collected data were analyzed by two researchers to establish inter-rater reliability.
The similarities and differences in the two groups Chinese CRs with respect to age, gender as well as due to
social status changes as a consequence of Chinese cultural norms, are discussed.

786
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Variational pragmatics in the foreign language classroom:


learning how to perform compliment responses in L2 Italian

Panel contribution

Prof. Borbala Samu 1


1. University for Foreigners of Perugia

In the field of interlanguage pragmatics L2 learners’ compliment responses have been widely investigated from
different theoretical perspectives (e.g. Cheng 2011, Samu & Wang 2020), mainly interested in analysing the effect
of the L1 on the L2 and observing the way learners respond to compliments compared to target language norms.
Since Wolfson’s (1989) pioneer work several studies observed differences in the realization of the compliment
responses of native and nonnative speakers according to the context and the speech situation. However, the
representation of the target language ways of using language as a homogeneous whole is still dominant in
language teaching practice and in teaching materials. The illusion of a homogeneous L2 speech community
contrasts strongly with the experience of foreign learners coming to study Italian in Italy. Regarding compliment
responses, previous studies (Castagneto & Sidraschi 2020) shed light on the geographic variation among Italian
native speakers’ performance and the different perception of politeness in Northern and Southern regions.
This study offers some new insights about the great variation in the rules and patterns which constrain com-
plimenting behaviour in Italian, through data obtained by administering a written Discourse Completion Test
to 150 L1 Italian students at three Universities across the country. A variety of situations and roles with dif-
ferent degrees of social distance between the interlocutors were foreseen to explore whether strategies are
activated in different ways depending on the context. Situations include compliments from a family member,
teacher, team manager, colleague or classmate, friends and strangers. Compliments focus on achievements, ap-
pearance, possessions or ability. The data show that in the L1 macro-social factors combined with parameters
relevant to intra-lingual pragmatic variation give a rather complex framework, very difficult to interpret for
(non-specialist) language learners. In conclusion, the study highlights the need for a focus on macro-social fac-
tors and parameters relevant to intra-lingual pragmatic variation in teaching L2 Italian following the insights
offered by Holmes & Brown (1987) and Rose (2001). On this basis, a learning path is proposed to include a
variational perspective on conventions of language use.
Castagneto M. & Sidraschi D. (2020), Paese che vai, complimento che trovi. La variazione diatopica del compli-
mento in Italia, in De Meo A. & Dovetto F.M. (eds.), La comunicazione parlata, Canterano, Aracne, 91-110.
Cheng D. (2011), New insights on compliment responses: A comparison between native English speakers and Chi-
nese L2 speakers, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 43, 2204-2214.
Holmes J. & Brown D.F. (1987), Teachers and students learning about compliments, in “TESOL Quarterly” 21 (3),
523–546.
Rose K.R. (2001), Compliments and compliment responses in film: Implications for pragmatics research and lan-
guage teaching, in “International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching” 39, 309–326.
Samu, B., & Wang, M. (2020). Concettualizzazioni culturali nelle risposte al complimento di apprendenti cinesi
di italiano L2: riflessioni sullo schema culturale della modestia, in “Gentes” 7, 101–122.
Wolfson N. (1989), The social dynamics of native and nonnative variation in complementing behavior, in Eisenstein
M. (ed.), The dynamic interlanguage. Empirical studies in second language variation, New York, Plenum Press,
219–36.

787
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Which politeness model for Italian compliments? An analysis


in light of Variational Pragmatics

Panel contribution

Prof. Marina Castagneto 1 , Dr. Chiara Meluzzi 2


1. University of Molise, 2. University of Milan

Compliments are complex pragmatic acts which require a great amount of facework from both the compli-
menter and the complimentee.
The present works aims at comparing different compliment management strategies in three compliment cor-
pora collected in just as many Italian regions - namely in Eastern Piedmont (North-West of Italy), in Cancello
ed Arnone (Caserta), and among the Sardinian community in Biella – and analyse them within the Variational
Pragmatics framework.
Data have been collected in light of the methodology used in Castagneto & Ravetto (2015) and in the Co.Cor
corpus (www.cocor.eu).
The analysis of compliment responses highlighted the difficulty in using a fit all pragmatic theoretical model to
describe the different facework dynamics for the compliment management within the different cultures. The
Eastern Piedmont culture is more individualistic (Hofstede 2001) and oriented towards negative politeness. In
this respect, the classical politeness model as proposed by Brown & Levinson (1978/1987) seems to better ex-
plain the social dynamics of compliment in this area: indeed, face belongs to speakers and face-work is oriented
towards face protection. Conversely, Arundale’s (2006) “Face Constituting Theory” seems to better explain the
social dynamics of compliments in Cancello ed Arnone. This society is closer to the collectivistic pole, and the
speakers are related to interdependent self-construal, as they tend to conceive themselves as a part in inter-
personal relationship. Yet, Cancello ed Arnone’s culture is not prototypically collectivistic as it is not shaped by
power distance; moreover, the speakers do not accept unequal power distribution since their relations are sym-
metric, and therefore their face-orientation relies on their interactional performance. In Cancello ed Arnone,
then, face has to be understood as a relational and an interactional phenomenon dynamically emerging in con-
versations, while compliments are oriented towards an interactive co-construction of a connection face which
belongs to both the complimenter and the complimentee. Finally, in the Sardinian immigrant community in
Biella, face dynamics are related to the respect of the Social Contract of Values (Mursy & Wilson 2001), espe-
cially with regard to the Maxim of Generosity according to which the act of compliment is to be meant as a
social obligation, rather than an attempt at pleasing the interlocutor. Speakers’ face is gained and preserved
through the respect of social and conversational norms, which precede and support the verbal interaction itself.
In light of this variability, the discussion will reflect upon the possible theoretical model behind the acts of
compliment in Italian.

788
Poetics of phaticity
(organized by Shunsuke
Nozawa, Makiko
Takekuro)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Connection and Disruption between Japanese Voice Actors


and Anime Characters

Panel contribution

Ms. Liu Yang 1


1. University of Tsukuba

The phatic function of communication is generally known as the function that concerns the management of com-
municative channels/connections. Though often exemplified by speech acts such as greetings or turn-takings,
phatic function is increasingly applied in explaining modern communication techniques and media culture con-
sumption (e.g., Nozawa 2022). This research aims to analyze the labor of Japanese seiyū (voice actors/actresses)
from a phatic perspective, and discuss how they pragmatically maintain and disrupt their self-established con-
nections to the characters they perform.
It has been clarified that seiyū are technically connected to their characters. With an analysis on several subcul-
tural metaphors for seiyū and seiyū’s own discourses, Nozawa (2016) examined how voice acting creates a layer
between seiyū and their characters, and that the layer itself has become an object of desire. In my discussion,
I would like to add how such a layer or connection is metapragmatically maintained and sometimes disrupted,
as the connection already exists self-evidentially as part of seiyū’s stardom.
First, I will discuss how the seiyū-character connection is lingually and visually maintained with the notion
of Hierarchy of Personal Presence (Du Bois 1986). The data include a widely used phrase observed in seiyū’s
narratives (mainly during their self-introductions), along with an increasingly generated form of performance
commonly known as seiyū concert, where seiyū appear on stage in the name of themselves and sing in the voice
of characters. While voice acting as a speech act might be categorized as impersonation or trance that barely
focuses on the proximate speakers’ own intentions (Du Bois 1986: 329), these data show how seiyū’s egos are
visualized and perceived in seiyū fandom.
Then, I move on to cases in which such a connection is disrupted. Here I focus on a specific seiyū concert
originating from an anime that features male idols, which was held in November, 2022. Three months before
the concert, one of the starring seiyū of the anime was reported in an affair scandal, whose performance in
the concert later got canceled. Through an analysis of the seiyū’s narratives during the concert mainly focusing
on how they mentioned themselves and their characters, I argue that seiyū lingually and performatively break
apart the connection when their connecting to the characters is considered a threat.
To conclude, instead of providing a holistic view on Japanese seiyū, I hope that this research will add a new
perspective in interpreting seiyū’s work as phatic labor, including but not limited to voice acting.
References:

• Du Bois, John W. (1986). Self-evidence and Ritual Speech. In Chafe, Wallace & Nichols, Johanna (Eds.)
Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. pp.313-336. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
• Nozawa, Shunsuke (2016) Ensoulment and Effacement in Japanese Voice Acting. In Galbraith, Patrick W.
& Karlin, Jason G. (Eds.) Media Convergence in Japan. pp.169-199. Kinema Club.
• ―――(2020)Phatic Communication. In Karlin, Jason G., Galbraith, Patrick W. & Nozawa, Shunsuke (Eds.)
Japanese Media and Popular Culture: An Open-Access Digital Initiative of the University of Tokyo. Accessed
November 8, 2022. http://jmpc-utokyo.com/keyword/phatic-communication/

790
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Extending the scope of phatic communion to political speech:


Analyzing Redditors’ comments on Japanese online reactions
to Zelensky’s speech to US Congress

Panel contribution

Prof. Masataka Yamaguchi 1


1. Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

The aim of this paper is to propose that the scope of the pragmatic research on “phatic communion” (Malinowski
1936; Senft 2009) be extended to broader discursive practices than “greeting formulae.” For this purpose, first,
I analyze the speech of President Zelensky to US Congress on March 16 in 2022, in which he “poetically” makes
an analogy between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and two historical events: Sept. 11 attacks and Pearl
Harbor. Second, and more importantly, I examine the Redditors’ comments on Japanese online reactions to his
speech, by which I show different stances or “standings” to his analogy, both from Anglo-American and Japanese
perspectives. In doing so, my point is to argue that we deconstruct the dichotomy of phatic communion as “a
mode of action” as opposed to “an instrument of reflection,” given that Zelensky simultaneously “established
bonds” with the members of the American Congress and further provoked “reflection” on the historical events
of Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In my presentation, I first analyze the speech to US Congress by Zelensky on March 16, 2022, in which he “po-
etically” compares “Russia’s … onslaught in Ukraine to Japan’s World War II air assault on Pearl Harbor” by
saying “your sky was black from the planes attacking you” and to Sept. 11, when “innocent people were at-
tacked, attacked from the air” (Edmonson and Shear 2022). Second, I examine comments on the online forum
entitled “Some Japanese online felt offended when Zelensky mentioned about Pearl Harbor in his speech today”
on the subreddit “r/Japan.” Using the “cultural standing analysis” (Strauss 2004) and other discourse analytic
techniques, I focus on the ways in which the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is remembered from several per-
spectives of “cultural standings” both in English and Japanese. Specifically, I summarize the patterns of the
cultural standing continuum of “highly controversial,” “debatable,” “common opinion” and “taken for granted”
in my analyses of the Redditors’ comments on the analogy of the Russian invasion to Pearl Harbor in English,
while referring to the posts written in Japanese, and to Japanese Yahoo comments.
In the end, I discuss implications of the analyses in which I argue that in addressing the question of “poetics
of phaticity,” we can extend the scope of the pragmatics of phatic communion to the discursive practices of
political speech and online comments as empirical sites for analysis. In sum, I suggest that to understand the
phaticity of political speech, we need to conceptualize phatic communion both as “a mode of action” and “a
mode of reflection.”

791
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Fractal meanings and cultural logics: Metapragmatics of


“jiko-sekinin (self-responsibility)” in Japan

Panel contribution

Mr. Toshiyuki Aoyama 1


1. University of Tsukuba

This paper analyzes the semiotic ideology of jiko-sekinin (⾃⼰責任: self-responsibility), which is one of
the most symbolic political arguments in late modern Japan. Political economic workers and activists have
urged Japanese citizens to be autonomous individuals and also to control risks under the conditions of socio-
economic anxiety since the 1990s. Accordingly, previous researchers have regarded jiko-sekinin as a political
ideology and criticized it through that lens. However, I argue that jiko-sekinin, as exemplified by the 2004 Iraq-
Japanese hostage incident during which the term gained widespread attention in Japanese society, should be
understood from the perspective of cultural norms related to phaticity.
In this incident, the criminals responsible requested the Japanese government to remove the Self-Defense
Force (SDF) from Iraq in exchange for the hostages, who were Japanese citizens visiting Iraq as volunteers and
journalists. This incident provoked a rupture in public discussion, centered on whether the Japanese govern-
ment should submit to the threat or not. Initially, the hostages’ families proactively requested the government
save the hostages by ordering the SDF to retreat from Iraq. This generated severe public criticism towards the
hostages and their families for causing meiwaku (迷惑: nuisance, annoyance, troubling) towards other Japanese
people, on the basis that their deeds were their responsibility.
This paper regards the semiotic process of the terms jiko-sekinin and meiwaku as discursive practices and
discusses how jiko-sekinin has been rationalized by the metapragmatics of meiwaku. Using newspaper articles
regarding the East-Asian Japanese hostage incident as data, this paper analyzes how the texts mix similar and
different perspectives towards the term jiko-sekinin mainly based on the “semiotics of differentiation” (Gal &
Irvine 2019). In particular, I focus on how the concept of meiwaku differs from the European and American
notion of “rights” (Azuma 2022). The term meiwaku means the subjective order, i.e. “don’t make a nuisance to
others,” and also implies the objective order “don’t break the rules.”
In conclusion, this paper analyzes the semiotic process of jiko-sekinin from the perspective of linguistic
anthropology and describes the ideological connection between jiko-sekinin and meiwaku. To take an example,
the subjective order of meiwaku combines jiko-sekinin with norms of social roles and ties, even though the term
jiko-sekinin implies autonomous individuals. As a result, I argue that discourses of jiko-sekinin and meiwaku
endlessly trigger subsequent arguments in Japanese society.
References
Aoyama, Toshiyuki (2021) Poetic sequence of self-responsibility discourses: An analysis of a blog article and
comments concerning the ISIS hostage incident, The Japanese Journal of Language in Society, vol. 23 (2), pp.
19-34.
Azuma, Hiroki (2022) The confusion of “meiwaku” and “right” in controversy of first visit of the year to a shrine
using stroller. In Resist oblivion, Asahi Newspaper Publication, pp. 26-27.
Gal, Susan. and Irvine, Judith. T. (2019) Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, Cambridge
University Press.

792
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Phatic and poetic simulacre in Japanese political argument

Panel contribution

Dr. Kuniyoshi Kataoka 1


1. Aichi University

Focusing on verbal exchanges in the Diet and press conferences, this presentation will examine how the formal
validity of talk nullifies the argument itself (i.e., semantic content), turning it into an occasion for phatic com-
munion. As Malinowski defined it nearly a century ago, phatic talk aims to “establish bonds of personal union”
(Malinowski 1936: 316), and what matters there resides in “the fact that one says it at all” (Leech 1981, see also
Rampton 2015). Under this circumstance, the act of utterance (locution) induces the maintenance of the com-
municative channel and creation of a bond. In other words, the semantic content transmitted by exchanging
information serves a secondary function, and instead, keeping in touch and building rapport becomes primary,
the distinctions of which are respectively identified as “contact” and “communion” phaticity (Zuckerman 2021).
Similarly, poesis concerns something more than the sum of effects inherent in semantic content (referential/non-
referential) and formal features such as repetition and parallelism: it is rather a consequence that emerges
when sound, tone, meaning, and form(ation) are homologously and equivalently mobilized through paradigm
and syntagm. What follows from these phenomena is a presupposition that both phaticity and poesis fundamen-
tally represent the consequences (the perlocution, or the indexical) caused by the locutionary and illocutionary
force beyond the referential, as well as poses a possibility that those consequential effects are not necessarily
invoked by linguistic means.
One such type of talk is the one used by politicians and statesmen, which sometimes has no function other than
to keep the audience’s and supporters’ attention, simply staging a make-believe performance as an interaction
ritual. Currently, the media does not seem to regard it as a problem either, embracing it as a mere occasion
for phatic acts. In such a circumstance, what counts is to simply achieve an interactive configuration (such as
Q-A exchanges and turn-taking)—or pretense-turned-reality, as long as the skeletal schema is ensured. Such
indifference (or insensitivity) to the semantic content has often been criticized for demonstrating yatteru-kan
“pretended image.”
This presentation will investigate the factors that ratify and encourage such exchanges in the Diet and press
conferences, arguing that the process is achieved through not only the politicians’ conciliation but also the
media’s complicit cooperation. In this respect, the current political situation in Japan represents a transition
from “pretense of reality” to “hyperreality” (blending of the real and the fiction: Baudrillard 1981).

793
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Poetic performance in tourist city’s identity construction

Panel contribution

Dr. Hiroko Takanashi 1


1. Japan Women’s University

This study examines tourism discourse from an English-guided tour in Bologna, Italy, and demonstrates how po-
etic performance shapes the city’s identity in intercultural tourism communication. Tourism discourse reveals
a “global semioscape” (Thurlow & Aiello 2007) saturated in sociocultural meanings, including place identity,
and tourists experience “the cultural Other” by referring to how it differs from the culture of “the Self” (Gao
2022, Molz 2007).
The analysis employs parallelism, aided by its deeply related notion of dialogic resonance. The poetic function
of parallelism (Jakobson 1968) constitutes language structure by combining selected linguistic elements from
a juxtaposed text. The parallel structure becomes visible in the light of dialogic syntax (Du Bois 2014), which
maintains that language is shaped in the dialogic environment with other utterances. Moreover, dialogic syntax
gives rise to dialogic resonance, which refers to affinities based on similarities and contrasts across utterances.
In the example below, the guide explains the local patriotism (campanilismo in Italian) by enacting an imag-
ined local with direct speech (as indicated by my) addressed to an imagined competing neighbor city’s resident
(as indicated by your) across the four lines (lines 4, 6, 8, 11). These utterances show resonance in the compar-
ative syntactic structure (my ~ + is better than + your ~) except line 11, lexemes (my, your, better), gesture
(the palm of his left hand is placed on the chest when uttering my ~, and then it folds out at your ~), and the
interactional pattern (tourists’ reaction, especially laughter, follows each utterance). Additionally, we can see
pragmatic resonance as the meaning expands from ‘bell tower’ (campanile in Italian, line 4), the word from
which campanilismo derives, to ‘village’ (line 6), to ‘city’ (line 8), where the emphasis is also indexed by the inten-
sifying adverb much in conjunction with loud voice (as indicated by <F>), and finally, to the humor employing
the stereotypical image of Italian people enthusiastic about their local soccer team (line 11). Of the four, the
last utterance marks the deviation not only in such witty pragmatic meaning but also in syntactic elements―it
employs a comparison implying idiom (kick ~’s ass) instead of the comparative structure. That it is slang also
makes this utterance impressive as a climax, which receives the hardest laughs.
1 Guide: .. Now the concept is called campanilismo,
2 .. which comes from the word campanile,
3 .. which means bell tower.
4 .. So basically it comes down to my bell tower is better than your bell tower.
5 Tourists: @@@@@
6 Guide: My little hilltop village is better than your little hilltop village.
7 Tourist: @@
8 Guide: <F> My city is much better than your city </F>.
9 @@
10 Tourist: <P> Yep </P>.
11 Guide: .. And now obviously it’s my soccer team can kick yours’ ass.
12 Okay.
13 Tourist: <@> Mm-hum </@> @@@@@
The analysis suggests that the poetic performance in language and body formulates recurrent patterns at both
local and discourse levels, reproducing a multi-faceted tourist city identity.

794
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Poetics of Cheering: Multimodal Achievement of Phaticity in a


Japanese Junior-High School Pep Rally

Panel contribution

Mr. Takeshi Enomoto 1


1. Osaka University

As early as 1923, Bronislaw Malinowski discovered a type of linguistic use called “phatic communion”. It is an
act in which “ties of union” are created, “serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some
social sentiment or other”. Expanding on this idea, and drawing on the perspectives of poetics, performance,
and metapragmatics (Jakobson 1960, Bauman & Briggs 1990, Silverstein 1993), this study explores how “ties of
union” are created poetically and multimodally (Kataoka, Takekuro & Enomoto 2022) in a Japanese junior-high
school gekirei kai (pep rally).
The data are from my one-year long fieldwork at a junior high school in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa, Japan. Al-
though I was able to record the rally only in the form of fieldnotes, photo images, and an audio recording, these
field data still provide rich ethnographic information.
The analysis consists of two parts. First, the study reveals the cohesiveness of the rally by identifying its solid
metrical structure. The beginning of the rally is marked by student athletes’ (SA) marching into the hall accom-
panied by clapping from students who do not participate in the tournaments (SS). Following the singing of the
school song, the rally proceeds to a part where each club takes turns to show their enthusiasm and to plead
for cheering. Their enthusiasm and pleading are then answered by a sequence of yells and cheering from SS,
followed by an encouraging address from the vice-principal. To these, one of the SA responds with a message
expressing their gratitude for cheering as well as their determination to do their best. After such a reciprocal
series of affirming social and sentimental ties of union, the end of the rally is marked again by SA’s marching
out of the hall and clapping from SS.
Second, the analysis takes a closer look at the yells and cheering. In so doing, I pay special attention to signs in
different modalities that point to different socio-spacio-temporal meanings (Harkness 2014). Singing the school
song is certainly a salient act of evoking the school’s tradition. In addition to that, the yells are saturated with
cultural semiosis. Stylized use of old expressions and its prosodic characteristics metapragmatically frame them
as performance. In such heightened delivery, the local natural environment is poetically invoked, positioning
the school in the midst of it. Then, deictically placing where the rally is held as “here”, the yells locate the games
or matches as “there” of fighting. In the subsequent cheering, not only the yells, but also pulses with drumming
and clapping play a vital role. Most significantly, one, two, and three pulses are indexically associated with
praying for good strenuous fighting, victory, and glory respectively.
Thus, a Japanese junior-high school pep rally is an exemplary site where ties of union and social sentiment, or
phaticity, are created poetically and multimodally. Though it is one semiotically rich manifestation of “phatic
communion”, it should be noted that it also involves institutional and educational processes of standardization
and differentiation based on collective ideologies.

795
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Secrets of Phaticity: Weak Bonds in Rural Japan

Panel contribution

Dr. Makiko Takekuro 1


1. Waseda University

Malinowski (1923) introduces the concept of “phatic communion” into linguistics, regarding language as a mode
of action. Greeting formulae, as well as quick exchanges about health or weather, are part of a “free, aimless so-
cial intercourse” that does not serve to communicate ideas but to establish ties of personal union. This “bonding
function” (Senft 1987) of language has received much attention in pragmatics. Numerous studies have exam-
ined ways in which bonding is achieved or emerges in the course of interaction. For the most part they claim
that, whether explicit or not, the effects of bonding, such as creating a sense of security among individuals and
enhancing interpersonal relations, are positive ones. However, many fundamental research questions remain
largely unexplored. To what degree is bonding effective? How and when does bonding become burdensome
and troubling instead of comforting?
In contemporary Japan, the pervasive use of idioms relating to “contact” or “phaticity,” such as kizuna
(‘bonds/bonding’) and fureai (‘touching-together’), imbues “an emergent fantasy of sociality” (Nozawa 2015:
373). These idioms emphasize an implicit ideology of phaticity in interpersonal communication, but at the same
time, paradoxically, they bring up feelings of anxiety about loosening or losing bonds in society. In this study, I
explore both aspirations and anxiety about bonding, based on ethnographic research in rural communities in
different parts of Japan. My purpose is to point out the considerable importance of weak bonds for wellbeing
and comfortable living in these communities (cf. Granovetter 1973).
First, I draw on research conducted in towns with remarkably low suicide rates (Oka 2011, 2012, 2020; Morikawa
2016). Kaifu-cho (known as Kaiyo-cho today after large-scale municipal amalgamations of the Heisei era) in
Tokushima Prefecture, for instance, has been listed as one of the top ten towns with the lowest suicide rates,
even though it is surrounded by towns with high suicide rates. In Kaifo-cho, houses are built closely together,
resulting in a high physical density. Some people may even overhear their neighbors’ phone conversations,
which inevitably increases the frequency of contacts between residents. Nevertheless, interviews and survey
results show that socializing among residents is typically limited to short chats or greetings (Oka 2016). In other
words, they intentionally avoid close interpersonal contacts. Moreover, peer pressure is known to be rather
soft, as evidenced by low voting turnout and meager fundraising numbers for the Red Feather Community
Chest. Residents do have mutual support systems, but in principle, they choose to keep personal ties weak and
they do not fantasize phaticity.
I then examine naturally-occurring conversations and narratives among residents of Ishigaki Island in Okinawa
Prefecture based on my own fieldwork. While pervasive “dialogicality” (Bakhtin 1981[1935]) and linguistic
resonance hint at bonds that seem to have been cultivated among participants, their post-interaction comments
reveal that such bonds are only short-lived. Their preference for temporary bonding illustrates their hidden
anxiety regarding phaticity. A possibility will be discussed that loose bonding is a coping strategy for people of
diverse backgrounds who live in a small community.

796
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The embodied poetics of yoga: Parallelism and communion


within a military veterans’ yoga program

Panel contribution

Dr. Robin Riner 1


1. Marshall University

Based on video ethnography of a yoga program for military veterans, this paper argues that the poetic features
of participants’ embodied interactions, including parallelism, equation and contrast (Jakobson 1960), and rhyth-
mic and prosodic contours, enable both shared and discordant affective stances (Goodwin et al. 2012) among
participants. Multimodal interactional analysis of video recordings of yoga sessions reveals patterns of par-
allelism across participants’ bodily actions, verbal directives of the instructor, and the organization of bodies
and objects in space. Drawing from the concept of phatic communication, which asserts that language serves
not simply to convey referential information, but also to create and maintain social “ties of union” (Malinowski
1923), the paper explores the forms of contact, communion, and division that multimodal poetic structures
afford within and are emergent from yoga sessions. The analysis focuses specifically on two structures of par-
allelism in the yoga sessions: first is the organization of the yoga mats in space and the orientation of bodies on
the mats and second is movement (layered with verbal directives) initiated by the instructor that is mirrored
(or not) by the veteran participants. Through an analysis of these unfolding structures of parallelism, I argue
that the emergent poetics of the interaction construct a sense of collectivity among participants. By engaging
in synchronous embodied actions – layered with the prosodic contours of the instructor’s utterances and pat-
terns of breathing and the parallel positioning of yoga mats and bodies – veterans build “kinesthetic empathy”
(Fisher 2019) through which they are “thrust into the living experience of another human being” (Goodwin et al.
2012:23), fostering a sense of community and emotional and social integration of the individual (Fisher 2019). At
the same time, these parallelisms are not exact. Individual variations and asynchronies within the overarching
parallel structures (such as when a veteran opts out of the guided movement) allow for moments of disalign-
ment and assertions of varied forms of agency. The yoga mats, moreover, while providing a form of common
ground among participants, also outline individually isolated spaces, thus potentially fostering a bounded sense
of self and divisions between participants. These dualities of individual/collective, contact/division, communal-
ity/isolation are afforded by the embodied poetics of interaction, creating an interactional space that is thera-
peutically beneficial (Briggs 1994). Participants are at once integrated into a collective and given space within
this collective to forge senses of individual and intersubjective agency and empowerment (Persson 2007).

797
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Phatic Function and the Liberal Imaginary of


Communication

Panel contribution

Dr. Shunsuke Nozawa 1


1. Hokkaido University

While the expression harassment has been part of the Japanese public vocabulary since the 1980s, the last
decade or so has witnessed a flourishing of various neologistic terms pivoting on the shortened form of this
loan word, viz., hara-, as a word stem (see e.g. Gendai Shisō 2013). Some of these terms are relatively longstand-
ing (and even semi-codified, like “power harassment”; Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare 2020), while
others are yet to catch on as widely (e.g. “smell harassment”), and some are apparently coined for the nonce.
As these hara- idioms conjure up ever more diversifying scenes of impropriety, what might the seeming ease
with which people invoke them in public and private discourse reveal about the contemporary significance of
communicative contact: what it means to be ‘in touch’ with others? Building on this initial observation, I ex-
plore the “phatic function” —- the capacity of signs to index their channel, or conditions and effects of contact
(Jakobson 1960) —- as a metapragmatic concern in the contemporary sociohistorical context by situating phatic
impropriety in institutional processes. Concerns about improper contact have compelled universities, corpora-
tions, local communities, state organizations, and other institutions to craft anticipatory, regulatory language
about how to avoid such contact and what to do should it happen within and beyond particular parameters of
institutional life. How do institutions generate and perform “phatic expertise” (Lemon 2018), a metalanguage
of harm through which they define, classify, anticipate, and warn about events of harmful contact? In claim-
ing to have such language, I argue, institutions seek to present themselves as a ‘proper’ liberal social space
and manage risks involved in their own institutional wellbeing. I approach the phatic function as a relatively
undertheorized dimension of liberal conceptions of communication, and discuss how institutional processes
and participants imagine and inhabit channels of contact deemed proper to liberal democratic sociality (Slotta
2015, Candea et al 2021). My discussion focuses on higher education, examining various reflexive discourses
performed by and for universities and other institutions, and provides a brief comparative framework to high-
light transnational contemporaneity in the metalanguage of harm by drawing on the issue of so-called “triggers”
and “trigger warnings” in the 2010s North American context.

798
Politeness and
impoliteness in French
and in comparison with
other languages
(organized by Nicolas
Ruytenbeek, Shima
Moallemi, Els Tobback,
Claudel, Kerry Mullan)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(C)overt self-praise strategies in Press Releases by French


companies. What does it mean to be polite for a company?

Panel contribution

Prof. Els Tobback 1


1. Universiteit Antwerpen

Within Politeness theory, self-praise has, traditionally, been described as a problematic speech act, since it in-
fringes the “maxim of modesty” (Leech 1983) and it does not take into account the hearer’s feelings. However, it
has also been shown that specific contexts, such as job interviews (e.g. Stevens and Kristof 1995) or social media
(e.g. Datyer 2018) tend to impose fewer restrictions on self-praise.
In this paper, the focus shifts from interactions between ‘natural persons’ to self-praise strategies used by ‘legal
persons’, more specifically French companies, in press releases published on their corporate websites. On a
theoretical level, this specific institutional context raises several questions, such as to what extent the use of
specific self-praise strategies is a matter of ‘politeness’. Companies being (normally) well aware of the fact
that their communication should by no means be too promotional if it wants to make a chance to be used by
journalists (e.g. Pander Maat 2007, Catenaccio 2008), self-praise in press releases appears to be at least a delicate
speech act. It will be argued then that press releases both involve the positive image of companies or their “want
to be appreciated and approved of” (hence, their ‘positive face’, Brown & Levinson 1987: 61) and the ‘negative
face’ of journalists.
At a textual level, the paper focuses on the pragmatic strategies of ‘self-praise’ used in 50 online published press
releases by French companies in 3 economic sectors: retail, banking and (public) transport. Based on previous
research on promotional language in press releases (Jacobs 1999, Pander Maat 2007, Catenaccio 2008) and on
self-praise (Dayter 2014, Tobback 2019), it will be shown that companies do not always refrain from using overt,
direct strategies and more or less strong qualitative upgraders, but that they also frequently make use of more
indirect strategies (e.g. praising other instances), or quantitative upgraders, which have a certain objectivising
effect on the self-praise for being (normally) objectively verifiable.
References
Brown P. and Levinson S., 1978, Politeness : Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Catenaccio P., 2008, Press releases as a hybrid genre: Addressing the informative /promotional conundrum.
Pragmatics, 18(1), 9–32.
Dayter D., 2014, Self-praise in microblogging. Journal of Pragmatics 61, 91–102.
Dayter D., 2018, Self-praise online and offline. The hallmark speech act of social media? Internet Pragmatics 1:1,
184–203.
Jacobs G., 1999, Preformulating the news: an analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Leech G., 1983, Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Pander Maat H., 2007, How promotional language in press releases is dealt with by journalists: Genre mixing
or genre conflict? Journal of Business Communication 44.1, 59-95.
Stevens C.K. and Kristof A.L., 1995, Making the right impression: A field study of applicant impression manage-
ment during job interviews. Journal of Applied Psychology 80, 587–606.
Tobback E., 2019, Telling the world how skilful you are: Self-praise strategies on LinkedIn. Discourse & Com-
munication 2019, 13(6), 647–668.

800
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A comparative analysis of politeness and impoliteness in


French and Korean

Panel contribution

Ms. Ha Nah Kim 1 , Ms. Georgeta Cislaru 2


1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2. Université Paris Nanterre

Our work aims to focus on a comparison of conventional indirect realizations in which cultural characteristics
are prominent among various expressions and strategies of (im)politeness in French and Korean. Linguistic
politeness can be defined as a coded communicative system working in social interaction situations to initiate
or maintain relationships “by minimizing the potential for conflict and confrontation inherent” (Lakoff 1990:
34). The face and face-work, terms proposed by Goffman (1967) and developed by Brown & Levinson (1987),
are key concepts underlying the politeness theory. According to them, the face is the public self-image that all
members of society have equally, and the face-work refers to all processes for achieving the purpose of realizing
politeness. The Korean word for this term is Chaemyeon. Nonetheless, the two words are not equivalent because
chaemyeon can be analyzed more complexly than the former (Lim 1994): 1) it is combined with all constituents
related to one’s self-concept, such as honor, status, authority, and self-esteem 2) the ‘weight’ of the faces of
interlocutors may be different depending on the situation and relationship 3) when someone tries to save face
in a very close relationship, it can cause a sense of distance (Choi & Yoo 1992). For example, as mentioned in
Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2009: 286), unlike the French, Koreans may feel distant when they are told “merci” (or
“c’est gentil” in an indirect way) by their parents or close friends. To Koreans, losing face means losing one or
more of the factors simultaneously related to this self-concept, making face-work more complicated for Koreans
than for French. Nevertheless, little research has been conducted under the premise that native speakers do
not perceive these two terms identically. The indirect speech act is one of the strategies related to face-work.
Furthermore, the preference for indirectness, characterized “in terms of the gap between speaker intention
and literal content” (Grainger & Mills 2016: 35), is one of the representative characteristics attributed to Korean
(Byon 2006). The indirect realizations of speech acts can be divided into conventional and non-conventional
indirect realizations (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984, Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1994), and the character of a linguistic
community appears more clearly in the former group. Traverso (1996) stated that some conventional indirect
realizations belong to routines that are “socially canalized according to successful solutions of recurring verbal
tasks, fixed by functional appropriateness and tradition” (Coulmas 1981, cited from Traverso ibid.: 40). The data
to be applied for the analysis are recordings of daily conversations by French and Korean native speakers – a
total of four recordings of two pairs of males and two pairs of females for each language. This comparison could
also create an opportunity to discuss the scope of certain pragmatic concepts and their validities in different
cultural frameworks.

801
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Espèce de linguiste! – An impoliteness construction in French?

Panel contribution

Dr. Daniel Van Olmen 1 , Dr. Delphine Grass 1


1. Lancaster University

This paper seeks to argue against the widespread view in (im)politeness research, especially since the “dis-
cursive” approach’s advent (e.g. Locher 2006), that (im)politeness is not intrinsic to linguistic form but just a
situational judgment. With Culpeper (2011) (see Terkourafi 2005 too), we aim to show that there do exist con-
structions in language conventionalized for impoliteness, with a study of French parenthetical/free-standing
espèce de ‘kind of’ + NP!.
We first analyze a random sample of 200 cases of the pattern from the frTenTen20 corpus (more specifically,
instances followed by a noun optionally modified by one adjective and occurring between punctuation marks).
An initial look at the data shows that most NPs after espèce de contain negatively evaluative nouns (e.g. crétin
‘dumbass’) and/or adjectives (e.g. sale ‘dirty’). Considering more general research into espèce (e.g. Chaveau-
Thoumelin 2020), this bias is argued to be distinctive of its parenthetical/free-standing use. An in-depth investi-
gation of each example in its co-text (see Culpeper 2011: 11-12) reveals that espèce de + NP! is also nearly always
intended and/or perceived to have negative emotional consequences for the addressee (e.g. ironic espèce de
génie! ‘you genius!’). Most exceptions are cases where the pattern is used jokingly or as a solidarity marker
between friends/relatives (e.g. espèce de petit con! ‘you little shithead!’). With Leech (1983), however, we regard
such instances as secondary since they depend on the potential of impoliteness. Together, these facts are taken
as pointing toward the existence of a construction/frame conventionalized –“as a correlate of the (statistical)
frequency with which an expression is used in one’s experience of a particular context” (Terkourafi 2005: 231)–
for impoliteness.
This claim is tested in two more ways. We examine the first 50 examples of espèce de in frTenTen20 where
the NP contains no overtly negative-evaluative noun or adjective (e.g. espèce de femme! ‘you woman!’). The
analysis of their co-text shows that they too are almost always meant and/or understood as offensive. We argue
here that the construction coerces such NPs into this interpretation. We will also conduct a questionnaire (to
be developed) in which native speakers of French are asked to assess the well-formedness of espèce de with
different NPs, in and outside context, and express their perceptions of them (the latter part will also include
stimuli with pseudowords, e.g. espèce de garlon!). Our hypothesis is that negatively evaluative NPs will be
considered more well-formed but that, irrespective of the actual NP, espèce de will be deemed impolite.
References
Chauveau-Thoumelin. P. 2020. Une Approche Constructionnelle des Enclosure Genre et Espèce. Lille: University
of Lille PhD dissertation.
Culpeper, J. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: CUP.
Leech, G.N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Routledge.
Locher, M.A. 2006. Polite behavior within relational work: The discursive approach to politeness. Multilingua
25, 249-267.
Terkourafi, M. 2005. Pragmatic correlates of frequency of use: The case for a notion of “minimal context”. In S.
Marmaridou, K. Nikiforidou & E. Antonopoulou (eds.), Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the
21st Century. Berlin: De Gruyter, 209-233.

802
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expression and perception of (im)politeness of formal and


informal requests in Spanish L1, French L1 and Spanish L2

Panel contribution

Mrs. Aurélie Marsily 1


1. Université catholique de Louvain

Politeness is a universal concept, but the ways in which it is applied varies from culture to culture (Kerbrat-
Orecchioni, 2004). The languages of our study, French and Spanish, share many linguistic features, yet there are
some notable differences between them. Several studies show that Spanish is a rather direct language (Bataller,
2013) and that the conditional mode is used in more formal requests than in French (Dewaele & Planchenault,
2006). Other studies highlight an increase in the use of tú vs. usted, especially among the younger generation
in Spain and also that the Spanish culture is oriented towards positive politeness (Bataller, 2013).
In this study, I analyse the expression and perception of (im)politeness in a comparative perspective: the corpus
COPINE comprises DCT, Naturalized Interactions (NIs, Marsily, 2022) and perception questionnaires. The DCT
is contains three situations of student-professor requests. The NIs incorporates five situations where a student
performs requests towards professors in naturalized settings. The corpus includes Spanish native university
students and French-speaking Belgian students of Spanish in different Walloon universities. The DCT and NIs
are analysed quantitatively to retrieve (im)politeness strategies in requests. The perception questionnaires offer
feedback on the participants’ productions and highlight different conceptions of (im)politeness. The data are
also compared with (Belgian) French L1 requests from a written DCT, to calculate the possible influence of the
mother tongue among the Spanish non-native group.
The first hypothesis is that NN speakers of Spanish tend to overuse features identified in their mother tongue,
such as the conditional mode, usted and indirect strategies. Another explanation might be that they find it more
convenient and more in line with the norms they already know in their mother tongue or because of lack of
knowledge of the politeness conventions operating the target language and culture. Secondly, I postulate that
Spanish native speakers use more direct requests and that this reflects their culture of acercamiento (Briz &
Albelda, 2013).
The results offer interesting insights on the production and perception of politeness in different N/NN academic
situations.
References
Briz, A. and Albelda, M. (2013). Una propuesta teórica y metodológica para el análisis de la atenuación lingüística
en español y portugués. La base de un proyecto en común (ES.POR.ATENUACIÓN). Onomázein Revista semestral
de lingüística, filología y traducción, 28, 288-319.
Bataller, R. (2013). Role-plays vs. natural data: asking for a drink at a cafeteria in peninsular Spanish. Íkala,
18(2), 111-126.
Dewaele, J.-M. and Planchenault, G. (2006). ‘Dis-moi tu’ ?! La perception de la difficulté du système des pronoms
d’adresse en français. In Faraco, M. (ed.), Regards croisés sur la classe de langue : Pratiques, méthodes et théories,
147-166. Aix: Publications de l’Université de Provence.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2004). ¿Es universal la cortesía? In Bravo, D. and Briz, A. (eds.), Pragmática sociocultural:
estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español, 40-54. Barcelona: Ariel.
Marsily, A. (2022). La petición en español peninsular. Producción y percepción de la cortesía verbal en las es-
trategias de petición de hablantes nativos y francófonos de Bélgica. Unpublished thesis dissertation. Université
catholique de Louvain.

803
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How to express embarrassment in Persian, Japanese and


French

Panel contribution

Dr. Shima Moallemi 1 , Prof. Chantal Claudel 2


1. Utrecht University, 2. Université Paris Nanterre

The basis of ideal interpersonal encounters is that they should run smoothly. All sorts of polite behaviors are
therefore used to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts or inconveniences that may lead to embarrassment.
Closely related to im/politeness, this feeling is therefore central to social relations. However, the situations
associated with it seem to differ from one community to another. The same is true of the linguistic behaviours
associated with it.
In studies about Japan, while embarrassment has been linked to guilt and/or shame (Benedict; Lebra Sugiyama
1983; Mead 2003; Kaufman 2011; Sakura et al. 1986), the existence of a continuum between embarrassment and
shame now seems to be established (Lebra Sugiyama 1983: 194; McNamee 2015: 197), as the word haji refers to
both (Lebra Sugiyama ibid.). The same is true in Persian where the term sharmandegi refers to both meanings
(shame/embarrassment). The realisation of such a feeling can be linked to speech acts such as: “expressing
gratitude, offering goods and services, requesting goods and services, apology, refusal, and accepting offers”
(Sharifian and Jamarani 2011: 227). For example, in Persian and Japanese, ritualized expressions are used
to express embarrassment. This is a linguistic strategy to achieve a form of politeness (positive or negative).
However, it would seem that in French, embarrassment and shame are not as closely linked to the expression
of politeness, particularly in the case of shame, which is generally directed towards another person (T’as pas
honte?) or a particular situation (Quelle honte! C’est la honte!).
In a cross-cultural approach, we will try to understand the cultural conceptualisation (Sharifian, 2011) of embar-
rassment in Persian (sharmandegi), Japanese (haji) and French (embarras) and the place occupied by this feeling
in the construction of interpersonal relationships and politeness in these languages. The question will there-
fore be asked to what extent this term can be linked to entries such as guilt, embarrassment and/or shame?
Furthermore, are the behaviors that cause embarrassment comparable from one cultural community to an-
other? Furthermore, which linguistic formulas refer to the expression of embarrassment? Which speech acts
do they refer to? Apology? Other acts?
References

• Benedict, Ruth, 1987, Le chrysanthème et le sabre, Arles, Picquier (1946 1ère éd., The chrysanthemum and
the sword)
• Kaufman Whitley, 2011, “Understanding Honor: Beyond the Shame/Guilt Dichotomy”, Social Theory and
Practice, Vol. 37, n° 4, 557- 573.

• Lebra, Takie, 2010, “Shame and guilt in Japan”, in LeVine, Robert A. (ed.), Psychological Anthropology: A
Reader on Self in Culture, Wiley-Blackwell, 102-111.
• McNamee, Gregory, 2015, “Shame vs. Guilt”, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 91, n° 1, 197.
• Mead, Margaret, 2003, Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples, New Brunswick, Transac-
tion Publishers
• Sakuta, Keiichi, Yagi, Kimiko and McKinney Meredith, 1986, “A Reconsideration of the Culture of Shame”,
Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 1, n° 1, 32-39.
• Sharifian, Farzad, and Jamarani, Maryam, 2011, “Cultural schemas in intercultural communication: A
study of Persian cultural schema of sharmandegi ‘being ashamed’ ”, Intercultural Pragmatics, Vol. 8, N°
2, 227–51.

804
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Polite requests with “falloir” in the language of service


encounters in Côte d’Ivoire

Panel contribution

Ms. Linnéa Koré 1


1. university of Gothenburg

Extremely rare in service encounters in France (e.g. Hmed 2008), requests constructed with the verb falloir, for
instance faut donner deux cent mille (electronics market), account for 21,5% of all requests in a corpus of 200
video-recorded interactions in French taking place at a supermarket, a pharmacy, an electronics market and an
open-air market in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. This makes them the second most important request strategy in the
data of the current study: only the elliptical form is more frequent. In order to fill a research gap, the present
study combines a frame-based and a discursive approach to politeness to answer the question: what effects
relating to (im)politeness do participants in service encounters in Abidjan achieve when using the verb falloir
to realise requests?
Firstly, I argue that the construction faut/faudrait followed by an infinitive verb, expressing the act that the
speaker wants the hearer to perform, functions as a generalised implicature (Terkourafi 2005), flouting Grice’s
maxim of quantity, in the service interactions of Abidjan. Indeed, this is generally how politeness is achieved
when a speaker is uttering a request with falloir in this type of context, typically the kind of politeness that goes
unnoticed. The construction faut/faudrait + verb has derived from the expression il faut (que)…, which is on
the surface nothing more than an assertion about the necessity that something be done, as if imposed by an
outer force. Therefore, the directive nature of this construction from the speaker to the hearer, is only implied.
Moreover, the most preferred frame of the implicature in question is the following: electronics market, male
speaker to male hearer, both speaker and hearer between 20 and 39 years old, close interpersonal relationship
considering the context (such as regular customer or colleague) and independent request (as opposed to solicited
or co-constructed).
Secondly, the results cannot show any clear-cut occurrences of impoliteness as an effect of requests with falloir.
However, two interesting uses of requests with faut in the data challenge the definition of the term impoliteness.
In one case, a participant qualifies her interlocutor, who utters several requests with faut, as “not polite”, even
though she asserts that she finds him “very nice” and that she likes his way of speaking. In another case, a
participant clearly finds her interlocutor impolite; nevertheless, it is probably the lack of initial greeting that
damages the politeness of the interaction as a whole, not the interlocutor’s request with faut. These examples
furthermore highlight that (im)politeness are discursive concepts.
References
Hmed, Neijete (2008). “Analyse comparative d’interactions dans des petits commerces français, tunisien et
franco-maghrébin”. In : Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. & Traverso, Véronique. (éds.). Les interactions en site
commercial : invariants et variations. Lyon : ENS éditions, pp. 253–276.
Terkourafi, Marina. (2005). “Beyond the micro-level in politeness research”. In : Journal of Politeness Research,
vol 1, n° 2, pp. 237–262.

805
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Politeness in multilingual medical consultations

Panel contribution

Prof. Véronique Traverso 1 , Dr. Vanessa Piccoli 2


1. CNRS, France, 2. Université de Nanterre

This contribution focuses on how people with limited language resources manage the relational aspect of inter-
action in the context of medical consultations.
It echoes the work on linguistic politeness and the management of interpersonal relations developed in Lyon
in continuity with Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1992, while within a multimodal conversational analysis approach.
The analysis is based on a corpus of medical consultations with migrants in France. It focuses on the resources
that the participants (patients and doctors) use to show their attention to the relationship when carrying out
interactional activities linked to the situation (such as history taking, request for description of symptoms, ex-
planation of the prescription by the doctor, request for prescription, change of medication by the patient). These
situations are also interesting because they sometimes reverse the asymmetrical positions specific to medical
consultations, when the exchanges are held in English, a language that the patient sometimes masters better
than the doctor.

806
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Processing pronouns of address during an online job


interview in German

Panel contribution

Ms. Maria den Hartog 1 , Ms. Patricia Sanchez Carrasco 1 , Dr. Gert-Jan Schoenmakers 1 , Prof. Helen de
Hoop 1 , Dr. Lotte Hogeweg 1
1. Radboud University Nijmegen

In many languages, speakers have to choose between informal or T (from the Latin tu ‘you’) and formal or
V (from the Latin vos ‘you’) pronouns of address. Previous studies have determined that factors influencing
T/V-use differ between languages and contexts (e.g. Kretzenbacher et al., 2006). Germans are known to prefer
V-address for public communications, including interactions in the workplace. Being addressed with an unex-
pected T or V can lead to negative feelings on the side of the addressee, and to embarrassment for the speaker.
However, the effects of T/V pronouns on the addressee remain understudied.
In our experimental study, participants (n = 198) took part in an online job interview for an unknown company.
Participants were addressed by a recruiter with either T or V in a video recording. We asked the participants
questions on a scale from 0 (full disagreement) to 100 (full agreement) to measure the effect of pronoun of
address. We investigated the following domains: interpersonal relations (e.g. “The recruiter acts like they know
me well.”), attitude towards the recruiter (e.g. “This person is friendly.”), job motivation and identification
(e.g. “I would “fit in” in this work environment.”), attitude towards the company (e.g. “I would describe the
organization as friendly.”), and salary expectations (“My estimate of the salary that the company may offer is:
lower/higher than average.”).
We constructed a linear model for salary expectations and linear mixed effects models for the other domains.
We found no effect of pronoun of address on interpersonal relations. We found main effects of T/V on attitude
towards the recruiter, job motivation and identification, attitude towards the company and salary expectations
(see Table 1), with interviewees reacting more positively and giving higher scores when V-address was used.
We found interactions between participant gender and pronoun of address for job motivation and identification
and for salary expectations (see Table 1). In these domains, men showed a stronger sensitivity to pronoun of
address than women, reacting more positively and expecting higher salaries when addressed with V. These
results show that pronouns can indeed have an effect on the addressee, and the effect that pronouns of address
have can be different for different genders. Our finding that attitudes are generally more positive when V is
used reflects previous findings that V-address is seen as the appropriate choice with strangers. In this study,
we have experimentally demonstrated for the first time that a violation of this norm negatively affects how
German-speakers see their interlocutor and the organization that their interlocutor belongs to.
References
Kretzenbacher, H. L., Clyne, M., & Schüpbach, D. (2006). Pronominal address in German: Rules,
anarchy and embarrassment potential. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 29(2), 17.1-17.18.
https://doi.org/10.2104/aral0617

807
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Processing pronouns of address: a job interview in French

Panel contribution

Ms. Patricia Sanchez Carrasco 1 , Ms. Maria den Hartog 1 , Dr. Gert-Jan Schoenmakers 1 , Prof. Helen de
Hoop 1 , Dr. Lotte Hogeweg 1
1. Radboud University Nijmegen

French speakers have a choice of pronoun of address, either tu (often referred to as informal or T-pronoun of
address) or vous (polite or V). This choice depends on factors like relative social distance, age of the addressee,
sameness (Havu, 2009; Warren, 2009) and communicative situation (Clyne et al., 2009). French speakers are
known to prefer V-address for public communications, including workplace interactions. However, over the
last two decades, some studies observed an increase in T-use in workplaces and service encounters. As a case in
point, a predominantly negative reaction was observed when several companies in France enforced informal
address policies, as in the well-known case of IKEA. We aim to experimentally investigate the potential effects
of T/V on the addressee in a work-related context.
In our study, 182 participants took part in an online job interview for an unknown company. Participants were
addressed by a recruiter with either T/V in a video recording. We asked participants questions on a scale from
0 (full disagreement) to 100 (full agreement) to measure the effect of pronoun of address. We investigated the
following domains: interpersonal relations (e.g. “The recruiter acts like they know me well.”), attitude towards
the recruiter (e.g. “This person is friendly.”), job motivation and identification (e.g. “I would enjoy working in
this company.”), attitude towards the company (e.g. “I would describe the organization as friendly.”), and salary
expectations (“My estimate of the salary offered is: lower/higher than average.”).
We found a main effect of T/V (T vs. V; β = -6.63, SE = 1.98, p < 0.001) on the construct attitude towards the
recruiter. Participants had more positive attitudes towards the recruiter when addressed with V, in line with
previous findings that speakers expect to receive V-address in the workplace.
A marginally significant effect of the interaction between pronoun and gender was found (β = -10,96, SE = 5,71,
p = 0,057). Women scores for identification and motivation were lower than men’s when addressed with T.
This trend seems in line with previous findings that women use T less often than males in the workplace (Alber,
2019: 17), and might thus feel more motivated to pursue jobs where professional distance prevails through the
V-use. V-address could be able to provide women with a stronger sense of belongingness in certain contexts,
compared to men, although these results are not conclusive and further research into differential T/V effects
for gender groups is needed.
We did not find any effects on the other constructs, suggesting that the scope of T/V effects is limited to the
speaker, and a connection might not be made with a broader context (opinion about the company, salary ex-
pectations). Our study shows that V-address is strongly seen as the appropriate choice with strangers and that
a violation of this norm negatively affects how French speakers perceive their interlocutor.

808
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Requesting behavior and personality – An experimental study


of French requests

Panel contribution

Dr. Nicolas Ruytenbeek 1


1. KU Leuven

The realization of speech acts is shaped by a variety of (socio-)contextual variables, as is the interpretation of
utterances (Gibbs & Colston 2012). To this day, some attention has been paid to the role played by personality
on the interpretation of utterances (Demeure et al. 2007) and on the language used in SMS (Holtgraves 2011).
However, the role of personality on (email) requesting behavior remains unknown. This research seeks to
fill this gap by addressing the combined influence of writer empathy and addressee personality on the use
of politeness strategies in French email requests, a speech act often performed using this channel. I predict
request forms to be more direct and include less mitigation in the case of writers who are low on empathy
compared to those who are high on empathy. Assuming that requests targeted at rigid individuals entail a
higher degree of threat for the negative face of the recipient of the email, I predicted a higher use of negative
politeness strategies with rigid recipients in comparison with requests addressed to flexible individuals. By
contrast, I expected positive politeness strategies to be more frequent for flexible recipients. In the current
state of knowledge, it remains unclear how the interaction between writer empathy and recipient personality
should influence the form of requests. However, a plausible prediction is that writers who are high on empathy
will be more responsive to the manipulation of the recipient’s flexibility with, as a result, greater variation in
request formulation compared to writers who are low on empathy.
In Step 1, an empathy questionnaire including items about relation to authority and requesting behavior will
be administered, via the testing platform Prolific, to a target number of 200 male participants with French as
mother tongue and aged 30-50. Only the 25 respondents who scored lowest and the 25 who scores highest on
the empathy questionnaire in Step 1 will be selected for Step 2.
In Step 2 (email writing task), these participants will be provided with contextual information and asked to
produce an email request. The personality of the recipient will be manipulated (flexible vs. rigid recipient); 2
different types of requests will be involved (a: request to reschedule a meeting; b: request to answer an email
on writer’s behalf).
In Step 3 (exit interview), participants in Step 2 will be asked a few questions intended to shed light on the extent
to which they adapted their requesting behavior to the personality of the addressee of their email.
References
Demeure, V. et al. 2007. Rôle de la face et de l’utilité dans l’interprétation d’énoncés ambigus question/requête
et incompréhension/désaccord. Actes des 4e Journées Francophones Modèles Formels de l’Interaction (MFI 07),
Paris, May 30 – June 1.
Gibbs, R. W., & H. Colston. 2012. Interpreting Figurative Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Holtgraves, T. 2011. Text messaging, personality, and the social context. Journal of Research in Personality 45
(1): 92-99.

809
18th International Pragmatics Conference

« On remercie une fois encore » : Requests and anticipatory


thanks in formal letters in L2 French

Panel contribution

Ms. Sulun Aykurt-Buchwalter 1 , Dr. Tatiana Aleksandrova 1


1. LIDILEM, Université Grenoble-Alpes

Non-native speakers, in authentic and didactic settings, may be required to write formal letters. According
to the CEFRL, advanced learners of L2 French are required to write argumentative essays and to adapt their
speech to the appropriate register. This requires pragmatic skills, especially in accomplishing complex commu-
nicative goals related to politeness, such as formulating requests and thanks. This study, located at the interface
between L2 acquisition and interlanguage pragmatics, seeks to observe and explain how L2 French learners ex-
press written politeness a situation characterized by formality and when addressing a hierarchically superior
interlocutor.
Requests are a well studied speech act from an interlanguage perspective (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999 ; Warga, 2005).
A wide range of linguistic tools serve as mitigators in requests and thus contribute to politeness. Thanking is
defined as “an act by which the speaker acknowledges receipt of any ‘gift’ and expresses their gratitude to the
person responsible for this gift” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1997 : 132). In an epistolary context, thanks are generally
anticipatory, since the receipt of the gift is hypothetical, and are therefore considered to be a form of indirect
request (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1997).
In this study, we analyse a corpus of 75 argumentative essays produced on the one hand by native French
speakers, and on the other hand by four groups of L1 Chinese, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish learners. The
texts were written based on a common prompt, namely, to write a formal letter addressed to the mayor of the
city to persuade them not to cancel a cultural event. We compare the number of occurrences of explicit requests
and thanks in the essays, as well as their place in the text structure. Then, we analyse the linguistic forms used
to express these objectives, namely markers of deontic modality, lexical variety as well as formulaic language.
Results indicate that the “explicit request without anticipatory thanks” pattern is the most frequent among
native writers. Learners, on the other hand, overuse requests and thanks, as well as the politeness marker “s’il
vous plait”, which mitigates the use of imperative mode. Regarding the linguistic forms, native writers differ
from learners in their use of formulaic language, which confirms existing research on this subject. Variations
also appear among the learners in terms of politeness markers. The contrasts suggest possible influences of the
L1 and the effects of teaching, but also learner strategies in the expression of politeness in L2 writing. This study
could be supplemented by an analysis of the corpora available in the learners’ L1s.

Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999). Exploring the Interlanguage of Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Research Agenda for
Acquisitional Pragmatics. Language Learning, 49(4), 677–713.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (1997). Le traitement des actes de langage en analyse des conversations : l’exemple
du remerciement. In Dialogue Analysis: Units, Relations and Strategies Beyond the Sentence. Weigand, E. &
Hauenherm (éd.), De Gruyter
Warga, M. (2005). “Je serais très merciable”: Formulaic vs. Creatively Produced Speech in Learners’ Request-
Closings. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 67–93.

810
18th International Pragmatics Conference

«Évitez les impératifs». Rules and formulae for


master-servant directives in French nineteenth-century
etiquette and conduct books

Panel contribution

Dr. Annick Paternoster 1


1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)

The third wave in (im)politeness studies represents a middle ground between research into more stable mean-
ings of politeness and into meanings emerging in interaction (Haugh and Culpeper 2018 on integrative pragmat-
ics). One way of tapping into more stable meanings is to harvest politeness rules and formulae in conduct and
etiquette books, which form a prescriptive politeness metadiscourse. Rules and formulae are presented within
minimal contexts: how to formulate an invitation, offer food, disagree, apologise, formulate advice, make re-
quests. With Terkourafi (2011) I take the view that conduct and etiquette writers reproduce exemplary usage,
which they prescribe authoritatively. Aided by their higher social standing, they legitimise and restrict existing
usage.
This historical proposal uses French etiquette books, manuels de savoir-vivre, and conduct books, civilités, two
genres that were very successful in the second half of the nineteenth century, with hundreds of publications.
My (small) self-built corpus is composed of public domain text drawn from Gallica.fr, the digital library of the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ (23 etiquette books and 8 conduct books, see Fisher 1992;
Paternoster 2022; Rouvillois 20082 ). Both genres address the middle classes, which are defined by having at least
one living-in servant (Guiral and Thuillier 1978). The proposal zooms in on the master-servant relationship,
given that the superior-subordinate dynamic is what mainly characterises Discernment politeness (Hill et al.
1986; Ridealgh and Jucker 2019).
For the minimal context (Terkourafi 2001, 2002) of masters’ directives towards servants, this proposal uses
close reading and qualitative, manual analysis to make an inventory of linguistic politeness rules –«Évitez les
impératifs » – and formulae – «Portez ceci à monsieur le comte», together with any metadiscourse justifying
their usage.
Like Culpeper and Demmen 2011, who find that mitigating can/could for English requests is slow to take off
in the nineteenth century, I find many impositives (which may even be commands, i.e. leaving no to refuse).
The bald-on-record imperative demonstrates the presence of a Discernment paradigm, whereby masters use
unmitigated impositives to express an order, which is not seen as impolite given the hierarchical difference
(Ridealgh and Unceta Gómez 2020). However, a minority of sources recommend mitigating features such as
the modal verb vouloir, the verbs prier and plaire, the nouns prière and bonté, the conditional, and the use of
questions, which are explicitly evaluated as polite. I will closely look into a diachrony of rules/formulae in an
effort to link the rise of mitigating formulae to ideological discussions about the master-servant relationship
within the sources, which are of a political, religious, and commercial nature: sources increasingly warn that
the servant is an individual in his/her own right.

811
Practices of knowledge
management in helping
interactions (organized
by Susanne Kabatnik,
Eva-Maria Graf, Thomas
Spranz-Fogasy)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Digital) Grief Counselling: Helping Interaction in Grief Work

Panel contribution

Dr. Christina Siever 1


1. Universität Zürich

Dealing with grief – triggered by the death of a loved one or also a loss in general – is usually referred to as
“grief work” (Schwarz-Friesel 2013: 278). The linguistic (and multimodal) practices of grief work are strongly
guided by socio-cultural and historical norms (cf. Linke 2001 and Jakoby/Haslinger/Gross 2013). According to
Hochschild (1979) compliance with these norms is a major task of the so-called “emotion work” but they often do
not (any longer) meet the needs of the mourners. People who are grieving therefore often experience loneliness
and they feel abandoned. As a result, they may seek help in form of the so called “grief counselling” in order to
find a way to adequately cope with their grief or conduct “grief work”.
Historically, grief counselling was mainly a task of pastoral care, but in the course of increasing secularisation,
people also started to seek help outside the church. In the course of this, different institutions for grief coun-
selling as have been established in the western modern world (cf. Winkel 2004: 182-183). In addition, many
(professional) individuals offer similar services with respect to this form of helping interaction for which they
also make use of digital tools (cf. Graf/Spranz-Fogasy 2018: 422); one frequently observable example is the use
of Instagram accounts to disseminate their knowledge and, of course, to draw attention to their work.
In the planned qualitative study, interviews with 10 grief counsellors who are using digital tools are conducted.
The focus of the evaluation of the interviews is on the question of how the expert knowledge of the helpers and
the experiential knowledge of the mourners can be meaningfully used in grief counselling or grief work. On
the other hand, I am interested in the extent to which digital tools support and change grief counselling.
References
Graf, Eva-Maria & Spranz-Fogasy, Thomas (2018): Helfende Berufe – helfende Interaktionen. In: Birkner, Karin
& Janich, Nina (Eds.): Handbuch Text und Gespräch, De Gruyter, pp. 419–443.
Hochschild, Arlie R. (1979): Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure. In: American Journal of Sociol-
ogy, no. 3, pp. 551–575.
Jakoby, Nina & Haslinger, Julia & Gross, Christina: Trauernormen: historische und gegenwärtige Perspektiven.
SWS-Rundschau, vol. 53, no. 3, 2013, pp. 253–74.
Linke, Angelika (2001): Trauer, Öffentlichkeit Und Intimität. Zum Wandel Der Textsorte „Todesanzeige“ in der
zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. In: Fix, Ulla et al.: Zur Kulturspezifik von Textsorten, Niemeyer, pp. 195–
223.
Schwarz-Friesel, Monika (2013). Sprache und Emotion. 2nd, updated and expanded ed. Francke.
Winkel, Heidemarie (2004): „Reden ist aber gerade das Entscheidende …“. Trauerberatung und die Ausdif-
ferenzierung semantischer Strukturen der Problematisierung individuellen Leids. In: Schützeichel, Rainer &
Brüsemeister, Thomas (Eds.): Die beratende Gesellschaft. Zur gesellschaftlichen Bedeutung von Beratung. Wies-
baden, pp. 181–203.

813
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Diagnosis in Telemedical Consiles. Recipient Design in a


Triatic Consultation.

Panel contribution

Prof. Karin Birkner 1


1. University of Bayreuth

Over the past years, the importance of telemedicine has increased considerably, especially for acute conditions.
In Bavaria, patients with neurological symptoms of a suspected stroke are presented to expert neurologists in
medical centres by doctors from rural clinics in order to shorten the “door-to-needle time”. The telemedical
consultations consist of the clinic doctor and the patient on one side of a video conferences and the neurologist
on the other. By taking the patient’s history, performing neurological tests (assisted by the clinic doctor) and
consulting CT-images, the neurologist arrives at a diagnosis and a treatment decision.

Due to the medial constellation, diagnostic utterances as well as prediagnostic statements (Spranz-Fogasy 2014)
are “heard” by all participants, nevertheless, they get addressed either to the patient, the clinic doctor or to
both of them. The paper will analyse the linguistic practices of adjusting the transfer of knowledge – viz. the
diagnosis – to the respective addressee, using different recipient designs that take into account the medial
constellation as well as the diverging relevancies of the diagnosis for an affected person or an institutional
agent. This way, intra- and inter-professional communication in the same encounter can be scrutinized. Using
conversation analytic methods, we examine the interactional work and the multimodal and multimedial
practices used by the participants in the delivery of a diagnosis in a triadic face-to-screen and face-to-face
constellation.

The study is based on 34 telemedical consultations, recorded between 12/2014 to 5/2015, in the Munich Clinic
Harlaching, lasting between ten and twenty minutes. Only considered oriented patients capable of giving their
consent were included. The conversations were transcribed in accordance with the GAT2 conventions (Selting
et al., 2009). In the analytical process, the selected sequences were gradually refined in a multimodal manner
(Mondada 2018).
References
Mondada, Lorenza (2018): Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Tran-
scribing Multimodality. In: Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 85-106.
Selting, Margret et al. (2011): A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT 2, translated and adapted for
English by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Gesprächsforschung: Online-Zeitschrift
zur verbalen Interaktion 12, 1-51.
Spranz-Fogasy (2014): Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Diagnose im Reden. Prädiagnostische Mitteilungen im
Gespräch zwischen Arzt und Patient (Sprache und Wissen 16). Berlin u.a.: de Gruyter.

814
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Explicit and implicit discursive practices of managing


coaching-relevant knowledge in agenda setting

Panel contribution

Dr. Sabine Jautz 1 , Prof. Eva-Maria Graf 2


1. University of Siegen, 2. University of Klagenfurt

Client: Do you actually have to be well informed as much as possible…


Coach: That’s an issue where I am maybe not in a position to be able to say so much about it
The helping profession coaching is defined as a “process of equipping people with the tools, knowledge, and op-
portunities they need to develop themselves and become more effective” (Peterson/Hicks 1995: 41). As argued
by Sator/Graf (2014: 92), “(t)he discursive management of knowledge, i.e. (re-)constructing clients’ experien-
tial and/or epistemic knowledge as regards the solution of their problems (…) is a central element of coaching
discourse”.
This core element of coaching discourse transpires in negotiating and managing differences in participants’ epis-
temic status, i.e., who has primary access to a targeted element of coaching-relevant knowledge or information
and in participants’ epistemic responsibility, i.e., who is held accountable for having what type of knowledge
and information (Stivers/Rossano 2010; Stivers et al. 2011) as well as their deontic status (Stevanovic/Peräkylä
2014). Coaching practice literature claims that coaches are responsible for the coaching process, i.e., bring the
relevant professional expertise to best guide clients through the process and thereby allow for clients’ learning
and development, while clients are responsible for content, i.e., bring their experiential and subjective exper-
tise as regards their life and their concern(s). Concurrently, the discursive management of coaching-relevant
knowledge is framed by and at the same time frames the working relationship between coach and client (Jautz
2017; Graf/Spranz-Fogasy 2018) as interactants treat knowledge as a moral domain with clear implications for
their relationships with co-interactants (Stivers et al. 2011). All of this locally emerges in the use of different
“interactional practices” which “both reflect and embody differential access to resources and to power” (Her-
itage/Clayman 2010: 50). While all clients bring work-related concerns, they have differing expectations as re-
gards how possible solutions for their concerns in the form of new knowledge should be generated. Moreover,
clients bring varying experience with coaching and their epistemic status with regard to coaching methods and
procedures must be assessed in order to guarantee epistemic congruency regarding the coaching process.
We document how the interactants locally co-construct – in more or less aligning and/or affiliative ways –
coaching-relevant knowledge in concert with their working relationship (Graf/Jautz 2022) by particularly fo-
cusing on agenda setting as part of the basic activities ‘Defining the Situation’, ‘Building a Relationship’ and as
part of the basic activity ‘Co-constructing Concern’ (Graf 2019).
To this end, we analyse first sessions from systemic-solution oriented business coaching (https://questions-
in-coaching.aau.at/). The data will be analyzed applying CA-based concepts such as sequentiality (Schegloff
2007), alignment and affiliation (Stivers et al. 2011), epistemics (Heritage 2010, 2011) and deontics (Ste-
vanovic/Peräkylä 2014).

815
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Helping. Managing knowledge in interaction.

Panel contribution

Dr. Ina Pick 1 , Prof. Claudio Scarvaglieri 2


1. University of Basel, 2. Lausanne University

Outline and Results


In this contribution we present a concept of helping with language (Pick & Scarvaglieri 2019; 2022) as a basic
means of helping that is gaining importance (Miller&Considine 2009, Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018) in the help-
ing professions. We aim to develop an understanding of helping with language from an interaction-analytic
perspective.
We suggest to conceive of helping with language as an interactive process in which the helper takes on (parts of)
actions in place of the helped. Helping with language thus proceeds as a communicative pre-structuring of alter-
natives of thinking and/or acting in pursuit of a goal, and thus as management of help-seekers’ knowledge. Such
a pre-structuring of actions can be performed in weak (formulating or activating of knowledge), intermediate
(formulating knowledge and evaluating alternatives) or strong (formulating knowledge and explicitly weight-
ing of alternatives) ways. Our analyses show that in general the ‘action complex’ (Pick 2017) of helping with
language can be performed in different institutional constellations and helping professions (Graf et al. 2014).
However, depending on the overarching institutional constellation or the helping profession in which the ac-
tion complex is embedded, we find varying degrees of pre-structuring alternatives (from weak to strong) as well
as differences regarding the pre-structuring of alternatives of thinking versus alternatives of acting in relation
to the different settings. We thus find that knowledge is managed differently in different helping professions.
We will illustrate these differences in our presentation.
Data
We analyze authentic conversations in the helping professions (incl. psychotherapy and legal counselling). We
rely on data gathered by us (Scarvaglieri 2013, Pick 2015) and on previously published material.
Methods
We follow an action-analytical approach (cf. Levinson 1979, Redder 2008) that allows us to reconstruct the
action complex that shapes linguistic helping as well as the interactional processes that precede and follow the
helping interaction.

References
Graf, E.�M., Sator, M., & Spranz-Fogasy, T. (Eds.) (2014). Discourses of helping professions. Amsterdam: Ben-
jamins.
Graf, E., T. Spranz-Fogasy. (2018). Helfende Berufe – helfende Interaktion. K. Birkner & N. Janich (eds.), Handbuch
Text und Gespräch, 419-443. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Levinson, S. C. (1979). Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17, 365–399.
Miller, K. & Considine, J. (2009). Communication in the helping professions. L. Frey & K. Cissna (eds.), The
Routledge handbook of applied communication research, 405–428. Abington: Routledge.
Pick, I. (2015). Das anwaltliche Mandantengespräch. Frankfurt: Lang.
Pick, I. (2017). Theoretische und methodologische Annahmen zur Typologisierung von Beraten. Beraten in
Interaktion. (pp. 19-51). Frankfurt: Lang.
Pick, I., & Scarvaglieri, C. (2019). Helfendes Handeln. E.-M. Graf, C. Scarvaglieri, & T. Spranz-Fogasy (Eds.),
Pragmatik der Veränderung: Problem- und lösungsorientierte Kommunikation in helfenden Berufen (pp. 25–64).
Tübingen: Narr.

816
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pick, Ina/Scarvaglieri, Claudio (2022): Helfen im Gespräch: Böhringer, D./Hitzler&Richter (Hrsg.): Helfen. Situ-
ative und organisationale Ausprägungen einer unterbestimmten Praxis. Bielefeld: Transcript, 163-192.
Redder, A. (2008). Functional Pragmatics. G. Antos et al. (Eds.), Handbooks of applied linguistics. Handbook of
interpersonal communication (pp. 133–178). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Scarvaglieri, C. (2013). ›Nichts anderes als ein Austausch von Worten‹: Sprachliches Handeln in der Psychothera-
pie. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter.

817
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Knowledge management in counselling on dementia risk


prediction

Panel contribution

Dr. Carolin Schwegler 1


1. University of Cologne

Counselling on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) detection and dementia risk prediction is a complex process and a rel-
atively new medical task without proper guidelines (Rostamzadeh & Jessen 2020). From a medical, ethical, and
legal point of view, it is desirable that the decision for or against a risk prediction – which is required after the
counselling – is ideally a step-wise shared decision-making process as an ensemble of health care professional,
patient, and close others (Alpinar-Sencan & Schicktanz 2020; Prvulovic & Hampel 2011). From a linguistic point
of view, predictive counselling meets central elements of helping interactions (Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018) and
offers interesting insights into the co-construction and management of knowledge in a biomedical and proba-
bilistic context (Lehtinen 2013; Schwegler 2021).
The aim of this contribution is to examine selected relevant discursive practices and their sequential organiza-
tion such as knowledge inquiring questions and “exploring (knowledge) by fishing” (Bergmann 1992) as well as
the procedural realization of (AD and prediction-) specific terminology – with a focus on explanatory synonyms,
repetitions, and reformulations.
Rostamzadeh, A. & Jessen, F. (2020). Früherkennung der Alzheimer-Krankheit und Demenzprädiktion bei Pa-
tienten mit leichter kognitiver Störung. Nervenarzt, 91, 832–842.
Alpinar-Sencan, Z., & Schicktanz, S. (2020). Addressing ethical challenges of disclosure in dementia predic-
tion: Limitations of current guidelines and suggestions to proceed. BMC Medical Ethics 21(2020), Article 33.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00476-4
Prvulovic, D., & Hampel, H. (2011). Ethical considerations of biomarker use in neurodegener-
ative diseases – a case study of Alzheimer’s disease. Progress in Neurobiology, 95(4), 517–519.
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.PNEUROBIO.2011.11.009
Graf, E.-M., & Spranz-Fogasy, T. (2018). Helfende Berufe – helfende Interaktionen. In: K. Birkner
& N. Janich (Eds.), Handbuch Text und Gespräch. HSW 5 (pp. 421–443. Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110296051-017
Schwegler, C. (2021). Prädiktive Medizin als Gegenstand linguistischer Untersuchungen. In: M. Iakushevich,
Y. Ilg & T. Schnedermann (Eds.), Linguistik und Medizin. Sprachwissenschaftliche Zugänge und interdisziplinäre
Perspektiven. SuW 44 (pp. 359–378). Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688696-021
Lehtinen E. (2013). Hedging, knowledge and interaction: doctors’ and clients’ talk about medical information
and client experiences in genetic counseling. Patient Education and Counseling, 92(1), 31–7.
Bergmann, J. R. (1992). Veiled morality: notes on discretion in psychiatry. In: P. Drew & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk
at work. Interaction in institutional settings (pp. 137–162). Cambridge, CUP.

818
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Knowledge management through formulation offers - the


example of Messenger-supported group psychotherapy

Panel contribution

Dr. Susanne Kabatnik 1


1. Greifswald

The balancing of knowledge asymmetries and the establishment of intersubjectivity is a central component
of eSA group psychotherapy (’electronic Situation Analysis) as a genuine helping format (Pick & Scarvaglieri
2019). The therapy format aims to treat persistent depressive symptomatology, which is often accompanied
by interpersonal conflicts (Schramm et al. 2011). The eSA format was developed to improve the communica-
tive behaviour of patients with depression (Grosse-Wentrup et al. 2020). Smartphones are used to analyse the
messenger-based communication of patients and their conflicts with familiars and relatives. Based on this,
the group formulates a message collaboratively. Different epistemata of the interactants play a role here, i.e.
both the professional knowledge of the therapists and the biographical, emotional and/or problem- or illness-
related knowledge of the patients as well as the communicative knowledge of the interactants. These manifest
themselves in particular in the formulation phase of the conversation, specifically in the formulation offers of
the interactants. The establishment of a common ground (Clark 1992; Deppermann 2018) forms the basis for
the joint project, namely the formulation of the message. In the formulation offers of the group, in which the
knowledge and experience fields of the patients are manifested, there are, for example, evaluative elements or
modal particles to indicate the epistemic status in the conversation (Heritage 2012; 2013). Using interactional
linguistics (Imo/Lanwer 2019), I focus on practices of knowledge management through formulation offers in
eSA group psychotherapy as a helping interaction format. The data basis for the investigation is an extensive
corpus of 14 group psychotherapy sessions recorded at the LMU Munich in the Department of Psychiatry and
Psychotherapy and transcribed in GAT 2.

819
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negative epistemic construction ‘I don’t know’ in German and


Bosnian medical interaction. A cross-linguistic study

Panel contribution

Dr. Minka Dzanko 1


1. University of Sarajevo

Following Beach and Metzger’s (1997) work on insufficient knowledge, studies on negative epistemic construc-
tion ‘I don’t know’ in informal, institutional, and telephone conversations in various languages emerged. So far,
very little research has focused on its use in medical interaction. Drawing from research in Conversation Anal-
ysis and pursuing a cross-linguistic pragmatic approach, I analyze two corpora of doctor-patient interaction to
explore semantic, sequential, epistemic, and pragmatic aspects of ICH WEIẞ NICHT and NE ZNAM in German
and Bosnian medical interaction. I argue that both phrases are being used as interactional practices to trans-
fer a certain degree of knowledge between patients and doctors. Data come from 29 German and 28 Bosnian
medical encounters. Analysis reveals similarities regarding (1) complementation patterns, turn-position, and a
temporal scope (2) as well as their function to display either partial or related knowledge that might contribute
to the topic at issue. However, as of their sequential context, the finding show differences which can be cor-
related with cross-cultural factors that influence medical interaction in German and Bosnian. While Bosnian
patients produce NE ZNAM predominantly in question-answer sequences on their subjective symptoms and
experiences of their illness, German patients use ICH WEIẞ NICHT in statements conveying patient initiatives
and self-diagnosis.
Keywords: conversational analysis, German, Bosnian, medical interaction, negative epistemics
References
Beach, Wayne A./Metzger, Terri R. 1997: Claiming insufficient knowledge. In: Human Communication Research
23 (4), 562-588.

820
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Patients’ interpretations and knowledge management in


medical interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Moa Hagafors 1


1. ICAR Lab

With recent years’ patient-centred approach, patients have been shown to take a more active role in medical
consultations, and the notion of patient agency is central to conversation analytical medical research. However,
the participation of patients seems to depend on the phase of the consultation, and Stivers (2005) shows how
patients are typically more active in treatment decisions than in the diagnosis. Peräkylä (2002) indeed demon-
strates how in Finnish primary care, patients rarely produce something more than a minimal acknowledgement
token after the announcement of a diagnosis, and that when they do produce an extended turn, it is rarely to
participate in the interpretation of evidence but rather to react to the diagnosis proper. This may be explained
by the importance of the professional vision (Goodwin, 2018) in this phase, where the expert knowledge of the
physician contributes to the exact understanding of their observations. It is well established that the epistemic
asymmetry in medical consultations not only depends on the participants’ inherent roles but also on the se-
quential unfolding of the interaction. Patients’ participation and claim of epistemic authority in the diagnostic
step of the consultation can thus typically help balance this asymmetry. In this presentation, the focus will be
on cases where patients participate in the interpretation of evidence, either when it comes to the evaluation of
the examination, or the interpretation of symptoms and its possible link to various treatments. Departing from
a Swedish corpus of nine video-recorded consultations in specialized care, we will look at examples of patients
unsolicitedly offering their interpretations and thus claiming epistemic authority. As will be shown, this is being
done in different ways: patients may express themselves freely before hearing the doctor’s interpretation, or
react as a response to it. The patient’s interpretation may furthermore be in line with that of the professional, or
contrast with it and bring up elements that the latter have failed to take into account. The sequential unfolding
of the knowledge negotiation in these examples will be analysed, showing how the doctor treats this kind of
participation. We will see how their responses range from non-response or minimal acknowledgement tokens
to an alignment with the patient’s production, taking their interpretation into consideration in the following
decisions.
Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139016735
Peräkylä, A. (2002). Agency and Authority: Extended Responses to Diagnostic Statements
in Primary Care Encounters. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 35(2), 219–247.
https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3502_5
Stivers, T. (2005). Parent Resistance to Physicians’ Treatment Recommendations: One Resource
for Initiating a Negotiation of the Treatment Decision. Health Communication, 18(1), 41–74.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327027hc1801_3

821
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Practices of knowledge management in interpreter-mediated


women’s healthcare interactions

Panel contribution

Prof. Laura Gavioli 1 , Prof. Claudio Baraldi 1


1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Due to a growing presence of migrant residents, consequent to movements toward the Western world,
institutional-help interactions, such as interactions in healthcare, increasingly include a further form of ver-
bal help that is translation between the language spoken by the institutional representative and that of the help
seeker. Thus so called “interpreter-mediated interaction” has caught the attention of interaction studies for a
while (e.g. Raymond 2014; Bolden 2018), highlighting the ways in which interactional forms of coordination
(Wadensjö 1998) help establish intersubjectivity. In this presentation we look at interactions in women’s health
care in Italy, which we have collected over the last 15 years, now making up a set of more than 500 encoun-
ters (about 100 hours recording, see e.g. Baraldi/Gavioli 2021 for a recent development of the project). The
patients in our data are migrant women speaking little or no Italian, who are helped by language mediators
providing interpreting service. We focus on what is defined by Wadensjö (1998) as “expanded renditions” of
the clinicians’ talk for the patients. In their expansions, the language mediators make their understanding ex-
plicit of what the clinicians are referring to, thus supplying knowledge for the benefit of the migrant women’s
understanding and participation. Such is the case for instance of medical items (illnesses, tests or therapies),
clinical procedures like check-ups, or recommendations about healthy behaviour (e.g. dietary choices), which
are all rendered explicatively by rephrasing the items (Weiste/Peräkylä 2015), in more easily recognisable and
understandable formulations. Expanded renditions then modify and re-present the clinicians’ utterances so
as to invite understanding (and participation) from the patient, a function of talk which is referred to in Her-
itage/Clayman (2010: 209) as transformative relaying. Thus, the way in which the interpreter’s epistemic status
(Heritage 2012) is related to the other participants’ epistemic status consists in filling a gap of knowledge based
on different practices of use of language in producing meaning in healthcare services on the one hand, and in
the migrants’ social contexts on the other. As a result, the interpreter’s epistemic stance in the interaction is de-
signed as that of a knowing speaker re-formulating talk with an orientation to enhance the migrants’ epistemic
status.
Baraldi, C., L. Gavioli (2021) ‘Effective Communication and Knowledge Distribution in Healthcare Interaction
with Migrants’, Health Communication 36(9): 1057-1058.
Bolden, G. (2018) ‘Understanding interpreters’ actions in context’, Communication & Medicine 15(2): 135–149.
Heritage, J. (2012) ‘Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge’, Research on Language
and Social Interaction 45: 1-29.
Heritage, J., S. Clayman (2010) Talk in action. Interactions, identities, and institutions. Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Raymond, C.W. (2014) ‘Epistemic Brokering in the Interpreter-Mediated Medical Visit: Negotiating “Patient’s
Side” and “Doctor’s Side” Knowledge’, Research on language and social interaction 47(4): 426–446.
Wadensjö, C. (1998) Interpreting as Interaction. London, Longman.
Weiste, E., A. Peräkylä (2015) ‘Therapeutic Discourse’, in K Tracy (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Lan-
guage and Social Interaction. Wiley-Blackwell.
. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi102

822
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘Benefactor’ recipient design in calls for help to the stasi

Panel contribution

Dr. Olga Galanova 1


1. Ruhr-University Bochum

Citizens outside and from the former GDR could find the telephone number of the Ministry for State Security
(stasi) in any telephone book and contact the authority verbally. All calls were secretly recorded by the stasi
and can be listened today in the Federal Archive for research purposes. My entire corpus consists of 800 calls
that were made available to me by the archive in the form of digitised and anonymised audio recordings.
The calls to the Stasi were not just enquiries, complaints and denunciations. Some of them were requests for
help, which, unlike denunciations and complaints, had not even been investigated. Therefore, the first challenge
for both the Stasi and the researchers was to distinguish the calls for help from the other formats, especially
those masquerading as calls for help. This leads to the following question, what characteristics indicate a help
format, what specificity do they exhibit in the institutional context studied, and how is the organisation and
distribution of help coordinated through the machinery of requests and offers in the setting studied (Clayman
and Heritage, 2014; Schegloff, 2007)?
In 1989, citizens complained about unfriendly behaviour by the officer on duty to whom callers were connected
and who attended to their concerns. This led to officers being instructed to greet callers with the “friendlier”
salutation “Can I help you?” and to introduce themselves on the phone with an alias. While the main aim
of the Stasi was not to provide a help service, but rather to keep records of callers’ personal circumstances, a
help-oriented practical epistemologies of trouble-telling prevailed and became accountable.
In this context, the following research questions became relevant, what relational constellation emerged from
such a self-initiated offer of help through this institutionally prepared greeting? How was a self-initiated re-
cipient design of a “benefactor” (Raymond/Zimmerman, 2016: ff218) carried through the interactive process
and what discrepancies resulted from such an opening sequence between “structural provisions” and “partici-
pants work design” (Jefferson (1972, p. 315)? These questions will be explored in my talk by means of concrete
examples played in German and presented in the form of translated transcripts.

823
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“What you have discovered here for yourself so far, maybe


represents a learning regarding the topic and about yourself.
Could one see it as such?” – (Epistemically) Pre-Structuring
Alternative Thoughts and Behaviours via Questions for
Solution Generation

Panel contribution

Ms. Frédérick Dionne 1 , Ms. Melanie Fleischhacker 1


1. University of Klagenfurt

Institutionalized helping transpires between a help-seeking client and a helping professional and is mainly re-
alized in and through (talk-in-)interaction. Its primary goals are to nurture personal growth and learning by
addressing help-seekers’ physical, psychological, intellectual and/or emotional constitution and problems re-
lated with it in a series of helping conversations (Graf et al. 2014: 1). Pick and Scarvaglieri (2019: 28; see also
2022) conceptualize such verbal helping as the “helping professionals’ tackling of activities and/or stages of an
activity in a goal-oriented process, which their help-seeking clients cannot carry out themselves (in the same
quality, speed etc.) at this particular point in time.” This (partially) taking over of activities for the help seekers’
benefit involves the professionals’ pre-structuring of (action) plans, solutions, or problem-solving interventions.
This is done via (epistemic) practices such as i) transmitting new or activating pre-existing knowledge, ii) intro-
ducing alternative patterns of thinking or behaviour, iii) providing assessment criteria for the help seeker to
evaluate such alternatives; and/or iv) the professional’s weighing of alternatives in respect to their potential
for goal attainment. As such, at the core of (professional) helping reside endemic epistemic asymmetries: the
helping professionals’ expert knowledge in tackling and addressing potentially problematic aspects of solution
generation, and the help seekers’ experiential knowledge regarding their concern and, indeed, what constitutes
an adequate goal and solution for their own needs (Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018: 427f).
Verbal helping presents structural similarities across a variety of counselling formats (Pick 2017; Pick & Scar-
vaglieri 2019/2022). Yet it differs in form and dimension, particularly on the level of pre-structuring which is
undertaken by the helping professional, i.e., expert-oriented interactions include more pre-structuring than
process-oriented helping does (Miller & Considine 2009). In work-related coaching, a process-oriented and
client-centered format (Graf 2019: 2, 59), coaches are generally conceptualized as “change-process facilitators”
(ibid.: 2), who, within a goal-oriented dialogue among equals (Jautz 2017), accompany and guide their clients
on their path to finding individual solutions. In this talk, we investigate how a coach’s verbal helping is realized
in solution-generating questions and to what degree coaches pre-structure clients’ solutions, i.e., alternative
ways of thinking or acting therein. To do so, we analyze how coaches’ (epistemic) practices (pre-)structure the
formulation of ideal solutions, the topicalization of resources, the development of concrete strategies, and the
evaluation of (interim) changes. We focus on 2 authentic systemic/solution-oriented business coaching pro-
cesses, which have been video-and audio-recorded and linguistically transcribed following cGAt conventions
(Schmidt et al. 2016).

824
Pragmatic approaches to
visual discourses in
online interactions
(organized by Carmen
Pérez-Sabater, Agnese
Sampietro)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From “Good for her” to “You in danger, girl”: making


multimodal moral judgements on Twitter’s ‘Am I the Asshole’
posts

Panel contribution

Dr. Elizabeth Marsden 1 , Dr. Alba Milà-Garcia 2


1. Åbo Akademi University, 2. Universitat Pompeu Fabra

This paper describes the multimodal posting practices in the community of Twitter users who follow the account
@AITA_Online. @AITA_Online reposts submissions from the sub-Reddit “Am I the Asshole?” in which users put
forward morally questionable situations in which they, or another person, may have been acting reprehensibly,
and ask the wider community for their judgment. Our data comprises 50 multimodal Twitter replies made by
users to nine reposts by @AITA_Online from May 2019 to August 2020 which received over 100 likes. Visual
elements may accompany a text comment added by the tweet author, they may have text embedded or they
may appear as a standalone image.
In the data, GIFs and images are used predominantly as reactions to previous posts (Herring & Dainas, 2017:
2186); more specifically, and as noted by Dynel (2020: 524), often offering a metaphorical or literal visualization
of a word used in the post, or the poster’s reaction/sentiment to the text. This embodiment of action or emotion
is an example of the ‘affective capacity’ of the GIF (Miltner and Highfield, 2017) format. Not all of our GIFs and
images fulfill this function however, with some, for example, serving to animate aspects of the original post.
Given the communicative goal of the dataset, which focuses on passing judgment on the actions of strangers, this
affective capacity is notably relevant, since these multimodal posts may illuminate a particular understanding
of the moral order (Kádár, 2017) or convey an (im)polite attitude towards the original poster or someone else
mentioned in their story. This presentation will look at a small number of multimodal posts in detail, exploring
their relationship to the surrounding context and potential communicative effects.
References
Dynel, M. (2020). Laughter through tears: Unprofessional review comments as humor on the ShitMyReview-
ersSay Twitter account. Intercultural Pragmatics, 17(5), 513–544. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2020-5001
Herring, S. C., & Dainas, A. (2017) “Nice picture comment!” Graphicons in Facebook comment threads.
Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2017-January: 2185–2194.
https://doi.org/10.24251/hicss.2017.264
Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Politeness, Impoliteness, and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interac-
tion. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107280465
Miltner, K. M., & Highfield, T. (2017). Never gonna GIF you up: Analyzing the cultural significance of the ani-
mated GIF. Social Media and Society, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117725223

826
18th International Pragmatics Conference

GIFs as Speech Acts

Panel contribution

Ms. Ashley Dainas 1


1. Indiana University

A picture is a worth a thousand words, but what about a picture that moves? Emoji and emoticons, the most
studied multimodal communication devices, have been shown to convey complex pragmatic and semantic in-
formation and to perform speech acts in text conversations (e.g., Ge & Herring, 2018; Herring & Ge, under
review). This raises the question of how GIFs, one of the more under-studied types of graphicons in computer-
mediated discourse (CMD), are used in conversation. The present study addresses this question.
As part of a larger study on the uses and interpretations of GIFs, 20 self-selected dyads submitted four GIF-
containing one-on-one personal text conversations. Two coders independently applied an adapted version of
the CMC act taxonomy (Herring, et al., 2005) consisting of 19 speech acts (e.g., elaborate, react, claim, desire) to
analyze the pragmatic meaning of each of the 80 GIFs in context. Interrater reliability never rose above 35%,
and so the coders discussed each item until agreement was reached. This discussion often resulted in both
coders changing their initial code.
Despite the lack interrater agreement, the results show that all the submitted GIFs could be seen as performing
at least one primary speech act. GIFs were used most often to comment on, explain, or literally or metaphori-
cally illustrate some aspect of a previous utterance. This was followed closely by being used to show listenership
or engagement as well as to approve or reject a previous utterance. GIFs could also make objective and subjec-
tive assertions; communicate desire, encouragement, or speculation; or promise future action. GIFs sometimes
performed other speech acts (e.g., requests, greetings, and apologies), but such uses were rare in the data. The
presentation will conclude by discussing the difficulty of applying speech act categories to complex and ambigu-
ous multimodal graphicons. The relationship between speech acts and other pragmatic functions (e.g., Herring
& Dainas, 2017) will also be considered.
References
Ge, J., & Herring, S. C. (2018). Communicative functions of emoji sequences on Sina Weibo. First Monday. 23(11).
https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i11.9413
Herring, S. C., & Dainas, A. R. (2017). “Nice picture comment!” Graphicons in Facebook comment threads. In
Proceedings of the Fiftieth Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50). Los Alamitos, CA:
IEEE. Available from: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/hicss.graphicons.pdf
Herring, S. C., Das, A., & Penumarthy, S. (2005). “CMC Act Taxonomy,” at
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/cmc.acts.html, accessed 12 June 2015.
Herring, S. C., & Ge-Stadnyk, J. (under review). Emoji and illocutionarity: Acting on, and acting as, language.

827
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Graphical elements in online relationship maintenance: Age


as a decisive factor

Panel contribution

Dr. Carmen Pérez-Sabater 1


1. Universitat Politècnica de València

This presentation proposal forms part of an ongoing study on how interactants exploit the technological affor-
dances at their disposal to create and maintain relationships in cases where online interaction is seen as an
extension of offline contact. Tong and Walther (2011) point out that the maintenance of interpersonal relation-
ships online is expressed through the frequent use of specific markers of bonding or bonding symbols, referred
to as “tie signs”, which serve to show the existence of a relationship between members of a given group or cou-
ple. The present study focuses on the role of graphicons, that is, emojis, emoticons, stickers, images, GIFs, and
video clips (Dainas & Herring, 2017), for the collective creativity of tie signs.
The corpus studied comprises 2 groups of interactions on WhatsApp during 2022: (1) those established among
the members of 5 WhatsApp groups and 5 dyads of adult users aged 18-70, and (2) those exchanged in 5 groups
and 5 dyads of teenagers aged 13-17 (total number of words 353 128/ 69 646 text messages). Langdetect and
its library demoji on Python drew the quantitative results on the number of texts with multimedia elements,
stickers, GIFs, emojis, emojis and text, and text. After the quantitative study, the discursive and pragmatic
functions of the graphic elements were studied following Pérez-Sabater (2019), Sampietro (2019), and Yus (2021),
centring on whether they offered propositional content or whether they simply enhanced group membership
by creating a kind of “proximity in the virtual”.
The analysis shows that most conversations are triggered by the exchange of a multimodal element in the adults’
exchanges. In contrast, in the teenagers’ texts, a personalized GIF or sticker usually starts this performance of
social connection. Another interesting outcome is that graphical elements work differently in adult user group
chats and dyads. Co-presence and connection is enhanced by sending an emoji to these groups of adult users,
whereas the exclusive exchange of pictograms is rare in the dyads studied. It seems that emojis need to be
accompanied by text (62% of the messages) to express the required propositional meaning, mainly to signal
that there is a relationship between the pair of interlocutors whose main reason for communication is to keep
that bonding alive; emojis do not appear to be pragmatically marked elements but are merely being used as
decoration. However, conventional emojis are rarely employed in teenagers’ texting to signal mutual affinity.
These young texters, probably in their need to stand out visually, base their dyadic interactions on messages
formed exclusively by personalized GIFs and stickers (67% of the messages).
Pérez-Sabater, C. (2019). Emoticons in relational writing practices on WhatsApp: some reflections on gender.
In Bou-Franch, P. & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (Eds.), Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Di-
rections (pp. 163-189). Palgrave Macmillan.
Sampietro, A. (2019). Emoji and rapport management in Spanish WhatsApp chats. Journal of Pragmatics, 143,
109-120.
Yus, F. (2021). Smartphone Communication: Interactions in the App Ecosystem. Routledge.

828
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How emojis interface with grammatical structures on


WhatsApp and Instagram

Panel contribution

Dr. Brenda Corchado 1


1. Inter American University of Puerto Rico

This work in progress is founded on the premise that emojis are mainly born from the need to compensate
for the lack of face-to-face communication that occurs in virtual environments. This compensation does not
occur in a vacuum, but is combined, usually in communicative interactions with syntactic structures that pro-
duce semantic content (Yus, 2021). These combinations can produce multimodal metaphorical constructions
(Forceville, 2009) whose meanings are elaborated with a social purpose; their understanding depends on the
shared cultural knowledge that the exchange participants may have. We are not only interested in knowing
how the modes were structured for the metaphorical creations, but we also intend to analyze syntactic aspects
in order to see to what extent this compensation is becoming a substitution, what types of syntactic structures
(verbs, nouns, adjectives…) are easier for the elaboration in emojis, and what tropes are more productives in
creating metaforical constructions (metaphors, methonymy, rebus…)
The corpus comprises messages from young Puerto Rican university students between the ages of 18-25, pro-
vided voluntarily. Their participation was anonymous and they received no compensation for that. The What-
sApp and/or Instagram messages had to contain some pictogram and, although, after the evaluation of the
sample, the communicative contexts of requests or rejections were preferred, they were not limited to these
contexts. After establishing the communicative purpose, we proceeded to identify the textual cohesion of the
message to recognize, through the same exchange, its understanding; that is, the same exchange evidenced
whether or not the communicative purpose was achieved.
The novelty and speed of changes in this context make it difficult to use a single theoretical framework to inves-
tigate them, so we took some aspects of the Cyberpragmatics proposed by Yus (2011) and for the analysis of the
multimodal metaphor (Forceville (2009, 1996) and Jewit et al (2016); for the textual cohesion of the metaphor
(Martinec and Salway, 2005).
The work is in process, so there could be modifications at the time of its presentation.

829
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Illocutionary context and management allocation of emoji


and other graphicons in Mexican parent school WhatsApp
communities.

Panel contribution

Dr. Elizabeth Flores-Salgado 1 , Dr. Michael Witten 1


1. Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla

Today emoji and graphicons are commonly used in WhatsApp interactions. WhatsApp is an instant medium
of communication that enables to use graphical forms such as emoji, photos, stickers or memes. Herring and
Dainas (2017) introduced the term graphicon to refer to these semiotic systems. The purpose of this study is
to analyze the interactional achievement of emoji and other graphicons in WhatsApp communities created
by and for school parents. It also aims to describe how they are used to signal the illocutionary force of the
utterance they accompany, their sequential position, and the management of turn allocation both before and
after the message in which they are used. Using a conversation analytic approach, 4824 messages written by
161 Mexican Spanish users, members of six different WhatsApp communities were examined in this study.
The results show that task-oriented speech acts were the most common in this community of practice. Speech
acts such as requests and responses to requests were mainly accompanied by emoji and graphicons. It was also
observed that these speech acts formed adjacency pairs in which requests most often formed the first part of the
sequence. It was also found that depending on the communicative purpose of the message and the type of speech
act used, the emoji functioned as either upgraders or mitigators. Emoji and graphicons also have the function
of managing WhatsApp conversations by signalling conversational turns. Another finding revealed that stand-
alone graphicons formed part of an adjacency system, replacing the verbal part of the message. Drawing on
Locher and Watts’ (2005) relational work model, the analysis revealed that the interactional use of emoji and
graphicons was influenced by the politeness rules of this community of practice.

830
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Kisses, peaches and fire: how emojis are used by online child
sexual groomers

Panel contribution

Ms. Andrea García-Montes 1


1. Universitat Politècnica de València

The presence of emojis has been mentioned in online child sexual grooming (OCSG) studies as one of the ele-
ments present in these interactions (Lorenzo-Dus, Izura & Pérez-Tattam, 2016; Chiang & Grant, 2019; Seymour-
Smith & Kloess, 2021). This is not surprising, since one of the main characteristics of digital communication is
the use of emojis (Pérez-Sabater, 2019; Sampietro, 2019; Vela, 2020; Yus, 2022). However, the research on these
graphicons (Herring & Dainas, 2017) in OCSG is reduced to McMahon and Kirley’s (2019) study. Their findings
show that emojis were recognised as evidence in diverse jurisdictions. Hence the importance of exploring the
pragmatic functions of emojis in OCSG discourse.
Following Lorenzo-Dus, Kinzel and Di Cristofaro, we understand OCSG as “an internet-enabled communicative
process of entrapment in which an adult uses language and other semiotic modes (e. g. images) to lure a minor
into taking part in sexual activities online and, at times, also offline” (2020: 15-16). One of the strategies used
by groomers to entrap their victims is by developing a deceptive trust relationship. Therefore, we can expect
groomers using emojis to accomplish rapport management (Pérez-Sabater, 2019; Sampietro, 2019; Zappavigna
& Logi, 2021). In this sense, emojis like face throwing a kiss or face with tears of joy —two of the most frequent
emojis in Cantamutto and Vela (2019) and Sampietro (2019)— are involved in this deceptive relationship. More-
over, if the main reason for groomers to talk with minors is to get sexual gratification, these adults might be
using emojis related to sexual terms; for instance, emojis such as peaches, aubergines or flames convey sexual
meaning (Méndez Santos & Linares Bernabéu, 2022).
In this investigation, we report the findings of the first linguistic analysis of emojis in OCSG discourse. This
presentation attempts to answer which emojis are the most frequent in our OCSG corpus. The data comprise 70
chat logs (103 475 words, 4669 emojis) exchanged among arrested offenders and real minors provided by the
Spanish Secretary of State for Security. Our analysis, based on CADS, shows that groomers predominantly use
rapport management oriented emojis rather than sexually marked pictograms. This suggests that offenders put
all their efforts into creating a false love relationship/friendship with their victims, which reveals their clear
manipulation tactics. With a similar aim, groomers use some emojis, especially the ones with anthropomorphic
facial expressions, strategically, since they mitigate sexual content, present it implicitly or, even, introduce it in
a playful way.
Lorenzo-Dus, N., Kinzel, A., & Di Cristofaro, M. (2020). The communicative modus operandi of online
child sexual groomers: Recurring patterns in their language use. Journal of Pragmatics, 155, 15-27.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.09.010
Pérez-Sabater, C. (2019). Emoticons in Relational Writing Practices on WhatsApp: Some Reflections on Gender.
In Bou-Franch, P. & Garcés-Conejos, P. (eds.). Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions.
Springer International Publishing, 163-189. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92663-6_6
Sampietro, A. (2019). Emoji and rapport management in Spanish WhatsApp chats. Journal of Pragmatics, 143,
109–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.02.009

831
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pictures vs texting, texting about pictures. Conversational


functions of everyday images on WhatsApp

Panel contribution

Dr. Agnese Sampietro 1


1. University Jaume I

Taking pictures is a common practice for many smartphone users. Nowadays, anyone with a smartphone can
take a photo or a screenshot and share it with other users both publicly and privately.
Research on photo-sharing practices has mainly focused on pictures featuring human participants (see, for ex-
ample, Venema & Lobinger, 2020; Katz & Crocker, 2015). In these situations, the phatic component is prominent:
users send pictures to share moments, emotions, and feelings with other people. Yus (2021), in effect, acknowl-
edges that the primary purpose of sharing pictures is the non-stop connection with other people. However,
seeking connection is not the reason for many photo-sharing practices. Indeed, the representation of every-
day objects or situations, especially when sent “on the go”, i.e., without embellishments, is largely unexplored.
This study aims to analyse how ordinary images (pictures of objects, screenshots, etc.), often with unesthetic
qualities, are introduced and commented upon in a conversation.
Data from this paper comes from a large (text-only) open-access corpus and a smaller multimodal (i.e., including
pictures) private collection of WhatsApp chats. Methods draw on computer-mediated discourse analysis (see
Herring, 2004) and digital conversation analysis (Giles et al., 2015). The analysis focuses on how pictures and
screenshots are included in conversations occurring in instant-messaging interactions.
Results suggest that WhatsApp users share pictures of objects and screenshots to discuss the object represented
or with phatic purposes. These images often appear in task-oriented exchanges, so they do not usually serve as
a prompt for storytelling. Nevertheless, images often open a conversation, setting the topic for the subsequent
discussion. Another function of pictures and screenshots is to sustain arguments with visual evidence. The
discussion also considers how using pictures in conversation demonstrates users’ semiotic ideologies about the
properties of photographic images.
References
Giles, D., Stommel, W., Paulus, T., Lester, J., & Reed, D. (2015). Microanalysis Of Online Data: The methodological
development of “digital CA.” Discourse, Context & Media, 7, 45–51.

Herring, S. C. (2004). Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Behavior. In


S. A. Barab, R. Kling, & J. H. Gray (Eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning (pp. 338–376).
Cambridge University Press.
Katz, J.E. & Crocker, E.T. (2015). Selfies and Photo Messaging as Visual Conversation: Reports from the United
States, United Kingdom and China, International Journal of Communication, 9(2015), 1861–1872.
Venema, R. & Lobinger, K. (2020). Visual bonding and intimacy: A repertoire-oriented study of photo-sharing in
close personal relationships. In C. Thurlow, C. Dürscheid, & F. Diémoz (eds.), Visualizing Digital Discourse (pp.
171-186). De Gruyter.
Yus, F. (2021). Smartphone communication. Interactions in the app ecosystem. Routledge.

832
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stickers and gifs to create identities: the case of


Cameroonians’ multilingual conversations on WhatsApp

Panel contribution

Dr. Ginette Maguelouk Moffo 1


1. University of Douala

This paper explores contextualized conversations of participants who use stickers and gifs in Cameroon What-
sApp groups. Online multilingualism considers different linguistic resources in user interaction (Danet & Her-
ring, 2007, Pérez-Sabater & Maguelouk-Moffo, 2020). Therefore, this study examines the role of the languages
used in stickers and gifs in two groups of participants on WhatsApp in Cameroon. The groups go beyond the
dominant French-speaking official language to include other local and national languages of Cameroon and a
growing number of hybrid languages, created mainly by the digital generation. The groups construct an iden-
tity on official and Cameroonian languages to show their link to the native home, and their interest in hybrid
communities (Anchimbe, 2011).
The data comes from two WhatsApp groups of participants from Cameroon who recently joined the university
in 2021. Data collection from these groups was not limited to the two official languages, English and French, it
also includes native Cameroonian languages.
The analysis centres, following Androutsopoulos (2007), on (1) the relationship between linguistic diversity and
ethnic identity online by examining the number of participants, their age and gender, and the dominant lan-
guage used in each group. Following Garde-Hansen and Gorton (2013), this presentation analyses (2) how stick-
ers intervene in the construction of online happiness and how they seek to eradicate cultural, social, political,
historical, geographical and religious differences. Finally, (3) a statistical analysis of the languages involved in
gifs and stickers is carried out.
The results show differences between the language practices of these groups. The quantitative analysis shows
that age is crucial in identifying the types of messages used, likely because age influences in the degree of orality
represented in different written stickers or Gifs and non-standardized languages.
Our research has established that this highly multilingual group of WhatsApp participants in the country adapt
their language to the written or spoken context in which they are involved. Gifs and stickers include text to
manifest the culture and achieve a particular goal in interaction.
Finally, the analysis of graphical elements shows that participants in post-colonial societies online prefer those
that mix languages, basically very colloquial French and some English. Indigenous and Cameroonian languages
are sometimes included to emphasise the solidarity among the participants by constructing the group online
happiness.
Anchimbe, E, A. (2011). The English language and the construction of a Cameroon anglophone identity. En A.
E. Anchimbe & M. Stephen, A. (Eds.). Postcolonial Linguistic Voices: Identity Choices and Representations. De
Gruyter Mouton, 77-98.
Cotelo García, R. (2022). Jelou pipol: Computer-mediated communication among Spanish-speaking gamers. John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 5(2), 257-290.
Danet, B., & Herring, S. C. (2007). The multilingual internet: Language, culture, and communication online. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press.
Garde-Hansen, J. & Gorton, K. (2013). Emotion Online Theorizing Affect on the Interne. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Pérez-Sabater, C. & Maguelouk-Moffo, G. (2020). Online Multilingualism in African Written Conversations: Lo-
cal, Global Identity and Alignment. Studies in African Linguistics, 49 (1), 141-159.

833
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Uses and functions of emoji in Spanish MPs’ Twitter profiles:


the influence of political ascription and gender

Panel contribution

Dr. Carmen Maíz-Arévalo 1


1. Complutense University of Madrid

From its first appearance on Twitter in 2007, hashtags have become ubiquitous in digital discourse, present
not only on Twitter but also on Instagram or Facebook. Hashtags are multifunctional, as they have evolved
from their original role as content and topic organisers to promoting social movements worldwide such as
#MeToo or #blacklivesmatter (Bisiada 2021; Zeifer 2020). Scholarly interest in hashtags, with a focus on its
communicative functions, goes back to the beginning of the 2010s (Page 2012; Wikström 2014; Zappavigna
2015). In the case of Spanish political discourse, hashtags have been proven to boost persuasion and to present
speakers’ communicative intentions in a concise and “easy to process” messages, which allows politicians to
get closer to their (potential) voters (Casañ Pitarch 2020; Pano Alamán 2020) while “branding” both their own
persona and the political party they represent (Mas Manchón and Guerrero-Solé 2019). However, most of these
studies centre on political tweets while politicians’ self-presentation on Twitter bios has not been studied. The
present study aims to redress this imbalance by zeroing in on the diachronic analysis of hashtags (and their
functions) by the Spanish members of parliaments (MPs) belonging to the consecutive terms 2016-2019 and
2019-2023. More specifically, the study aims to contrast the function(s) of hashtags in the Twitter profiles of the
350 MPs of the past term with the use of the same element by the 350 MPs of the current term. Adopting a mixed-
method approach, hashtags were thematically coded by means of NVivo. Results show a significant increase in
the use of hashtags by the politicians in the second group, with specific functions such as stressing the region
or county they represent, repeating their party electoral slogans or social movements. Furthermore, although
hashtags seem to point to the same themes, there are important quantitative differences when considering the
politicians’ political ascription (left vs. right-wing).
References
Bisiada, M. 2021. “Movement or debate? How# MeToo is framed differently in English, Spanish and German
Twitter discourse.” In Bisiada (ed.). Empirical studies in translation and discourse, 113-40. Berlin: Language
Science Press.
Casañ Pitarch, R. 2020. “Spanish politicians in Twitter: A linguistic analysis of their written discourse”. Ibérica
40: 195-206.
Mas Manchón, L. and F. Guerrero-Solé. 2019. “The use of hashtags as a political branding strategy/El uso de los
hashtags como una estrategia de marca política”. Revista Internacional de Relaciones Públicas 9(17): 5-24.
Page, R. 2012. “The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags”. Discourse
& Communication 6(2): 181-201.
Pano Alamán, A. 2020. “La política del hashtag en Twitter”. Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación 152: 49-68.
Wikström, Peter. 2014. “# srynotfunny: Communicative functions of hashtags on Twitter”. SKY Journal of
Linguistics 27: 127-152.
Zappavigna, M. 2015. “Searchable talk: The linguistic functions of hashtags”. Social Semiotics 25(3): 274-291.
Zeifer, B. 2020. “El hashtag contestatario: cuando los hashtags tienen efectos políticos”. Dígitos. Revista de
Comunicación Digital 6: 101-118.

834
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What is really at stake when we talk about “a pragmatics of


emoji”?

Panel contribution

Prof. Francisco Yus Ramos 1


1. University of Alicante

Inferring entails a gap-filling inferential activity performed to turn what is coded into what is meant. This basic
inference is also at work in internet-mediated communication (Yus 2011). In one of these internet-mediated
interactions, namely messaging apps, texts are mainly typed, but the user is aided by a number of additional
discourses (emojis, GIFs, stickers, audios…) and text-altering strategies (letter repetition, connoted use of punc-
tuation…) in the accomplishment of their communicative intentions. These discourses and/or strategies make it
easier to convey the intended interpretation within an otherwise cues-filtered environment. In this paper, I will
focus on one of these discourses on messaging apps: emojis (specifically on WhatsApp). From a cyberpragmatic
approach, typing an emoji on its own or attached to a text invariably has communicative value, that is, their
presence in the messaging conversation alters, modifies or complements the way specific texts are interpreted
and impacts how the overall interaction proceeds. A pragmatics of emoji normally aims at isolating their func-
tions, as I did with my three-fold distinction of categories: emoji within (the text), emoji without (the text) and
emoji beyond (the text) with a number of sub-functions (Yus 2021). In this paper, though, I acknowledge the use-
fulness of this pragmatic approach but intend to move beyond this analysis of emoji and show how interpreting
emojis entails inferential strategies that so far have only been isolated for verbal content. In short, I intend to
move beyond current semiotic analyses of emojis and, instead, picture them as genuine objects of pragmatic
analysis on their own, and whose interpretation also demands those inferential strategies that have previoulsy
been supposed to be only at work in the comprehension of verbal content.
References
Yus, Francisco. 2011. Cyberpragmatics. Internet-mediated communication in context. Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins.
Yus, Francisco. 2021. Smartphone communication: Interactions in the app ecosystem. Abingdon: Routledge.

835
Pragmatic aspects in
food-related
communication
(organized by Daniela
Cesiri, Francesca
Coccetta, Katia Peruzzo)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A pranzo is (not?) a dinner party. Observing words for


mealtimes in a corpus of Italian and translated fictional prose
in Italian (XIX-XX century)

Panel contribution

Dr. Floriana Sciumbata 1


1. University of Trieste

In his essay A che ora si mangia? (2017), the Italian historian Alessandro Barbero observes how times of meals
and their names have changed since the XVIII century: they do so from country to country, they become a status
symbol for social classes and shift through time, mostly owing to customs imported from abroad.
This study starts from Barbero’s observations and explores how words related to meals in Italian, especially
colazione and pranzo, as well as the related verb pranzare, changed their meaning diachronically throughout
the past two centuries. Colazione and pranzo are indeed interesting cases, with the former previously used to
indicate lunch and the latter dinner, or the most important meal of the day or a formal one, although today they
are commonly used for breakfast and lunch. Furthermore, the analysis seeks to understand whether there are
differences between their use and meaning in prose originally written in Italian and translated works.
The study is based on a corpus of fictional prose in Italian published between 1800 and 2005 and consisting of
two subcorpora (works originally written in Italian and translations into Italian, ~8,000,000 words). The corpus
is divided into four periods (1800-1899, 1900-1945, 1946-1975, and 1976-2005) on the basis of historical, social,
and cultural factors in Italy, which will be useful to compare meal names over time.
To find differences between Italian and translated prose and in different periods, colazione, pranzo and pranzare
were located in the corpus and considered if they specify the time of the day by mentioning the hour in which
they take place or through other lexical strategies (“in the morning”, “after waking up” etc.).
Results show that Italian writers consistently use colazione to indicate lunch and pranzo for dinner, while trends
are different in translations: the use of colazione and pranzo is innovative at first (indicating breakfast and lunch
respectively), and later more conservative (lunch and dinner respectively). Generally speaking, the cultural as-
pect ought to be taken into consideration, given that translators have the task of conveying different cultural
systems using a different language. The influence of other languages, mainly French, may explain the innova-
tive use of colazione in translations in the first periods, considering its two déjeuners indicating either breakfast
(without specifications) or lunch (when à la fourchette). In contrast, the more archaic use of the last period can
be ascribed to one of the translation universals, known as normalization (Laviosa-Braithwaite, 2001: 289-290;
Ondelli, 2020: 35, 65), which explains the translators’ tendency to choose more formal and standardized solu-
tions. In this specific case, the translators’ choice to use colazione for lunch and pranzo for dinner in recent years
may have also been an attempt to emulate a more bookish and formal language. Regarding pranzo, referring
to one meaning or the other not only depends on whether it is used in a translation or when writing formally
but also on the formality of the social event itself.

837
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Animating food and drink: How cartoons create fantasies,


stereotypes and expectations about food

Panel contribution

Prof. Anthony Baldry 1


1. University of Messina

“The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great,
round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors,
and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy brown-faced, broad-girthed
Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in
wanton slyness at the girls as they went by. […] The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits
in a bowl, […] appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and
round their little world in slow and passionless excitement”.
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, 1843
In the pre-animated cartoon era only brilliant novelists like Dickens could use language to create ante litteram
multimodal animations that encourage critical reflection on human nature. How much easier it is today to use
the affordances of the animated cartoon to turn inanimate foods into animated human beings and use body
movements such as lolling, tumbling, winking to poke fun at people’s fantasies, stereotypes, expectations and
disappointments. Yet when, in today’s animated cartoons, human identities are merged with food and drink
and their packaging, unanswered questions are raised about young people’s critical skills when exploring the
relationships between caricature-creating semiotic resources (Baldry & Thibault 2006) and their awareness and
empowerment vis-à-vis texts’ potential to manipulate and even to deceive (Vasta 2020, forthcoming).
Would animated cartoons, by their very nature, help with this empowerment? Could students find examples,
satirical or otherwise, that encouraged their critical reflection on human identities and membership of commu-
nities? Using the affordances of the OpenMWS platform (Taibi 2021; http://mws.pa.itd.cnr.it/) for multimodal
corpus construction, a group of university students constructed a searchable corpus of animated cartoon ex-
cerpts satirizing human behaviour through association with food and drink, focusing on the consequences from
the standpoint of pragmatics (O’Halloran et al., 2014) of merging human beings with food and drink in often
stereotypical but unexpected ways. The paper reflects on the students’ findings, that led them to widen their
field of investigation and undertake related experiments, in relation to the students’ capacity to undertake and
benefit from critical multimodal discourse analysis.
Baldry, A.P and Thibault, P.J. (2006) Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis, London and New York, Equinox.
O’Halloran, Kay et al. (2014). “Multimodal pragmatics”. Pragmatics of Discourse, in K. Schneider & A. Barron
(eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 239-268.
Taibi, D. (2021) Learning Analytics in Support of Video Corpus Construction and Exploration. In Proceedings of
the 20th European Conference On E-Learning, pp. 450-459.
Vasta, N. (2020) “Advances and Challenges in EFL Multiliteracy Environments”, in N. Vasta & A.P. Baldry (eds),
Multiliteracy Advances and Multimodal Challenges in ELT Environments, Forum, Udine, pp. 27-64.
Vasta, N. (forthcoming) “(Re)mediating Narratives of Identity in US Civil Rights Discourse: CMDA as a pedagogic
tool”, BAS Journal, 2023.

838
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Kids and nutrition– the new frontier in the discourse about


food

Panel contribution

Prof. Viviana Gaballo 1 , Prof. Sara Gesuato 2


1. Sapienza University of Rome, 2. University of Padua

Printed products and digital communicative events on food preparation, assessment and consumption have
been enjoying increasing social success. This phenomenon also applies to children, considering the number
of cookbooks and cooking shows catering to young chefs. Since Cutter’s (1994) research on the recipe genre,
scholars have been paying attention to the discourse about food (Bergman et al. 2022). Yet, to our knowledge,
no linguistic studies have been conducted on the discourse of food addressing children. Our study aims to
contribute to filling this gap.
We consider 91 kids’ recipes (about 30,000 words) available on the BBC Good Food website, 39 recipes from a
young chef cookbook (about 6,000 words) and nutritional advice for kids (about 15,000 words) accessible on the
Kids’ Health website. We address these questions: A) how are kids’ recipes and health information instructions
for kids organised? B) What relationship do recipe authors vs health advisers establish with their addressees?
Our approach combines a top-down and a bottom-up approach – i.e. familiarisation with the content and struc-
ture of the texts through repeated readings, and examination of collocational patterns of recurrent terms and
phrases.
The online recipes comprise more moves than the printed ones: both compulsory (Title; Mini-introduction;
Nutritional facts; Ingredients; Method; Questions/comments vs Title; Level of difficulty; Ingredients; Tools; In-
structions, respectively) and optional ones (Cooking implements; Recipe tips vs Tip, respectively), recognisable
from their headings and arrangement on the page. The most prominent in both sets is the Method, although
more detailed in the online recipes. Divided into numbered Steps, it guides the reader through the stages of
food preparation: it comprises instructions (“Peel X”; “Add Y”), indications on procedures (“then”; “with your
hands”), clarifications on procedures (“if using X”; “use X to do Y”), and warnings (“so they don’t X”; “be sure to
Y”). The focus is thus on the conative function of language.
The nutritional advice texts are divided into short (one-to-four paragraph-long) titled Sections, which contain a
combination of: attention-getting utterances (“Do you like putting on an apron and making a delicious snack for
your family?”); explicit “sensible” tips (“Also be sure to wash your hands before and after handling raw meat”),
and instructive information (“Stimulants make us feel more awake and alert.”). The focus in on the conative,
referential and phatic functions of language. In both datasets, the wording suggests a relationship between
experts and non-experts.
The findings suggest that recipe authors take their readers’ interest for granted, assuming no prior familiarity
with cooking, whereas nutrition experts appeal to kids both rationally and emotionally, aiming to sensitise them
to food health issues.
References
Bergman, Karolin et al. (2022) “ ‘Writing nutritionistically’: A critical discourse analysis of lay people’s digital
correspondence with the Swedish Food Agency”, Health, 26(5): 554-570
Cotter, Colleen (1994) “The cook, the community and the other”. In Bucholtz M. et al. (eds.) Cultural Perfor-
mances, Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, April 8-10, 1994, Berkeley, California
University of California, pp. 133-142

839
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Polite and politic work in Greek food blogs: The case of praise

Panel contribution

Prof. Angeliki Tzanne 1


1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Food blogging, “the practice of publishing food-related posts on a blog” (Lee et al. 2014: 228), is a way for people
to exchange information about food. In addition, bloggers and visitors to blogs have the chance to create and
maintain a network of relationships. In the case of Greek food blogs, in particular, participants have been found
to cultivate relationships of closeness and solidarity, mainly through the positive politeness strategies they use
(Tzanne 2019; 2022).
This paper is concerned with praise, a positive politeness strategy that occurs frequently in the comments sec-
tion of 10 Greek food blogs run by amateur cooks. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s ([1978]1987) theory of
politeness, and relational work, the discursive approach to politeness put forth by Locher and Watts (2005),
the paper examines the main forms of visitors’ praise, the ways it is received by food bloggers and the types of
relational work it performs.
It will be argued that, although praise could be seen as a clear example of Brown and Levinson’s ([1978]1987)
positive politeness strategies, in particular an output of “Notice, attend to H (his interests, wants, needs, goods)”
and “Give gifts to H (goods, sympathy, understanding, cooperation” (Brown and Levinson, [1978]1987: 103, 129),
in the case of Greek food blogs, praise, especially ‘simple praise’, may constitute politic relational work (Locher
and Watts 2005), that is, unmarked relational work which is merely adequate and appropriate for the specific
context. This can be justified by the fact that most of the instances of simple praise go largely unnoticed (Locher
and Watts 2005; Watts 2003) by bloggers and, thus, remain unacknowledged in the specific context of digital
communication.
In the light of the above, it will be suggested that, in the discourse of Greek food blogs, many instances of praise
may function as greetings or preface to other speech events like requests for information. Finally, it will be
argued that, since there is no evidence that not responding to praise is perceived as impolite, leaving praise
unacknowledged also constitutes politic behaviour in the particular context.
REFERENCES
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. ([1978]1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Originally published as Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In E. Goody, ed.,
(1978) Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. New York: Cambridge University Press. 56-289.
Lee, S. H., Samdanis, M. & Gkiousou, S. (2014). Hybridizing food cultures in computer-mediated environments:
Creativity and improvisation in Greek food blogs. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 72: 224-38.
Locher, M. A. & Watts, R. J. (2005) Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9-33.
Tzanne, A. (2019) Politeness, praising, and identity construction in a Greek food blog. In Ogiermann, E. and P.
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.) From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 48-67.
Tzanne, A. (2022) Relational Work in Digital Communication: The Case of Greek Food Blogs. Athens: Pedio.
Watts, R. (2003) Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

840
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Road to Well-Being: Illy’s CSR campaigns as a best practice


for local community engagement

Panel contribution

Prof. Nicoletta Vasta 1


1. University of Udine

In keeping with a major Conference strand – i.e. “how human interaction forges atypical solidarity ethnic,
social, linguistic and political divides” –, and with the Panel’s focus on “how communication about food and
nutrition is shaped, both verbally and visually”, this paper analyses Illy’s recent advertising campaigns on
coffee growing and consumption rituals.

The analysis shows that, while Illydreamers (2015) and Live HAPPIlly (2017) promote the brand as a lovemark
(Roberts 2005) – creating an intimate, long-lasting company/consumer relationship –, subsequent campaigns
are CSR-oriented, with Corporate Social Responsibility covering multiple topics “from safety and diversity
to ethics, the environment, and community involvement” (Evangelisti/Garzone 2011: 122) and incorporating
Illy’s commitment to sustainability and local communities’ engagement. Incidentally, Illy has established an
award-winning coffee procurement certification protocol to meet CSR standards (https://www.illy.com/en-
ww/live-happilly/stories-of-sustainability).

While the Thanks4thecoffee (2016-2019) campaign is one of the ways in which the company publicises its work
in establishing the above-mentioned certification protocol, its major focus is on celebrating International Coffee
Day by atypically showing the delivery to coffee growers of the thank-you-for-the-coffee messages collected on
its website and in Illy coffee bars worldwide. The campaign thus rather unusually focuses on creating a social
bond with coffee growers, rather than with the company or brand, and on promoting collective well-being
resulting from their work. To underscore the message of collective well-being, the thank-you messages are read
aloud to coffee growers by their children in the 2017 version of this campaign. The 2018 Half a Cup commercial
for this campaign pays tribute to women’s work in coffee production by multimodally underscoring the fact
that, since women represent almost half of the workers in the supply chain, their absence would result in half
a cup of coffee. Finally, in 2019, the campaign is based on plant-to-cup coffee sounds and on the thanks from
people worldwide to coffee growers, thus exploiting the synergic interplay of different semiotic resources.
Welcome on the Road to Happiness (2021) and Cupside Down (2022) complete Illy’s innovative journey to
solidarity and community well-being.

Starting from a brief overview of how coffee consumption differs as a result of the development of specific
cultural habits, the paper ultimately aims to investigate, in a CMDA perspective (Vasta 2005, 2010, 2012, 2020),
how the above-mentioned campaigns manage to instantiate narratives of social bonding and CSR which
represent an innovation, in pragmatic and strategic terms, with respect to more traditional fair trade policies
and discourse strategies enacted by other coffee companies.

References
Evangelisti P./Garzone G. (eds). 2011. Discourse, Identities and Genres in Corporate Communication. Lang.
Roberts K. 2005. Lovemarks. PowerHouse.

841
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Vasta, N. 2005. “Profits and Principles: Is There a Choice? The Multimodal Construction of SHELL’s Commitment
to Social Responsibility and the Environment…”. Identity, Community, Discourse. Lang,429-52.
Vasta, N. 2010. “Negotiating Roles and Identities in Corporate Advertising…”, Thresholds and Potentialities of
SFL… EUT,182-205.
Vasta, N. 2012. “Marketing and Resisting Plastic Surgery…”. A Lifetime of English Studies. Il Poligrafo, 649-73.
Vasta, N. 2020. “Place Branding…”, Il ritorno dei luoghi… ETS, 7-10.

842
18th International Pragmatics Conference

With a ‘Beat’ of Salt. The Evolution of Recipes in the TikTok


Era

Panel contribution

Dr. Ilaria Moschini 1


1. Università degli Studi di Firenze

Cooking recipes belong to a well-defined procedural genre, with the clear writing purpose of providing instruc-
tions on how to prepare dishes, which has remained remarkably constant over the years (Taavitsainen 2001).
For several centuries, the main formula of cooking recipes consisted of a title and a body of the text with the
instructions. At least since Medieval times, layout and coloring have assisted this division into text parts with
a typical two-part visual structure helping in “scanning by title and then reading a single recipe” (Carroll 2010,
64).
The emergence of channels of communication such as television and digital media has favored some trans-
formations in the scenarios where cooking recipes are produced and shared. Emblematic artefacts that have
emerged are television shows which – from the early informative programs led by home economists and nu-
tritionists – have turned into entertainment, personalized, and gamified shows (Collins 2009). Other artefacts
are food blogs, where communication can potentially take place between experts and non-experts (Cesiri 2020).
However, as Garzone highlights (2017, 47-48), the genre of cooking recipes appears to have remained quite un-
altered since culinary instructions tend to be embedded into such textual spaces through many examples of
intertextuality.
TikTok, a video-sharing social app that has exploded worldwide since 2018, has changed the global communica-
tive landscape by providing an influential hub for entertaining content, especially for the demographic group
of people between the ages of 18 and 24 years. “Cooking/recipes” is one of the most popular content categories
on this platform, featuring around 18 billion hashtag views at a global level (Statista 2022).
Through the multimodal analysis of a qualitatively selected corpus of TikTok cooking recipes, the paper will
explore the ways in which the genre has been affected by this new kind of digital mediation. It will investigate
how the semiotic work is distributed among the different resources offered by the digital platform in terms of
affordances and constraints. It will also examine whether the “semantic regime” that sets the ideational goals
of the media environment influences the ultimate communicative scope of this procedural genre.
Carroll, R. (2010). “The Visual Language of the Recipe: A Brief Historical Survey”, Food and Language Proceedings
of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2009. Hosking, R. (Ed). Totnes: Prospect Books, 62-72.
Cesiri, D. (2020). The Discourse of Food Blogs. Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York and London: Routledge.
Collins, K. (2009). Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows. New York and London:
Continuum.
Garzone, G. (2017). “Il genere ‘ricetta’ in lingua inglese”, Dalla tradizione ai food blog. Parole per mangiare.
Discorsi e culture del cibo. Bajini, I, Calvi, M.V., Garzone, G., Sergio, G. (Eds). Milano: LED, 38-56.
Statista Research Department (2022). “Most popular content categories on TikTok worldwide as of July
2020, by number of hashtag views”, Statista, Feb 15, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1130988/most-popular-
categories-tiktok-worldwide-hashtag-views/
Taavitsainen, I. (2001). “Middle English Recipes. Genre Characteristics, Text Type Features and Underlying
Traditions of Writing”, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2/1, 85-113.

843
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Eat, Play, Love”: An Interlinguistic Perspective on


Montalbano’s Pragmatics and Aesthetics of Food

Panel contribution

Dr. Carla Quinci 1


1. University of Padua

Much ink has flown on the hurdles of translating the crime stories of Camilleri’s extravagant detective
Montalbano either on paper or screen. The strong Sicilian identity pervading the setting and the characters’
language (e.g. Fodde, 2019; De Meo, 2020), habits, humour, and mindset represent the main translation
challenges in Camilleri’s work, making the translator walk the tightrope between preserving authenticity and
ensuring understanding. Besides shaping and depicting the Sicilian cultural identity, food may be considered
a fictional character in itself, one that holds a privileged relationship with Montalbano and overshadows
those with love and work. In an attempt to expand Dore’s (2015) work on the English subtitles of the first
13 episodes of Montalbano’s TV series and provide an additional, pragmatic perspective on the translation
of food discourse, this paper analyses all 36 episodes with English subtitles of Inspector Montalbano aired
by the BBC in the UK. All the food-related instances of verbal and non-verbal communication were retrieved
and analysed intra- and interlinguistically. The intralinguistic analysis considers the instances in the original
Italian version and explores how food is conceived, and how it shapes cultural and individual identities and
affects interpersonal relationships. Interlinguistically, the paper investigates whether and how these pragmatic
aspects are conveyed in Inspector Montalbano by drawing on Dore’s (2015) analysis of translation strategies,
with a focus on authenticity (Adami 2017). Some recurrent food-related references, including both food terms
and culinary habits, can be classified as expressing Montalbano’s national, regional, and individual culture.
These contribute to shaping his identity on multiple levels, thus increasing the character’s authenticity. As for
the relationship with food, some clear tendencies emerged. Food is often prioritized over work and personal
issues; it is celebrated – as are those able to prepare good food – and considered a form of art; it influences
people’s moods, and is offered and shared to welcome others. Contrary to contemporary views, overeating is
not condemned but is rather depicted as a way to celebrate food. Finally, food also carries an allegorical value,
as good food is associated with those who appreciate it or know the secrets and art of its preparation, and
bad food is associated with allegedly unworthy people, e.g., the Forensics. From an interlinguistic perspective,
national-level food-related cultural references (e.g. coffee) are often translated through direct equivalents,
while regional references are predominantly foreignised through borrowings (e.g. pasta ‘ncasciata), which
preserve their authenticity. Adaptation through generalisation also occurred, causing a partial loss of the
pragmatic nuances of food-related references.

References
Adami, Esterino. 2017. “Pragmatics and the Aesthetics of Food Discourse.” Anglistica AION 21 (1): 53–62.

De Meo, Mariagrazia. 2020. “Subtitling Dialect in Inspector Montalbano and Young Montalbano.” InTRAlinea.
Special Issue: The Translation of Dialects in Multimedia IV: 1–11.
Dore, Margherita. 2015. “Food and Translation in ‘Montalbano.’ ” In Food Across Cultures – Linguistic Insights
in Transcultural Tastes, edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Siria Guzzo, 31–47. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fodde, Luisanna. 2019. “L’identità mediterranea nella sfida traduttiva dell’italiano regionale: dai romanzi di
Montalbano alla sottotitolazione.” Quaderni Camilleriani 9: 89–103.

844
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Five Foods to eat if you have Covid-19”. Discursive strategies


in health claims of food-related communication

Panel contribution

Prof. Stefania Maci 1


1. University of Bergamo

The amount of popular literature, television and radio shows, online forums, and blogs on the reparative and
restorative properties of food and drink, has increased dramatically during the past 20 years. However, as the
public has become more educated about the irrefutable link between nutrition and health, it has also been
much more perplexed about what to consume. Due to the marketization of a variety of very diverse diets, each
claiming to be the safest and healthiest (the macrobiotic, vegetarian, pescatarian, ketogenic, and paleo, to quote
some of them), uncertainty about what we should be eating has created a sense of rising uneasiness. Those who
have survived an illness, particularly in the case of the pandemic, tend to feel this unease far more strongly,
worrying that specific drugs may be the cause of eventual death and that this can be overcome with the right
dieting.
This talk aims at providing an overview of the process and discursive strategies involved in formulizing and
disseminating health claims in food-related communication from science to laypeople in times of crisis (Covid-
19) across cultures (the UK and Italy), how these are decoded by laypeople and what information laypeople
process and retain.
In the first phase of our corpus-based investigation, we will gather information through official documenta-
tion in English provided by the health ministries of the interested countries in relation to food consumption
and Covid-19 treatment. Parallel to this, we will explore through social media (namely Twitter) how laypeople
interpret, understand and re-encode such food-related messages conveying health claims. The aim is to iden-
tify linguistic and/or visual attributes that play a key role in the understanding of food-related information in
relation to Covid-19 treatment across cultures and linguistic contexts.
The identification of the core discoursal and rhetorical features about food shared by health communities and
professional stakeholders from different language backgrounds (i.e. English and English as a Lingua Franca
when communicating to speakers of other languages), will allow the detection of those features that single out
the laypeople’s difficulties in decoding the textual output of such communities and thus in misunderstanding
the pragmatic intentions existing beyond the text. These findings will lead to the identification of the best (and
worst) communication practices about food by health professionals and stakeholders, which will help to elabo-
rate effective ways to

• formulate and disseminate proper food-related information in scientific health claims;


• develop recommendations and guidelines for Health Policy Makers, Regulators, and any interested stake-
holders on how to better construct food claims in relation to Covid-19 and any other serious disease that
can be understood by the intended consumer, taking into account cross-cultural and cross-linguistic fac-
tors.

845
Pragmatic development,
sense conventions and
the puzzle of non-literal
uses (organized by Ingrid
Lossius Falkum, Nicholas
Allott)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A turning point in metaphor development: Significant


improvements and shift in cognitive scaffolding during
school-age

Panel contribution

Mr. Nicolas Petit 1 , Prof. Valentina Bambini 2 , Dr. Luca Bischetti 3 , Dr. Ira Noveck 4
1. Hospital Le Vinatier, 2. iuss, 3. University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, 4. Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

Metaphors are a powerful and ubiquitous tool for verbal communication (Gao et al., 2017; Glucksberg, 1989; So-
pory & Dillard, 2002), but this process appears to be fully mastered only late in children’s development (Winner
et al., 1976). Although emerging early (Pouscoulous & Tomasello, 2020), metaphor comprehension remains task-
dependent until late, with a particular development window between 8 and 11 years old (Deckert et al., 2019).
The autism literature postulated two important cognitive bases for metaphors comprehension, namely theory
of mind and formal language skills (Kalandadze et al., 2019), the former because understanding metaphors
arguably requires reconstructing the speaker’s intention, the latter because refined and stable linguistic rep-
resentations might be necessary to derive a figurative interpretation. Yet, these two factors have only been
investigated more recently in typical development (e.g. Lecce et al., 2019 for theory of mind), but not in a joint
perspective. To fill this gap, we recruited 249 children between 6 and 11 years old, who were native French
speakers and whose parents did not report any neurodevelopmental disorder. Children were assessed for re-
ceptive grammar (BILO-2C CO, Khomsi et al., 2007) and theory of mind (PST, Langdon & Coltheart, 1999), as well
as for metaphor comprehension via a referential metaphors task (as Noveck et al., 2001) as implemented in the
TIPi (Test des Inférences Pragmatiques informatisé, Petit et al., in progress), a new tablet-based assessment tool
for pragmatic comprehension. Results showed a non-linear developmental trend in metaphor comprehension,
with a focused improvement between 7 and 9 years old. Mixed-effects models explaining children’s accuracy
and response times showed that the cognitive predictors of metaphor comprehension changed with age: the-
ory of mind was a reliable predictor in younger children (6 to 8 years old) but faded away in favor of receptive
grammar in older children (8 to 11 years old). These results confirm that school age is a key period for the de-
velopment of metaphor comprehension and suggest that the underlying strategies or cognitive scaffolding of
this ability might be evolving in this window.

847
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Acquisition of manner implicatures and sense of


conventionality in children

Panel contribution

Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 1 , Dr. Elspeth Wilson 2 , Dr. Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos 1 ,
Mr. Henrik Torgersen 1
1. University of Oslo, 2. University of Cambridge

Grice’s Maxim of Manner entreats speakers to ‘avoid obscurity of expression’, ‘avoid ambiguity’, ‘be brief’ and
‘be orderly’ (Grice, 1975; but see later reformulations in Horn 1948 and Levinson 2000). If a speaker says ‘that
idea is not impossible’, she implies that it is not straightforwardly possible, otherwise she would have used the
synonymous but briefer alternative, ‘possible’. To date, manner implicatures have only been tested in children
with the lexical-periphrastic causative alternation (e.g. ‘he made the door close’ vs. ‘he closed the door’), which,
however, is possibly lexical rather than pragmatic (Antoniou & Katsos, 2017).
Manner implicatures present an interesting case in revealing how children’s cognitive development interact
with their pragmatic competence. In particular, a rich literature documents children’s development of conven-
tionality, both linguistically and across a range of nonlinguistic domains. This may include a stage of heightened
sensitivity to convention (Falkum, 2022).
We investigate the acquisition of manner implicatures in children by looking at lexical alternations within DPs.
Using the relation between a lexical item and a hyperonym (e.g. ‘chocolate cake’ vs. ‘round chocolatey thing’),
we investigate how children comprehend manner implicature used to reference an untypical variant of the
base form. In terms of acquisition, we investigate two hypotheses:
(H1) Children follow an inverted u-shape in rates of manner inferences
(H2) Children reach adult-like rates of manner inferences relatively late
Method: We use a picture-selection task with 3-, 5- and 7-year-olds and adults (total N = 96). Participants hear a
context sentence, which either establishes a supportive context (e.g., It was Tom’s birthday so Sasha tried some
baking) for the marked meaning or a neutral context (e.g., It was Tom’s birthday so Sasha did some baking),
followed by either a marked implicature-triggering sentence (e.g., She made a round chocolately spongey thing)
or an unmarked literal sentence (e.g., She made a chocolate cake). Supportive/neutral contexts are crossed with
critical/control sentences to yield four conditions. Participants are presented with two images on a screen, one
matching the marked meaning of the utterance, and one with the unmarked meaning, and listen to the short
story (context sentence + critical/control sentence). After each story, participants are asked to point to the picture
which matches the utterance.
In favour of (H1), children’s heightened sense of conventionality could mean that they acquire implicatures as
soon as other implicatures, and may even be more sensitive to them than adults. This would predict an inverted
U-shaped development, where children begin to derive manner implicatures, and then with heightened sense
conventions do so increasingly, before decreasing to adult-like levels.
On the other hand, pro (H2), although manner and quantity implicatures share similarities, manner implica-
tures are plausibly more complex, and therefore more challenging for children, in that they involve negation
of the inference to the stereotypical of the unmarked alternative (i.e. ‘a normal chocolate cake’) rather than
negation of the alternative’s meaning itself (following Levinson).

848
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Class innovation and sense conventions at the


syntax/pragmatics interface

Panel contribution

Mx. Biu Rainey 1 , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 1


1. University of Oslo

Children as young as 2 years old are well-documented in their capacity for lexical innovation, including ex-
tending words across class boundaries (e.g. “I’m talling” for getting taller, Clark 1993). However, experimental
evidence suggests children struggle with class derivation before 3 (e.g. Lippeveld & Oshima-Takane 2015,
2020). Why the disparity?

Almost all of this experimental literature holds the common assumption that roots are marked for class in the
lexicon, and that class derivation is therefore reliant on the acquisition or activation of transformational rules.
We propose instead that class is not lexically marked. Morphosyntax instructs the parser to retrieve and
construe an unmarked concept X in the manner that the speaker intends - that is, the optimally relevant
manner. As a consequence, we hypothesize that as long as the communicative task at hand is not beyond their
developmental level in terms of pragmatics, even the youngest children should be able to process innovative
uses of class.
If the above holds, then class innovation should be impacted by sensitivity to convention. Encounters with
words act as convention-shaping mechanisms, with each encounter further entrenching a given interpretive
process as the conventional method of construing the associated concept - similarly to how sense convention
interference might occur in instances of metonymy or other modulation (Falkum, Recasens & Clark 2019). We
created an experimental setting to investigate this, testing children’s understanding of innovative uses of class in
both ‘familiar’ and ‘novel’ conditions. In the familiar condition, the children will have acquired both the target
item and at least some associated class conventions through usage. In the novel condition, the children will
have no pre-existing class conventions associated with the term, and will thus be relying entirely on pragmatic
capacity to grasp the speaker’s intended meaning (Carston 2016).
In the experimental design, children from 2 to 5 years old engage in a picture selection task. They first encounter
an animated character, who performs either a novel or a familiar action, accompanied by a verbal prompt
(e.g. “Look! It’s waving/plikking!”). They then see two new characters, one of whom will be performing the
taught action while the other performs a novel distractor. Children are asked to identify the target, this time
in a nominal frame (e.g. “Can you show me the waver/plikker?”). Both picture selection and reaction time are
recorded and analysed. This process is repeated for 10 items (not including control items), 5 familiar and 5
novel, with encounter order randomized, resulting in a within-subject design. Following the above account,
our prediction is that in both the novel and familiar conditions a high success rate in target selection will be
seen at the youngest age. However, this success rate will fall off with age in the familiar condition, due to an
increasing sensitivity to class convention in the older children.

849
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Literalism in Autistic Individuals: Relation with Predictive


Processing Accounts

Panel contribution

Dr. Valentina Petrolini 1 , Mr. Christian Michel 2 , Prof. Agustin Vicente 3


1. University of the Basque Country, 2. University of Edinburgh, 3. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque
Country

1. Autistic individuals have a stronger tendency than neurotypicals to understand non-literal uses of language
literally (Chahboun et al., 2017), as well as to experience difficulties in understanding implicit meanings (Wilson
& Bishop, 2020). Vicente & Falkum (2021) criticize existing accounts of such phenomena. In this contribution,
we propose to relate literalism to predictive processing accounts of autism.
2. Predictive processing (PP) holds that the brain, in its effort at building a model of the environment, is con-
stantly making predictions about what the subject is going to experience, updating the model according to the
input received. Predictions are then assigned prior probabilities according to how reliable the model is taken to
have been in the past. According to PP approaches to autism, a core difference between neurotypical and autis-
tic brains is the weight assigned to sensory information. While the neurotypical brain assigns more confidence
to its higher level priors, the autistic brain assigns more weight to sensory data at the expense of such priors
(Pellicano & Burr, 2012). PP accounts have offered explanations of most autistic symptoms, from insistence on
sameness to social difficulties (Palmer et al., 2017).
3. Predictions also play an important role in linguistic comprehension. Pickering and collaborators (Pickering
and Garrod, 2021) have proposed a model of language understanding where hearers are constantly issuing
predictions about prosody, syntax, content, and intentions of the speaker. Predictions at these different levels
are constantly and dynamically updated depending on what the speaker is actually producing.
4. Concerning non-literal uses of language, or implicit meanings in general, hearers have to guess what speakers
try to convey. Take an implicature that includes the question (Wilson & Bishop, 2020): “Did you hear what the
police said?” and instead of the predicted answers – i.e., ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – the hearer gets the following answer:
“There were many trains passing by”. In order to get the implicated meaning ‘no’, the hearer has to be confident
that, no matter what the speaker actually says, the answer has to be ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Regarding figurative language - especially metaphorical language - hearers have to find the right analogy after
an unexpected semantic clash (E.g. Juliet is the sun - but in what way?). The hearer expects certain features in
the predicate (e.g., features that apply to persons), and is surprised by a predicate whose salient features are not
the expected ones. High confidence in one’s prediction about the overall speaker’s meaning may make it easier
to select features that are applicable to the subject of the utterance while suppressing the rest. By contrast, low
confidence in one’s prediction may make it harder to suppress features of the literal meaning, and make the
hearer get stuck as a consequence, trying to make sense of how to apply literal predication.
5. A PP account can successfully explain literalism in autism, as well as the observed asymmetry between, inter
alia, metaphor comprehension and metaphor production (Kasirer & Mashal 2014), where individuals arguably
experience a lower degree of uncertainty.

850
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Losing the thread: How 3- and 5-year-olds predict the outcome


of a story when non-literal language is used to update events.

Panel contribution

Dr. Claire Prendergast 1


1. University of Oslo

How do young children make sense of non-literal language in context? In a picture selection task testing 3- and
5-year-old’s capability to predict the outcome of a story when an idiom is used to update events, we investigated
the cognitive strategies preschool children adopt in event prediction and how much weight they assign to differ-
ent contextual cues in doing so. In the main study, Norwegian-speaking children (N=122) were asked to predict
the ending of story from a polynomial display of four options onscreen relating to event prediction heuristics:
anchoring (outcome event not updated by the idiom), representativeness (correct outcome), availability (a literal
interpretation of the idiom) and nominal matching (distractor). A follow-up study (N=40) alternated onscreen
options to further investigate differences in performance on the task for each age group. In the main study we
found that 5-year-olds chose the literal option at a significantly higher rate than 3-year-olds. However, 3-year-
olds also chose the literal option more than any other option and were more likely than 5-year-olds to choose the
anchoring and nominal matching options. Neither group were more likely to choose the correct option. In the
follow-up study, when no literal option was available, 5-year-olds chose the correct option significantly more
than in the main study. By increasing sensitivity to several contextual aspects of the experiment, we managed
to further contextualize results from previous studies explaining differences in how 3 and 5-year-olds handle
non-literal language in an otherwise predictable context. We propose that this hinges in part on differences in
how social others are held accountable for their language use.

851
18th International Pragmatics Conference

That child is a grasshopper (because he jumps a lot):


children’s development of novel metaphor comprehension

Panel contribution

Ms. Isabel Martín-González 1 , Dr. Kristen Schroeder 2 , Dr. Camilo Ronderos 2 , Dr. Elena Castroviejo 1 ,
Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 2 , Prof. Agustin Vicente 3
1. University of the Basque Country, 2. University of Oslo, 3. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque
Country

• The literature on metaphor comprehension has produced two major views on when children are able
to understand novel metaphors (Falkum, 2022): the “literal-stage hypothesis” posits that this occurs at
10-12 years of age. In contrast, the “early-bird” view holds that even children as young as 3 are able to
make sense of novel metaphoric language when the task is age-appropriate (Pouscoulous & Tomasello,
2020). Evidence for the “early-bird” view comes from referential, perceptually-based metaphors (e.g.,
“the tower with the hat” referring to a roof). The goal of the current work is to examine the develop-
ment of metaphor comprehension using nominal metaphors akin to those used by the “literal-stage
hypothesis” tradition (e.g., “the prison guard was a hard rock”), albeit using child-appropriate methods.

• We deployed an eye-tracking, visual world paradigm in which children (ages 3-9) heard 10
metaphoric (normed for novelty) or literal sentences while examining four pictures (a metaphoric, a
literal and two distractors). The metaphoric condition included a context sentence and a metaphor, e.g.,
“Grasshoppers jump a lot [context sentence] That child is a grasshopper [metaphor]”. The literal con-
dition was the same but substituted “child” with “animal”. Participants had to select the picture they
thought best described the referent at the end of each trial.
• The experiment included the predictors SENTENCE TYPE (two leves, ‘metaphoric’ vs. ‘literal’), AGE (con-
tinuous, measured in days) and their interaction as fixed effects. Eye-tracking data was analyzed fitting
a linear, mixed-effects model to the log-probabilities of looks to metaphoric picture divided by looks to
the literal picture. Forced choice data was analyzed by fitting a logistic regression model to the type of
picture selected at the end of the trial (1= metaphoric picture, 0= literal picture). Both models included
a ‘maximal’ random effects structure, with random intercepts and slopes (for both factors and their in-
teraction) by items and by participants.
There was a significant effect of AGE (p<0.01) on picture selection and on log-gaze probabilities for the
metaphoric condition, but not for the literal condition, which resulted in a significant interaction be-
tween both factors (p<0.01) for both types of data.
• The results suggest that children get better with age at understanding metaphors (they look progres-
sively more at the metaphoric picture and select the metaphoric picture at the end of the trial more
often as they get older in the metaphoric condition), but not at understanding their literal equivalents.
The youngest participants (3-4-year-olds) did not seem to understand the metaphors used in the
experiment. Our study thus stands in contrast with both the ‘early-bird’ and ‘literal-stage’ views.
We posit a continuous, linear improvement in metaphor comprehension, with 5-year-olds being the
youngest to understand the nominal metaphors in our task. We discuss our results in the light of other
work on the development of figurative language comprehension.

References

852
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Falkum, I. L. (2022). The development of non-literal uses of language: Sense conventions and pragmatic
competence. Journal of Pragmatics, 188, 97–107.

Pouscoulous, N., & Tomasello, M. (2020). Early birds: Metaphor understanding in 3-year-olds. Journal of Prag-
matics, 156, 160–167.

853
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Emergence of Second-Order Epistemic Vigilance and its


Developmental Trajectory

Panel contribution

Dr. Marie Aguirre 1 , Dr. Thomas Castelain 2 , Prof. Nausicaa Pouscoulous 3 , Prof. Diana Mazzarella 1
1. University of Neuchâtel, 2. Universitat de Girona, 3. University College London

Humans are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that allows them to face the risk of misinformation
and underlies their ‘epistemic vigilance’ towards the trustworthiness of the source of the information and the
believability of its content (Sperber et al., 2010). Epistemic vigilance plays a role in the understanding of decep-
tive uses of language, such as blunt lies (Mascaro & Sperber, 2009). Previous work in pragmatics put forth the
hypothesis that epistemic vigilance may also contribute to the understanding of figurative uses of language, such
as irony (Wilson, 2009). Mazzarella and Pouscoulous (2021) have proposed that irony comprehension requires
the exercise of so-called ‘second-order epistemic vigilance’: the ability to assess others’ epistemic vigilance. This
capacity would allow interpreters to recognize that the ironical speaker is dissociating from a source that she
judges untrustworthy and/or content that she judges false or irrelevant. This opens up new research avenues
for developmental pragmatics: Is the development of irony comprehension buttressed by the child’s epistemic
vigilance? To answer this question, it is crucial to examine the co-development of epistemic vigilance and prag-
matic skills. Little is known, though, of when second-order epistemic vigilance emerges and how it develops
during childhood.
The present study investigates the emergence of first- and second-order vigilance towards deception in early
and middle childhood. To assess second-order vigilance, we devised a new ‘false communication task’ (adapted
from Mascaro & Sperber, 2009). Children were first exposed to the behaviour of a partner who faces multiple
trust choices between a benevolent and a malevolent informant. We thus manipulated the vigilance of the part-
ner: in the Vigilant condition, the partner systematically trusts the benevolent informant, while in the Gullible
condition, the partner systematically trusts the malevolent informant. In a subsequent phase, we tested chil-
dren’s propensity to accept a piece of information from the same partner, as a measure of their second-order
epistemic vigilance (their ability to keep track of the vigilance of their partner and act accordingly)
We tested four- to seven-year-olds (N = 225) and adults (N = 60) as a control group. Children were tested in
four sessions (one control and three experimental sessions). Each experimental session involved a different
manipulation of the benevolence/malevolence of the informants in both first- and second-order epistemic vig-
ilance tasks: a moral characterization (“mean” vs. “nice”), an epistemic characterization (“always tells lies” vs.
“always tells the truth”), and an intentional one (“wants to help” vs. “does not want to help”). Participants were
tested on their first-order epistemic vigilance when evaluating the trustworthiness of the two informants, and
on their second-order epistemic vigilance when evaluating the trustworthiness of the vigilant/gullible partner.
Our findings on first-order epistemic vigilance are in line with previous literature. Results on second-order
epistemic vigilance revealed that children are sensitive to the distinction between a vigilant and a gullible part-
ner starting from the age of 5. However, across all the age groups tested, children appear to display a strong
tendency to trust their partner, in both the Vigilance and the Gullible conditions.

854
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Uncoupling children’s literal bias from their metaphor


comprehension abilities

Panel contribution

Ms. Mary Beth Neff 1 , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 1


1. University of Oslo

If you were to stub your toe and say, “Ah - my toe is on fire!”, there are two possible interpretations to take—that
your toe is literally on fire or that your toe is in a lot of pain. Depending on the context, adults may interpret this
statement metaphorically. Children, however, often interpret these metaphorical utterances literally and do so
even if the context is infelicitous (Vosniadou, 1987,1989). We investigate why, between these two alternatives,
children privilege the literal interpretations of novel metaphorical statements.
In efforts to tease apart children’s treatment of literal versus metaphorical meaning, metaphor comprehension
tasks often require children to disambiguate between the two interpretations (e.g., Long et al., 2021). For ex-
ample, after hearing “Lucy is a parrot”, children were asked to choose which of three images the experimenter
wanted: the parrot, the girl resembling a parrot, or a different girl (Long et al., 2021). Like in other studies, chil-
dren’s responses were literally biased, which has often been suggested to indicate a difficulty with metaphor.
However, because both literal and metaphorical interpretations are visually depicted in these tasks, and thus
equally available as referents, choosing literal alternatives does not provide clear evidence against metaphor
comprehension. Instead, these findings could suggest that children privilege literal information when available.
If the aim of metaphor comprehension tasks is for children to pick metaphorical interpretations, then provid-
ing evidence that the literal interpretation is also afforded could confuse that goal. Therefore, removing these
literal options may provide a better test of children’s metaphor comprehension. In a recent study, Pouscoulous
and Tomasello (2020) replaced literal alternatives with distractors and found that 3-year-olds could comprehend
novel metaphors. For example, children were given two toy cars—one with a large sack on its roof (metaphor-
ical) and one with a similar sack inside (distractor)—and asked to “Pick the car with the backpack.” Children
chose metaphorical depictions over distractors, demonstrating that even 3-year-olds can access metaphorical
meaning. However, given this is a single study it is unclear whether these findings are specific to the task or
the type of metaphor tested. It also does not show whether reintroducing literal options would impede this
understanding.
Adapting Pouscoulous and Tomasello (2020), we investigate whether 3- to 7-year-old children can understand
a variety of novel attributional, functional, and psychological metaphors and whether this understanding is
impeded by literal competitors. Children will hear a metaphoric utterance and be asked to choose which of
two images the utterance refers to. In the first experiment, children will be presented with metaphorical and
distractor images. In the second experiment, the distractor will be replaced by a literal depiction.
We predict that children will privilege metaphorical images over distractors (Exp1) but not literal images (Exp2).
If this were the case, it would suggest that literalism could be attributed to broader communicative expectations
rather than a deficit in metaphor comprehension. If literalism is distinct from figurative comprehension, then
this would also suggest that previous tasks that included literal competitors may have underestimated children’s
ability with metaphor.

855
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When children are more pragmatic than adults: Norwegian


children’s comprehension of precise and imprecise absolute
adjectives

Panel contribution

Dr. Camilo Ronderos 1 , Ms. Emma Mathisen 1 , Dr. Ira Noveck 2 , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 1
1. University of Oslo, 2. Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

Traditionally, studies in developmental pragmatics have shown that children struggle with deriving non-literal
meaning and prefer to derive semantic (or ‘literal’) interpretations of phenomena such as metaphor, irony,
hyperbole or scalar implicatures (Demorest et al, 1983; Noveck, 2001, i.a.). With age, they learn to interpret
the intended non-literal meaning of such expressions. However, does this developmental tendency mean that
children always go from first grasping the semantic meaning to later learning the intended (pragmatic) meaning
of an utterance?
The current work attempts to answer this question by investigating the development of comprehending maxi-
mum standard absolute gradable adjectives such as straight. These adjectives can have both a precise (“lit-
eral”) (perfectly straight) and an imprecise (“non-literal”) (straight enough) interpretation. Their precise inter-
pretation is generally believed to be part of the adjective’s semantic meaning, whereas the imprecise interpre-
tation is seen as a pragmatic adjustment (see Kennedy, 2007, i.a.).
We tested 100 native speakers of Norwegian ages 3-8, and 33 adults. Participants saw 12 critical items and 12
fillers on a tablet screen. In each trial, participants heard an instruction to select a picture. They saw three
pictures including a distractor referent, a target referent (precise, imprecise or incorrect control picture) and
a red X, signifying that neither of the two pictures was the correct referent (See Figure 1). The Experiment
had CONDITION (three levels: precise, imprecise, control), AGE (continuous predictor measured in days) and
their interaction as fixed effects. The dependent variable was whether participants selected the target picture
(coded as 1) or the red X (coded as 0). Instances of selecting the distractor image (less than 2% of the data) were
discarded.
We fitted a mixed-effects, ‘maximal’ logistic regression model to the data. We found an interaction between
CONDITION (precise vs. imprecise levels) and AGE (z-value= 2.4, p<0.05), suggesting that, with age, children
were less likely to tolerate imprecise interpretations and increasingly preferred precise ones (see Figure 2).
Adults were significantly less likely to tolerate imprecision relative to the youngest age group (3- to 4-year-olds),
whereas there was no significant difference in their acceptance for precise referents.
Overall, our findings suggest that children behave more pragmatically than adults when understanding im-
precision, and that only with age do they become less tolerant of imprecise interpretations of absolute adjec-
tives. This speaks against a general ‘semantics-first’ developmental trajectory. We discuss whether children’s
increased knowledge of and sensitivity to conventional senses of absolute adjectives (assuming that the precise
senses are perceived as “more correct” than imprecise ones) makes them less accepting of imprecise uses with
age.

856
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When do children (really) start understanding irony?

Panel contribution

Ms. Ana Milosavljevic 1 , Prof. Nausicaa Pouscoulous 2 , Dr. Thomas Castelain 3 , Prof. Diana
Mazzarella 1
1. University of Neuchâtel, 2. University College London, 3. Universitat de Girona

Research on the development of irony comprehension does not show a consistent acquisition pattern. While
several studies point to a relatively late development during late childhood or even adolescence (see, e.g., De-
morest et al., 1984), others suggest that children may be sensitive to irony much earlier (around the age of 6, see
Köder & Falkum, 2021).
First, these mixed results raise some methodological issues. Such variability could be explained by the variety
of tasks used, requiring different levels of metalinguistic and linguistic abilities. Furthermore, it is an open
question whether the measures of irony comprehension employed in the studies with younger children can
effectively capture a full-fledged understanding of irony, or merely detect their sensitivity to the existence of a
mismatch between the speaker’s expectations and the actual context.
Second, this complex picture calls for a better understanding of the socio-cognitive repertoire that supports
irony acquisition. Mazzarella and Pouscoulous (2021) proposed that irony comprehension requires the exer-
cise of advanced forms of epistemic vigilance, which allow hearers to grasp the speaker’s ironical attitude and
recognize that the speaker is distancing herself from a source deemed unreliable and/or content considered
false or irrelevant.
The present study aims to (1) examine the emergence of irony comprehension by assessing whether young chil-
dren’s successful performance in irony comprehension is reducible to sensitivity to the presence of a mismatch
between expectations and context; (2) test the role of epistemic vigilance in buttressing irony comprehension.
We assessed irony comprehension in 6- year-olds (N=56) and 7- year-olds (N=43) and a control adult group
(N=21) by adapting the offline picture selection task of Köder and Falkum (2021). Participants were presented
with short pre-recorded stories accompanied by pictures, each involving an interaction between a mother and
two siblings. In the induction phase, the reliability of the two siblings was established: they were each presented
as consistently reliable, or unreliable, in their report of past events. In the test phase, the mother requested one
of the two children to act in a certain way. As the child meets/fails to satisfy her expectation, the mother utters
either an ironical (criticism) or a literal comment (literal praise, literal criticism, control). Participants judged
which emoticon (happy vs. angry face) best reflected the mothers’ inner feelings. Importantly, in the literal
control condition, the mother responded positively even though the visual context did not meet her expecta-
tions, so that participants were supposed to choose a positive emoticon as a correct interpretation of the target
utterance. The choice of the negative emoticon in the control would thus suggest their failure to consider both
the context and the utterance when making such judgements.
Preliminary analyses reveal a clear improvement of irony understanding with age, with 7-year-olds displaying
better performance than 6-year-olds, but no effect of our reliability manipulation. Crucially, when excluding
children who failed the control, both age groups reported lower irony scores, and 6-year-olds are at chance
level. These results support the relevance of rethinking the import of established measures of irony in the
developmental pragmatics literature.

857
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘They are wellies, not shoes’: Do children’s sensitivity to


language norms grow stronger with age?

Panel contribution

Dr. Rebecca Iversen 1 , Dr. Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos 1 , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 1
1. University of Oslo

In early childhood, children gradually develop abilities to learn meanings of words (Clark, 2007), categorise
and identify functions for objects (Kalish, 2007), and take part in games that require a shared goal structure
(Rakoczy, 2007). Around the same time, children also realise that there is a preferred, or conventional, way to
do so (Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007). Children have a strong disposition for attending to these conventions across
domains, including language (Clark, 2007a), artefact use (German, Truxaw, and Defeyter, 2007), categorization
social behaviour (Schmidt, Butler, Heintz, and Tomasello, 2016) and pretence games (Rakoczy, 2007), to the
extent that they have been hypothesized to share a common structure (Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007). This study
aims to examine how children’s sensitivity to conventionality develops with age, and if their performance is
similar across the different domains.
Conventions are regularities in social behaviour which allow us to coordinate our actions (Lewis, 1969). A
child’s appreciation of conventions aids language acquisition. For example, conventionality creates assump-
tions that newly acquired words have a meaning distinct from words they have already learned (Clark, 1993),
and that word meanings are shared with other people in their community (Koenig, Clément & Harris, 2004).
But a strong tendency to follow conventions can cause difficulties in situations where a familiar word requires
a non-conventional interpretation (e.g., metonymy: Köder & Falkum, 2020, Falkum, Recasens & Clark, 2017,
metaphor: Di Paola, Domaneschi, Pouscoulous, 2019; Long, Shukla Rubio-Fernandez, 2021). This has led to the
proposal that during the pre-school years a child’s growing sensitivity to conventional meanings might impede
their pragmatic reasoning (Vicente & Falkum, 2021), before they become more flexible and learn that conven-
tions are human-made and alterable.
In this study, we examine 3-5-year-old children’s (N=119) sensitivity to conventions in three different conditions:
(1) conventional vs. unconventional targets, (2) conventional vs. incorrect targets and (3) unconventional vs.
incorrect targets. Each condition consists of eight test questions, and a child can obtain a score of 0-16 points.
Test items belong to one of four categories: word learning, categorization, artifact function and rule-based
games/pretend play. We measure picture choice and reaction times to examine any differences between their
responses on the conventional and unconventional options.
We predict two possible outcomes: Either we find a progressive development where 3-5-year-old show a strong
adherence to sense conventions but that they become more flexible with age (cf. pretence games: Rakoczy,
Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008, artifact use: Schillaci & Kelemen, 2014). Or we find that 5-year-olds are more sus-
ceptible to choosing conventional options than 3-year-olds, due to a particular attention to conventions during
this developmental period (cf. Falkum et al. 2017; Vicente & Falkum, 2021). In both cases, the more convention
adherence, the less pragmatic/unconventional answers and vice versa. Finally, following Kalish and Sabbagh
(2007), we explore whether we find a similar developmental trajectory across the four domains (word learning,
categorization, artifact function and rule-based games/pretend play).

858
Pragmatic variation in
pluricentric languages
(organized by Cesar
Felix-Brasdefer, Klaus
Schneider)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An ethnographic multimethod investigation of speech actions


in Namibian English and English English: A focus on offers
and responses to thanks

Panel contribution

Prof. Klaus Schneider 1 , Prof. Anne Schröder 2 , Dr. Pawel Sickinger 2 , Dr. Selma Ashikuti 3 , Dr. Nelson
Mlambo 3
1. University of Bonn, 2. Bielefeld University, 3. University of Namibia

English is one of the pluricentric languages par excellence and hence well-studied in the framework of Vari-
ational Pragmatics (VP) (e.g. Schneider & Félix-Brasdefer 2022). However, L2 varieties and more specifically
African varieties of English are relatively underexplored in this paradigm. In the present paper, we contrast
English English (EngE) to Namibian English (NamE), the latter representing a particularly unique research ob-
ject, as the country in which it is spoken is shaped by an unusual colonial history leaving behind two former
colonial languages (German and Afrikaans) in addition to English. The country also hosts 20-30 indigenous lan-
guages and therefore is an ideal test case for investigating the interplay of multilingualism, complex facework,
and diverging cultural norms influencing pragmatic behaviour. This linguistic diversity shapes the linguistic
ecology and thereby the variation of English at various levels (see Schröder 2021). In this, NamE noticeably
differs from EngE, to which NamE data is systematically compared in our research.
In this paper, we describe the development of ethnographically informed research tools on the basis of a series
of explorative qualitative interviews and ethnographic field notes as well as close collaboration with local ex-
perts, shedding light on culture- and language-dependent concepts of politeness as well as the conceptualisation
and contextualisation of a range of speech acts, namely APOLOGIES, OFFERS, REQUESTS, and RESPONSES TO
THANKS. By triangulating these qualitative data with elicited quantifiable oral (100 recorded questionnaires)
and written (800 questionnaires) DCT data, we will show how communicative behaviour is influenced by the
macrosocial background of members of the respective Community of Practice, i.e. students at the University
of Namibia and at three universities in England (Lancaster, Norwich, Sheffield). In our presentation, we will
specifically focus on two of the speech acts, namely OFFERS and RESPONSES TO THANKS. Our data suggests
that realisation strategies for these two speech acts differ notably e.g. in terms of directness depending on
ethno-social group, language background and participant constellation, as well as national variety.
In this, the present paper answers Anchimbe & Janney’s (2017:117) call for community-based and emic ap-
proaches to pragmatic practices in postcolonial speech communities, in that the data collection includes “per-
spectives that prioritise the local, situated, emic and hybridised forms rooted in these societies” (Anchimbe
2018:43), while allowing these insights to inform stringently controlled, quantifiable research in the tradition
of VP, suitable for immediate comparison with other national varieties of English.
References
Anchimbe, E. A. (2018). Offers and offer refusals. A postcolonial pragmatics perspective on World Englishes.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Anchimbe, E. A., & Janney, R. W. (2017). Postcolonial pragmatics. In A. Barron, Y. Gu & G. Steen (Eds.), The
Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 105–120). London: Routledge.
Schneider, K. P., & Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2022). Pragmatic variation across national varieties of pluricentric
languages. In A. H. Jucker & H. Hausendorf (Eds.), Pragmatics of space (pp. 637–678). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter
Mouton.
Schröder, A. (Ed.) (2021). The dynamics of English in Namibia: Perspectives on an emerging variety. (Varieties of
English around the World G65). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

860
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Complaints and regional variation in French: Examples from


Cameroon and France

Panel contribution

Dr. Bernard Mulo Farenkia 1


1. Cape Breton University

The focus of this paper is on complaint strategies across regional varieties of French. Using DCT questionnaire
data collected in Cameroon and France, the study examines the strategies used by French speakers in Cameroon
and France to complain in three different situations (to a friend, to a stranger, and to a professor). While the
findings reveal some parallels in both varieties of French, the analysis highlights many differences with respect
to the types and realization patterns of complaint (head act) strategies, external modifications, and internal
modifications). Overall, the study adds to the research on intra-lingual regional pragmatic variation in French,
which has so far dealt with speech acts such as apologies, compliments, requests, and refusals.

861
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Does space matter? Pragmatic variation in Finland Swedish


and Sweden Swedish

Panel contribution

Prof. Jenny Nilsson 1 , Prof. Jan Lindström 2 , Dr. Love Bohman 3 , Prof. Catrin Norrby 4 , Dr. Klara
Skogmyr Marian 4 , Prof. Camilla Wide 5
1. Institute for language and folklore, 2. University of Helsinki, 3. Södertörn Högskola, 4. Stockholm University, 5. University of
Turku

A large-scale investigation of pragmatic behavior in Swedish-speaking Finland and Sweden found that there
are some differences in the communicative patterns between the two nations (Norrby 2021, Norrby et al. 2020).
However, to what extent does geographical space really affect pragmatic variation? Could such variation rather
be caused by other social-spatial factors? In this presentation, we wish to problematize the notion of space and
examine how pragmatic variation interfaces with several dimensions of space, not only geographical but also
social space (see also Jucker & Hausendorf 2022).
We approach space from a variational pragmatics perspective (Schneider & Barron 2008, Schneider 2010) and
present an empirical study of greeting behavior in 1000 video-recorded Swedish service encounters to illustrate
how different layers of space interact and are relevant for pragmatic variation (see also Nilsson et al. 2020,
2022). We combine qualitative observations of greeting routines with statistical analyses of several co-variables
in order to find connections between the choice of a certain greeting form and geographical and social-spatial
factors.
In the presentation, we will illustrate how the geographical-spatial levels of nation and region (i.e., data from
a certain nation and town) can partly account for variation in the choice of greeting forms, but that more local
levels of geographical space (i.e., interactions in specific venues) as well as social variables such as the age and
gender of a speaker also play an important part. We will also discuss how spaces can carry recognizable cultural
meanings, and may trigger certain parts of a speaker’s pragmatic repertoire.
Jucker, Andreas H. & Hausendorf, Heiko (Eds.). 2022. Pragmatics of Space. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Nilsson, Jenny, Lindström, Jan, Bohman, Love, Norrby, Catrin, Skogmyr Marian, Klara & Wide, Cailla. 2022.
Pragmatic variation across geographical and social space. In: Jucker, A. H. & Hausendorf, H (Eds.). Pragmatics
of Space. 611–635.
Nilsson, Jenny, Norrby, Catrin, Bohman, Love, Skogmyr Marian, Klara, Wide, Camilla & Lindström, Jan. 2020.
What is in a greeting? The social meaning of greetings in Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish service encoun-
ters. Journal of Pragmatics, 168. 1–15.
Norrby, Catrin. 2021. Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages – communicative patterns in Sweden
Swedish and Finland Swedish. Sociolinguistica, 35(1). 267–276. https://doi.org/10.1515/soci-2021-0013
Norrby, Catrin, Lindström, Jan, Nilsson, Jenny, & Wide, Camilla. 2020. Pluricentric languages. Handbook of
Pragmatics: 23rd Annual Installment. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 201-220.
Schneider, Klaus P. & Anne Barron. 2008. Where pragmatics and dialectology meet. Introducing variational
pragmatics. In: Schneider, K. P. & Barron, A. (eds.). Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in
Pluricentric Languages. 1–32. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schneider, Klaus, P. 2010. Variational pragmatics. Handbook of Pragmatics. Vol. 14. 1–34.

862
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expressing gratitude in Nigerian and British English

Panel contribution

Dr. Foluke Unuabonah 1 , Prof. Ulrike Gut 2


1. Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria, 2. Englisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Münster, Germany

With the speech act of thanking, a speaker acknowledges ‘having benefited from the actions of another person’
(Norrick 1978: 285). The linguistic form chosen for this speech act has been shown to vary systematically across
some varieties of English (e.g. Funke 2022, Cheng 2010, Schauer & Adolphs 2006). For example, New Zealand
English speakers use fewer and a smaller inventory of thanking expressions than British English speakers (Jautz
2013). Likewise, Hong Kong English speakers use a restricted repertoire and very brief expressions of thanking,
probably reflecting Chinese cultural norms (Wong 2010). Expressions of gratitude have not been studied sys-
tematically yet in African varieties of English, where an influence of cultural norms can also be expected. It is
the aim of the present study to contribute, within the paradigm of variational pragmatics (Schneider & Barron
2008), to our growing knowledge of variation in expressions of gratitude in varieties of English by investigating
the use of thanking expressions in Nigerian English and British English.
We analysed questionnaires with 18 discourse completion tasks (DCTs) prompting expressions of gratitude filled
in by 452 educated speakers of Nigerian English. The responses were analysed according to the type of thanking
strategy (Aijmer 1996) and their linguistic form (naming a benefactor, naming the reason, intensification). In
addition, expressions of gratitude in the spoken part, the social and business letters in ICE-GB and ICE-Nigeria
were analysed in the same way.
The results show that, in both varieties, thanking explicitly was the most frequent thanking strategy followed
by the stress gratitude strategy. Differences between the two varieties exist in terms of British English users
employing more express emotion strategy, while Nigerian English users employ more thank a supernatural being
strategy. The study further revealed that DCTs elicited a wider range of different expressions of gratitude and
that their linguistic forms differed across DCTs and the corpus data. The study thus shows that Nigerian English
thanking strategies are influenced by the religious and socio-cultural practices of Nigerian English users and
highlights the constraints of data collection methods in cross-varietal pragmatic research.
References
Aijmer, K. (1996). Conversational routines in English: Convention and creativity. London: Longman.
Cheng, S. W. (2010). A corpus-based approach to the study of speech act of thanking. Concentric: Studies in
Linguistics, 36, 257–274.
Funke, N. (2022). Pragmatic nativisation of thanking in South Asian Englishes. World Englishes, 41, 136–150.
Jautz, S. (2013). Thanking formulae in English: Explorations across varieties and genres. Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Norrick, N. R. (1978). Expressive illocutionary acts. Journal of Pragmatics, 2, 277–291.
Schauer, G. A., & Adolphs, S. (2006). Expressions of gratitude in corpus and DCT data: Vocabulary, formulaic
sequences, and pedagogy. System, 34, 119–134.
Schneider, K., & Barron, A. (Eds.). (2008). Variational Pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric
languages. Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Wong, M. (2010). Expressions of gratitude by Hong Kong speakers of English: Research from the International
Corpus of English in Hong Kong (ICE-HK). Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1243–1257.

863
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Morphopragmatics of mitigation in German as a pluricentric


language: subjunctive II and diminutive in formal and
informal conversations from Austria and Germany

Panel contribution

Dr. Katharina Korecky-Kröll 1 , Mrs. Maria Luisa Krapp 2 , Dr. Georg Oberdorfer 2 , Mrs. Anja
Wittibschlager 1
1. University of Vienna, 2. University of Marburg

The subjunctive II and the diminutive are two grammatical phenomena that are widely used for the pragmatic
purpose of mitigation in the world’s languages (e.g., Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994; Caffi 1999; Schneider
2003; Félix-Brasdefer 2008). In German as a pluricentric language, they have been identified to exhibit con-
siderable regional variation, not only in terms of different forms but also in terms of different frequencies of
usage. Therefore, they are expected to be an adequate testing ground to investigate pragmatic differences in
two different national centers of German, namely Austria and Germany.
Early 20th century research in German dialectology (e.g., Wrede 1908 based on the “Wenker” questionnaires)
highlighted regional frequency differences of diminutives between Northern and Southern regions of the
German-speaking area, which were often attributed to the inhabitants’ personality traits (e.g., “reserved north-
erners” vs. “jovial southeners”, see Elmentaler 2013 for a critical review). However, later questionnaire surveys
conducted in the 1990s (Muhr 2008; Warga 2008) also showed that mitigation using subjunctive II forms was
more frequent in Austrian than in German speakers.
We investigate whether these older questionnaire-based observations on frequency differences of diminutive
and subjunctive II can be confirmed based on recent free conversation data from Austria and Germany collected
from 2008 to 2019.
Our data were sampled from 48 autochthonous male adult native speakers of German (24 speakers per country)
living in 24 smaller locations (12 locations per country, evenly distributed across territories). The two speakers
from each location were part of two different sociodemographic groups, i.e., one “nonmobile older rural male”
(NORM, see Chambers & Trudgill 1998) aged 60+ with low formal education and one young man with (at least)
high school diploma aged 18-35.
To analyze intraindividual variation, we investigated two conversational settings per participant:
1) a formal interview with a researcher unfamiliar to the participant conducted in the respective national vari-
ant of Standard German,
2) an informal conversation with a close friend from the same location conducted in the respective dialect or
regiolect.
All conversations were transcribed following the GAT2 conventions (Selting et al. 2009). From each transcript,
we sampled 1000 word tokens of participants (i.e., 96,000 tokens in total) and tagged these samples for diminu-
tive and subjunctive II forms. We then used linear mixed-effects regression models (Bates et al. 2015) in R (R
Core Team 2018) to investigate effects of various independent variables (e.g., national variety, regional variety,
location, sociodemographic group, setting) on token frequencies of diminutive and subjunctive II forms.
Results show larger effects of the setting than of the national or regional variety or the sociodemographic group,
but also differences between subjunctive II and diminutive forms: While subjunctive II is more frequently used
in formal language of distance and has a stronger politeness focus, diminutives are more common in informal
conversations to express mitigation (Caffi 1999) and linguistic insecurity (Labov 1972).
We discuss aspects of pluricentricity vs. pluriareality and give an outlook on future research which should
include female and diverse gender data as well as data from Switzerland.

864
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic Variation During the Negotiation of Service Across


Varieties of Spanish

Panel contribution

Prof. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer 1


1. Indiana University

Research on linguistic pluricentrism has received considerable attention among national varieties of a language,
as well as among dominant and non-dominant varieties (Nilsson et al 2022; Schneider & Félix-Brasdefer 2022).
Pluricentric languages, such as Arabic, French, Chinese, or Arabic, have been generally defined as languages
having different national varieties, each with a standard codified register and with “several interacting cen-
ters, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified) norms” (Clyne 1992: 1). This
presentation examines pragmatic variation across three national varieties of Spanish during the negotiation
of service in small shops across three varieties, namely, Spanish from Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Seville,
Spain. The framework adopted is ‘variational pragmatics,’ which is an approach concerned with pragmatic
variation within a single language and focused on the impact of macrosocial factors on language use in (mostly
spoken) interaction (for a recent summary of the field (Schneider & Barron, 2008; Schneider 2020 [also Félix-
Brasdefer 2015]). Three levels of pragmatics are analyzed: actional (variation of the request for service and
presence/absence of mitigation), openings and closings (interactive), and the selection of forms of address (T
vs V [tú/vos vs usted]) and vocatives. The data were collected from 300 audio-recorded service encounter in-
teractions in each location: 100 in each region. Data are analyzed with regard to degrees of directness and in-
directness, pronominal variation T/V, and presence or absence of internal modification. Results show regional
differences in the preference for request forms, most frequent in each region (assertion [Mexico]; imperative
[Seville’; elliptical request [Argentina]). Regarding T/V, Mexico shows an orientation towards respect and for-
mality (V) over equality (Buenos Aires & Seville). This presentation ends with methodological issues and new
directions for analyzing pluricentrism in other varieties of Spanish that have not received sufficient attention.
References
Clyne, M. (1992). Pluricentric languages: Introduction. In: Michael Clyne (ed.), Pluricentric Languages: Differing
Norms in Different Nations (pp. 1-9). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The Language of Service Encounters: A Pragmatic-Discursive Approach. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Nilsson, J., Lindström, J., Bohman, L., Norrby, C., Skogmyr Marian, K., Marian, & Wide, C. (2022). Pragmatic
variation across geographical and local space. In A. H. Jucker and H. Hausendorf (Eds.), Pragmatics of Space (pp.
611-635). Handbooks of Pragmatics, vol 14. Berlin/Boston: Mouton De Gruyter.
Schneider, K. P. (2020). Rethinking pragmatic variation: The case of service encounters from a modified varia-
tional pragmatics perspective. In: J. César Félix-Brasdefer and María Elena Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic Variation
in Service Encounter Interactions across the Spanish-Speaking World (pp. 251–262). Abingdon/New York: Rout-
ledge.
Schneider, Klaus P. & Barron, A. (2008). Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational prag-
matics. In: K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (eds.), Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricen-
tric Languages (pp. 1–32). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schneider, K. P. & J. C. Félix-Brasdefer (2022). Pragmatic variation across national varieties of pluricentric lan-
guages. In A. H. Jucker and H. Hausendorf (Eds.), Pragmatics of Space (pp. 637-678). Handbooks of Pragmatics,
vol 14. Berlin/Boston: Mouton De Gruyter.

865
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Regional Varieties of Arabic as a Pluricentric Language: A


Speech Act Perspective

Panel contribution

Dr. Dina El-Dakhs 1


1. Prince Sultan University

Traditionally, language variation was studied through dialectology which focused on regional variations within
a single country (Schneider & Placencia, 2017) and on the central levels of the language system; namely, pronun-
ciation, vocabulary and grammar. More recently, variational pragmatics (VP) emerged to encourage the exam-
ination of linguistic pluricentirism; that is, language varieties that are spoken natively within (e.g., Alexandrian
Arabic, Caireen Arabic and Upper Egyptian Arabic in Egypt) and across (e.g., Alexandrian Arabic in Egypt, Najdi
Arabic in Saudi Arabia and Marrakesh Arabic in Morocco) nations from a pragmatic perspective (Schneider,
2010; Schneider & Barron 2008). The current talk adopts a VP approach to the study of the Arabic language
which represents an ideal example of linguistic pluricentrism because it is spoken throughout the Arab World
which extends over 5,070,420 square miles in 22 countries. This huge space has created a diverse society in
terms of geography, dialects, customs and historic experiences (Sidani & Thorburry, 2010).
The current talk will summarize the results of earlier studies that the speaker conducted on variational prag-
matics in the Arabic language, particularly between the Alexandrian dialect, which is spoken in the northwest
of Egypt, and the Najdi dialect, which is the dialect spoken in central Saudi Arabia including its capital city of
Riyadh. I chose these dialects because Saudi Arabia and Egypt are geographic neighbours, and that there is
a constant language contact between Egyptians and Saudis due to work and tourism relations. Hence, if prag-
matic differences emerge within this context, the differences will constitute a strong indication of the significant
role place plays in pragmatic variation in pluricentric languages. The talk will adopt a speech act perspective
because it will compare the realization of specific speech acts across these two regional varieties of Arabic (e.g.,
complaining and complementing) while considering important macro- and micro-social factors, including gen-
der, age, social distance and social power. Additionally, the talk will shed light on the methodological choices
the speaker made with respect to data collection (i.e., the use of discourse completion tasks and role-plays) and
coding (i.e., the use of adapted models from earlier studies).
References
Schneider, K.P., 2010. Variational pragmatics. In: Fried, Mirjan, Ostman, Jan-Ola,
Verschueren, Jef (Eds.), Variation and Change: Pragmatic Perspectives. Benjamins,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 239-267.
Schneider, K.P., Barron, A., 2008. Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: introducing
variational pragmatics. In: Schneider, Klaus P., Barron, Anne (Eds.), Variational
Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages, [Pragmatics and
Beyond New Series 178. Benjamins, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, pp. 1-32.
2
Schneider, K.P., Placencia, M.E., 2017. (Im)politeness and regional variation. In: Culpeper, J.,
Haugh, M., Kadar, D. (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness.
Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 539-570.
Sidani, Y.M., Thornberry, J., 2010. The current Arab work ethic: antecedents, implications,
and potential remedies. J. Bus. Ethics 91 (1), 35-49.

866
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The impact of the factors ‘nation’ and ‘region’ on pragmatic


variation in pluricentric German. First results

Panel contribution

Dr. Tanja Ackermann 1 , Mr. Henrik Discher 1


1. Freie Universität Berlin

While there is an ever-growing body of literature on the divergent phonology, lexicon and grammar of Ger-
man as spoken/written in Germany, Austria and in German-speaking Switzerland (cf., e.g., Ammon et al. 2016;
Dürscheid et al. 2018), the pragmatic dimension of pluricentric German has been studied to a much lesser degree
(cf. Norrby & Kretzenbacher 2013: 243–244) – especially in comparison with English or Spanish. For German,
only few studies exist that address selected pragmatic aspects and focus on a comparison between German
German and Austrian German or German German and German spoken in Switzerland (for an overview see
Ackermann 2021).
In our talk, we want to investigate Austria, Germany, and German-speaking Switzerland by examining the for-
mal and the actional pragmatic levels – specifically, differences in the use of (pro)nominal address terms and
the expression of requests. The data come from an online-survey with production and rating tasks, in which 577
participants took part (as well as from focus-group interviews and the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache [‘Atlas
of Colloquial German’]). Using multifactorial modelling, we will show that the macro-social variable region has
an impact on the use of vocatives and the realization strategies of requestive head acts (as well as other social
variables such as age or gender). However, we will argue that the level of national varieties plays a rather minor
role for language use: the production data yield interesting spatial patterns that typically do not correspond to
national borders. Nonetheless, the concept of national varieties does play an important role, namely from a
sociolinguistic perspective as data from our focus-group interviews and other meta-pragmatic studies suggest
(cf., e.g., Locher & Luginbühl 2019). Accordingly, a distinction should be made between the actual occurrence
of language variants in the respective language uses on the one hand and the perception (or construction) of
such diatopic variation on a meta-level on the other hand.
As an outlook, we will present our recently launched trinational project Variational Pragmatics of German. Com-
paring Communicative Patterns, which is dedicated to the variation of formal and actional pragmatic phenom-
ena in the German-speaking area on a larger scale, building on the pilot studies mentioned above. Primarily,
we will put our methodological choices up for discussion.
References
Ackermann, Tanja. 2021. Bitte könnte ich vielleicht? Eine kontrastive Untersuchung zu Aufforderungen in
Deutschland und in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz. ZDL 88. 265–301.
Ammon, Ulrich, Hans Bickel & Alexandra N. Lenz. 2016. Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen. 2. edn. Berlin &
Boston.
Dürscheid, Christa, Stephan Elspaß & Arne Ziegler. 2018. Variantengrammatik des Standarddeutschen.
www.variantengrammatik.net.
Elspaß, Stephan & Robert Möller. 2003–. Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA). www.atlas-alltagssprache.de

Locher, Miriam A. & Martin Luginbühl. 2019. Discussions on Swiss and German politeness in online sources.
In Eva Ogiermann & Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness,
250–275. Cambridge.
Norrby, Catrin & Heinz L. Kretzenbacher. 2013. National variation of address in pluricentric languages: The
examples of Swedish and German. In Augusto Soares da Silva (ed.), Pluricentricity. Language variation and
sociocognitive dimensions, 243–270. Berlin & Boston.

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Variational pragmatics study on impoliteness strategies in


Chinese negative online consumer reviews

Panel contribution

Prof. Wei Ren 1


1. Beihang University

Variational pragmatics (VP) studies mostly examine intralingual variation in oral communication, although of-
ten through written discourse complete tasks. In contrast, online communication deserves more attention in VP
research. This study investigates the impoliteness strategies employed by Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese
in negative online consumer reviews. The data were composed of 400 negative online reviews from TripAdvisor,
200 of which were written by Mainland Chinese and 200 of which were written by Taiwan Chinese. The find-
ings suggest that in the context of online consumer reviews, both Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese tend to
employ the following impoliteness strategies: positive impoliteness (including pointed complaints, dissociation
from the other, unfavorable comparison, taboo words, and meta-comments), negative impoliteness (including
explicit emotional displays, unpalatable questions, suggestions to hotels and threats), implicated impoliteness
(including suggestions/warnings to customers, indirect blame), and sarcasm. Moreover, both groups tend to use
on-record impoliteness strategies more frequently than off-record impoliteness. Despite the similarities, some
differences were also found. For example, Mainland Chinese people tend to employ positive impoliteness more
frequently, while Taiwan Chinese people show a greater preference for negative impoliteness. In addition, Tai-
wan Chinese employed significantly more off-record impoliteness than Mainland Chinese, which demonstrates
that in the context of online consumer reviews, Mainland Chinese tend to express their negative feelings more
directly and explicitly, while their counterpart Taiwan Chinese employ impoliteness strategies more implicitly
and tend to use more mitigation strategies. The findings indicate that the macro factor region has impacts on
the employment of impoliteness strategies in Chinese online consumer reviews.

868
Pragmatics in ageing: A
better understanding of
(a)typicality (organized
by Lihe Huang)
Pragmatics of the
‘(a)typical clause’ across
languages (organized by
Ritva Laury, Tsuyoshi
Ono)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Atypicality in copular predications in Mano (Mande)

Panel contribution

Dr. Maria Khachaturyan 1


1. University of Helsinki

This talk focuses on some properties of predication in Mano and its deviation from a canonical clause. It dis-
cusses copular predication and a) its frequency in spoken discourse, b) its role in interaction.
Mano has four copulas: lɛ̄, lɛ́, wɔ́ and gɛ̰.̀ In Mano copular predications, the copula is the predicative center
which takes only one argument – a subject, the word order being S - COP (as in 1, where the subject is the
3pl pronoun ō). A prominent type of function expressed by copular predications is ostensive demonstration,
where the copula is usually wɔ́ or gɛ̰.̀ Depending on the interaction context, such predications may take a sub-
stantial proportion among all predications uttered, as was the case in a 30-min recording where siblings were
conversing while passing through an unfamiliar town by car and discussing objects around them and where
presentatives took more than 10% of all predications.
(1) ō wɔ́ dìŋ̄ ā
3pl.emph cop there dem
‘There they are.’ [sortie_abidjan_aller.008]
Crucially, two out of the four copulas, lɛ́ and wɔ́, do not function independently, but always as part of a con-
struction: usually, NP – Copula – […] – Demonstrative (the final element may vary). The material between the
copula and the demonstrative is optional; it helps specifying the relationship of the subject to discourse and to
the context of interaction, as in 1, where the copula is followed by the demonstrative adverb dìŋ̄ ‘there’. The
material to the right can also be a clause, as in (2).
(2) sálámá wɔ́ ē kɛ̄ à là ā
luck cop 3sg.pst be 3sg on dem
‘Lucky she was (lit.: luck was on her).’ [bavardage_tilepulou.057]
The copula serves to support the NP as a separate discourse move whose function is to orient the interlocutors’
attention to a referent. In the cases of ostension, joint attention is really the goal: the point of the utterance
in (1), uttered by a child from a group of siblings, is to orient other siblings to a car carrying the children’s
parents. The role of the NP, supported by the copula and the ensuing predication, can also be to assert updating
information, where the main update is concentrated on the NP itself and the predication provides an additional
update: In (2) the point of the utterance is to assert that a woman (referent of the 3sg pronoun à ‘her’) was lucky
when she almost lost her child (on NPs as separate discourse moves, see Ozerov 2021). As for the final element
of the construction, the demonstrative, its function is to serve as a boundary of the noun phrasal component,
which can occur between turns or inside a turn, depending on the intonation (final or non-final, on NPs as
turn-internal subunits and turn-internal boundaries, see Iwasaki 2009).
Thus, functions of copulas cannot be reduced to predication alone and predication, which is arguably a central
function of the clause in the traditional grammar, turns out to be a component of a more complex interactive
event.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Clausal Constituents and Repair-related Actions in


Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Panel contribution

Prof. Patricia Mayes 1


1. University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) enables people with communication disabilities to inter-
act with others. The focus here is on high-tech AAC, in which an electronic device, equipped with a keyboard
and speech-generating software, vocalizes an utterance typed by the participant. AAC-mediated interaction is
atypical for many reasons such as the presence of typing errors and delays, and the absence of prosodic cues.
These factors lead to frequent trouble and repair, but unlike typical interaction, self-repair is rare; and recip-
ients are quite active, making repair a collaborative process (Mayes 2020; Müller & Soto 2002). Still, the lack
of interactional resources makes the recipient’s task of projecting the speaker’s utterance more difficult, and
repair is a step-by-step process that depends critically on already produced syntactic forms. In repairing noun
phrases, the recipient focuses on the head of the NP, and apparently, targets NP constituents of a clause (Mayes
2020), suggesting additional questions about the relation between the syntactic form of the trouble source (TS)
and the form(s) targeted by recipients’ repair-related actions. More specifically, what is the projected grammat-
ical form of the TS when recipients target NPs in their repair-related actions, and what other types of clausal
constituents (if any) are also targeted?
Nouns and noun phrases are the TSs 62% of the time in my data, with other forms causing trouble less fre-
quently. However, even when the TS is a predicate, recipients may focus most of their repair-related actions
on determining other NP constituents. The example below illustrates this point. (FD=voiced by F’s AAC device;
F=vocalizations; M and L=recipients)
01 FD: but the person (2.6) who (1.5) has C-H-R-G-E
02 M: ((gesturing, as if spelling))
03 L: char- who has charge of wha:t.
04 M: oh, charge.=
05 F: =thethethe ((glottalized))
06 M: of the (.7) [pops?]
07 F: [groug]rougrou (home).
08 M: oh, the group ho[me. ]
09 F: [>yeah.<]
The initial TS is part of the predicate, voiced as five letters in line 1. L quickly completes the repair with charge,
while simultaneously initiating another repair (line 3). Her question might be interpreted as targeting both
the subject and the prepositional object, but the emphasis on what suggests the latter. M follows up with a
candidate repair, also targeting that PP (line 6). This example illustrates how recipients use available syntactic
forms, building from the bottom-up, so to speak. In this case, once the predicate is understood, they focus on
other constituents of the verb phrase.
Essentially, when the trouble source is a predicate or part of a predicate, recipients’ repair-related actions tar-
get NPs that function as constituents in the VP or clause. One reason may be that AAC interaction does not
differ from typical English conversation with respect to the fact that most clauses are low in transitivity. (See
Thompson & Hopper 2001.) That is, mostly copular clauses or two-participant clauses with low-content predi-
cates. In such clauses, much of the content is expressed through NP constituents, making them a likely target
for recipients’ repair attempts.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Clause structure in Upper Kuskokwim conversational


discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Andrej Kibrik 1


1. Institute of Linguistics RAS

Upper Kuskokwim is a moribund language of interior Alaska, it belongs to the Athabaskan (Dene) language
family and is still spoken by some in the village of Nikolai. This study is based on my field research conducted
since 1997. The data includes natural and arranged conversations recorded between 1997 and 2010.
Transcripts are organized as sequences of elementary discourse units (EDUs). EDUs are prosodically identified
quanta of local discourse structure, similar (but not exactly identical) to what is known as intonation units (see
e.g. the work by Chafe, 1994). In the analysis below some EDUs are excluded from consideration, specifically
those fully consisting of code switching to English, truncated EDUs, and regulatory EDUs without propositional
content.
Upper Kuskokwim, like other Athabaskan languages, is polysynthetic, that is expresses multiple grammatical
meanings within verbal words. Among other things, so expressed are referential features of clause arguments,
including Principals (subjects), Patientives (direct objects) and some other. These arguments appear as pronomi-
nal morphemes on the verb. Other clause participants (adjuncts) are expressed as combinations of pronominal
prefixes and postpositional stems. These kinds of participant expression, characteristic of polysynthetic lan-
guages, may appear unusual against the background of more familiar languages, but actually is widely spread
cross-linguistically.
An analysis of the dataset gives rise to the following quantitative generalizations. 76% of all analysed EDUs are
clausal. The remaning 24% EDUs are biclausal, typically consisting of a matrix clause and an embedded clause.
I suppose that the high number of biclausal EDUs is related to the polysynthetic nature of the language. Among
the clauses, 83% are verbal clauses, and the rest are nominal, adjectival, existential and verificational clauses.
Clauses can be classified according to the number of participants as follows. 50% of all clauses have just one
participant, 37% two participants, and 4% more than two participants. The remaining clauses (nominal and
verificational) have no participants. Of course, not all participants are arguments. 72% of clauses have one
argument, and 20% two arguments. The remaning clauses have no arguments.
As is common in polysynthetic languages, it is very frequent that clause participants are only expressed by
means of morphologically bound pronominal morphemes on the verb or on adpositions. This kind of expression
is found in 57% of all clause participants and in 63% of arguments. Accordingly, lexically expressed are 43% of
clause participants and 37% of arguments. Among the clauses having two or more participants, there is not a
single one that would have more than one lexically expressed participant.
The excerpt below consists of two consecutive EDUs, the first of which illustrates a two argument clause with
both arguments only expressed by pronominal affixes. The second EDU illustrates a clause with a relatively
heavy noun phrase that plays the role of clause Patientive.
JN: FINE ts’eˀ ch’ik’oˀiłnech
F. Ptcl Indf_Pat.3_Princ.Pfv.cook
‘He really cooked good.’
AgN: dineje mamaˀ ghotiniłnagh
moose food.Poss 3_Pat.1Sg_Princ.Impfv.Neg.crave
‘I am tired of eating moose meat.’

873
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Comment Clauses in Spoken Turkish: An Analysis of


san/zannet/bil (presume/suppose/know)-predicates

Panel contribution

Prof. Deniz Zeyrek 1


1. Middle East Technical University

This paper deals with the Turkish equivalents of comment clauses/CCs formed by three complement taking
predicates/CTPs (Thompson 2002): presume/suppose/know. In their CC role, CTPs are syntactically defective be-
cause the verb lacks its obligatory complement. CCs have positional freedom, tend to be prosodically separated
from the rest of the clause, have metatextual functions (e.g., they hedge or express stance), behave in ways akin
to discourse markers.
CCs have been examined in many languages, e.g., English (Brinton, 1996, 2001; Traugott, 1995), Finnish (Laury
& Helasvuo 2020), Mandarin (Endo, 2013), Hebrew (Maschler, 2012), and a recent line of research has even
targeted negative constructions (Lindström et al., 2016, and the references therein). I will examine the CC role
of positive forms of san/zannet/bil-predicates in Turkish, an agglutinating, verb-final language with variable
word order and ask the following questions:

• Are san/zannet/bil-predicates used in atypical ways (e.g., in syntactically deficient clauses)?


• Do CCs that involve san/zannet/bil-predicates take the form of converbial/subordinate clauses?
• How is the CC role of san/zannet/bil-predicates distinguished from their CTP role?

The data will be drawn from the spoken section of Turkish National Corpus (Aksan et al., 2012) and analyzed
using descriptive statistics.
Results from the initial analysis indicate that (a) san/zannet/bil-clauses may lack syntactic constituents shown
by the absence of morphosyntactic cues that signal complementhood. In these cases, they have metatextual
functions and can be classified as CCs. (b) While san-/zannet- ‘presume/suppose’ mostly occur in 1st P taking
the form of main clauses, bil- ‘know’ may occur in 2nd P and take the form of converbial/subordinate clauses.
(c) The initial findings show that main-clause CCs are common in initial and medial positions with respect to
their associated clause, subordinate-clause CCs may appear post-verbally (i.e., clause-externally), and both types
convey epistemic/evidential/evaluative meanings. I will assess whether such findings extend to the whole data.
References
Aksan, Y. et al. 2012. Construction of the Turkish National Corpus (TNC). LREC 2012. İstanbul.
Brinton, L.J, 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Mouton de
Gruyter.
Brinton, L.J., 2001. From matrix clause to pragmatic marker: the history of look-forms. J. Hist. Pragmat. 2.
Endo, T. 2013. Epistemic stance in Mandarin conversation: The positions and functions of wo juede (I feel/think).
Pan & Kádár (Eds.), Chinese discourse and interaction: Theory and practice. Equinox.
Laury, R. & Helasvuo, M. 2020. The emergence and routinization of complex syntactic patterns formed with
ajatella ‘think’ and tietää ‘know’ in Finnish talk-in-interaction. Emergent Syntax for Conversation. Clausal pat-
terns and the organization of action. Maschler, et al. (Eds.) John Benjamins.
Lindström, J., et al. (Eds.) (2016). Grammar and negative epistemics in talk-in-interaction:Cross- linguistic stud-
ies. Special issue of JoP.
Maschler, Y., 2012. Emergent projecting constructions: the case of Hebrew yada (‘know’). Stud.Lang. 36 (4).
Thompson, S.A., 2002. “Object complements” and conversation: towards a realistic account. Stud.Lang. 26.
Traugott, E.C., 1995. The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization. Inter-
national Conference of Historical Linguistics-XII, Manchester.

874
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Turan, D. et al. 2020. Sentence-Initial Verbs: A Corpus-Based Study. Anadolu University, Journal of Social Sci-
ences.

875
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emergent clauses in three Tibeto-Burman verb-final languages

Panel contribution

Dr. Pavel Ozerov 1 , Ms. Stephanie Yam 2


1. University of Innsbruck, 2. University of Münster

Tibeto-Burman languages are commonly characterised by optional expression of NPs, verb-final syntax, and
rich sets of non-obligatory case-markers and particles whose distribution is driven by elusive pragmatic prin-
ciples. Using multimedia corpora of natural interaction, we explore recurrent grammatical structures in three
languages from different branches of the family: Karbi (isolate), Burmese (Lolo-Burmese) and Anal Naga (South-
Central). Our talk will focus on the distribution and use of structures illustrating how the basic unit of a verb
and its arguments is routinely expressed in everyday speech in these languages.
Anal Naga has an obligatory system of verbal indexation for core arguments. In Karbi, there is optional in-
frequent indexing of non-agentive arguments, and Burmese has no verbal indexing. In all three languages, a
clause can consist solely of the verbal predicate without any overt NP argument(s). Thus, clauses in Anal Naga
are more grammaticized with argument expression linked to the verb, whereas clauses in Burmese and Karbi
may involve only “bare verbs”. Prosodically, the verb can be accompanied by the core and non-core argument
NPs (typically one, rarely two) in the same Intonation Unit (IU). This renders a minimal (N)(N)V unit, observed
e.g. in ~30% of structures in the Burmese data.
NPs can alternatively be expressed in separate IUs. In this case, the overall structure emerges incrementally,
where the speaker introduces NPs as separately planned moves, tentatively aiming at yet unplanned verb-
containing final IU. In Anal Naga and Burmese, such intonationally separate NPs are common, with hesitations
and inter-speaker negotiation, and are typically marked by adnominal clitics (“differential case” and pragmatic
particles), as illustrated below for Burmese (pragmatic clitics in bold, verbal IUs underlined).
A: ʔaiʔ-kobizĩ=Ka̰,
this-Covixin=sbj

B :ɛ̃<nod>
Mhm
A: ĩdija-sʰèbù,
Indian-medicine
B: ɛ̃<nod>
Mhm
A: ʔɛ̀.da=lɛ ̀,
this=add
so this,
B: kòbiʔ.ɕi!
CovidShield
A: ɛ̃ kobiʔɕi.
mhm CovidShield
ʔɛ̀- ʔɛ̀.di=bousta=Ko=lɛ ̀,
th- this=booster=obj=add
tʰaʔ-tʰò=lo̰ ja̰=là
again-get.vaccinated=for suitable=q
so this booster, is [it] OK to get [it] for the re-vaccination?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Although the clitic-marked NPs project a specific relation to the verb, they constitute a local move whose pro-
jection can be overridden in the temporality of spontaneous interaction. Prosodically separated NPs often end
up being structurally detached (as happens in 30% of Burmese structures, e.g. Covixin=sbj above). Moreover,
adnominal clitics are mostly absent if the NP constitutes part of an IU together with the final verb. Thus, rather
than representing case in its traditional view, these are (in our view) local cues guiding the interpretation of the
NP in the unfolding structure and foreshadowing the referent’s role in the preliminary conceptualisation of the
reported event.
In Karbi, when nominal arguments are marked with pragmatic clitics, they generally do not occupy an IU sep-
arate from the verb. However,-marked NPs may occur after the verb whereas unmarked NPs generally do not
occur in this position. Additionally, in some relatively infrequent cases, a postposed double-marked nominal
argument may occur in its own IU.

877
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From clause connectives to utterance-final suffixes in Korean:


A discourse-pragmatic approach

Panel contribution

Prof. Sung-Ock Sohn 1


1. University of California, Los Angeles

Korean is a verb-final language with the basic word order subject-object-verb. As an SOV language, the verb
occurs at the end of an utterance- or turn-final position, while the other elements may be moved around quite
freely. The use of clause connectives without main clauses is pervasive in Japanese and Korean. For instance,
the Korean clause connective -nuntey ‘but’ and the conditional suffix -ketun ‘if’ are commonly used in a turn or
utterance-final position. This use of clause connectives without main clauses has been traditionally considered
a syntactic ellipsis derived from a main clause omission.
However, conversation-analytic (CA) approaches to turn-final elements reveal that these final connectives are
used in a particular context as a vehicle for implementing a particular social interaction (Park 1999, Kim &
Sohn 2015). Specifically, Park (1999) illustrates that the Korean connective -nuntey ‘but’ in a turn-final position
(without a main clause) indexes interactionally delicate actions such as requests, disagreements and denials.
Based on the authentic conversational discourse, Park’s study demonstrates that the speaker invites the inter-
locutor to infer the speaker’s intention by employing -nuntey at a turn-final position. Furthermore, Park’s study
confirms that the interlocutor does not have any trouble in understanding the invited inference. Likewise, the
conditional suffix -ketun ‘if’ is frequently used in utterance-final position in spoken discourse. Used in turn- or
utterance-final position, the erstwhile conditional connective functions as an interpersonal marker which di-
rects the listener’s attention to certain interactional features such as ‘informing/reporting’ and ‘account-giving’
(Kim &Suh 2010). Produced with a diverse pitch pattern (e.g., rising, falling, falling-rising, or continuing) and
final lengthening, -ketun-marked utterances invite the recipient to make an inference about the validity of the
propositional content.
While previous studies have demonstrated the interactional functions, the sequential contexts, and the gram-
maticalization path of -ketun (Koo and Rhee 2001, Kim and Suh 2010), there were very few that have examined
the prosodic features of -ketun. This paper explores the interplay of discourse function and prosody by examin-
ing the use of clause-connectives in turn-/-utterance-final positions in Korean spoken discourse. Cross-linguistic
studies on prosody and interaction have shown that the boundary tones of utterance-final elements play a cru-
cial role in interaction (Beeching & Detges 2014). By analyzing various intonation patterns of the final suffix
-ketun, we hope to illuminate how prosody and features of grammatical items mutually elaborate each other to
achieve a particular interactional function in utterance-final position. The target form historically originates
from a conditional connective ‘if’ and is predominantly used as a suffix in contemporary Korean, in particular
in spoken discourse.
Produced with a diverse pitch pattern (e.g., rising, falling, falling-rising, or continuing) and final lengthening,
-ketun-marked utterances invite the recipient to make an inference about the validity of the propositional con-
tent. This paper presents how the interactional functions of grammar (e.g., morpho-syntactic units) interplay
with prosody and speaker stance in spoken discourse from the perspective of interactional linguistics by ana-
lyzing the emergence of the clause-connective suffixes in a turn-/utterance final position.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How far can we go with the clause?

Panel contribution

Dr. Toshihide Nakayama 1


1. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

As is often the case with concepts that have been widely referenced and utilized in different theories and prac-
tices, it is rather difficult to give a single universally applicable precise definition to the term “clause”. However,
it is probably safe to say that the clause is typically considered a linguistic unit (e.g., see Radform 2004, Genetti
2018):
(i) consisting of a predicate, its arguments, and all other modifying expression associated with the predicate,
(ii) expressing a complete predication
The celebrated status of the clause within linguistic studies may very well be because of the feeling that the
clause is where the two different (syntactic and semantic) dimensions of the linguistic organization meet. Al-
though such a characterization may seem reasonable within the context where the concept had initially been
developed, i.e., written texts and idealized sentences in English and other well-studied European languages, it
does not easily carry over to languages of a different structural type.
This presentation will survey the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic organization in Nuuchahnulth,
an endangered indigenous language of Canada, and show that it is not easy to find a linguistic construct in
Nuuchahnulth that neatly lines up with the clause that is assumed in syntactic analyses in English.
Structurally, the domain formed around the predicate in Nuuchahnulth is very limited in its internal structure,
i.e., the predicate and its direct arguments. Because of this limitation, a semantically rich predication that could
be expressed in English within a clause using modifiers (such as adverbs) or prepositional phrases must be
expressed with a combination of multiple clauses (i.e., predicate-argument pairs) in Nuuchahnulth. A structural
unit consisting of a predicate and its argument, therefore, does not necessarily correspond well with a semantic
unit of a predication in Nuuchahnulth (as a single predication can consist of multiple sets of predicates and
their arguments). With respect to discourse-pragmatic organization, English-type clauses are less visible in
Nuuchahnulth, especially in interactive, spoken discourse. Expressions utilized in such discourse are often not
formed around a predicate.
This presentation hopes to show that the concept of “clause” that has been assumed in the traditional study
cannot be extended easily beyond the context of written texts and idealized sentences in English and that we
need careful examination as to if and where we can find justification for positing the clause as a significant
organizational unit.
References
Genetti, Carol. 2018. How Languages Work: An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Radford, Andrew. 2004. Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Repeated predicates in Japanese conversation: special focus


on adjectives

Panel contribution

Dr. Ryoko Suzuki 1


1. Keio University

It is commonly observed that Japanese speakers respond to a question or show a reaction to something in re-
peated forms in everyday talk, as in the following example:
A: ashita gakkoo aru?
tomorrow school have
Do you have classes tomorrow?/(lit.) Are there classes tomorrow?
B: n, aru aru.
yeah exist exist
Yeah, (I) do./(lit.) There are.
B answers A’s question by repeating the verb aru . Suzuki and Ono (in press) point out that a wide range of
verbs occur in repetition in response to or showing reaction to something. Some verbs are particularly com-
monly repeated, such as chigau chigau ‘differ, differ (meaning no, no)’ and aru aru ‘(something) exist, exist/have,
have’ iru iru ‘(someone) exist exist’ to name just a few. Suzuki and Ono propose that “verb repetition is a tem-
plate that creates new reactive tokens (13).” Some repeated verbs, such as chigau chigau ‘(lit.) differ differ’
or wakaru wakaru ‘(lit.) understand understand’ occur frequently, and speakers repeat them multiple times.
Those frequently repeated forms seem to function as independent reactive tokens.
As the translation suggests, verb repetitions in Japanese work just like English clauses. Speakers use those forms
naturally. A verb is only one of the parts of speech that is repeated in Japanese conversation. In this study, we
focus on adjective repetitions, using video-recorded natural conversational data (Corpus of Everyday Japanese
Conversation).
In our preliminary investigation, the data come from 104 tokens of the non-past form of adjective repetitions in
86 conversations. Just like verbs (as shown in Suzuki et al. in press), a wide range of adjectives (31 adjectives)
occur in repetition. Of these, 14% occur in direct responses to the interlocutors’ questions or requests. On
the other hand, 71% are reactions of the speaker to various things in the immediate context: (1) reacting to
another speaker’s narrative as shown below with sugoi sugoi ‘incredible incredible’; (2) reinforcing one’s own
point of view (ii ii ‘good good’); verbalizing bodily reactions (e.g., itai itai ‘painful painful,’ kayui kayui ‘itchy,
itchy’); (3) reacting to some people (e.g., a baby) or things (e.g., Sumo match on TV, delicious food) right in front
of himself/herself (e.g., umai umai ‘skillful skillful,’ oishii oishii ‘delicious delicious’).
A: Kazoku zen’in kita no. Kazoku zen’in.
family all came PRT family all
The entire family came. The entire family (did).
B: e:, sugoi sugoi.
Wow, incredible incredible.
Repeated adjectives are often pronounced emotively, and just like repeated verbs, they can occur without
utterance-final pragmatic particles. Some adjectives are repeated multiple times without pause, suggesting that
those forms function as unitary expressions showing speakers’ reactions. Whereas repeated verbs function as
reactive tokens to immediately preceding utterances by another speaker, repeated adjectives seem to be asso-
ciated with a broader range of speakers’ reactions. This study shows that predicative forms, not only verbs but
also adjectives, are repeated multiple times commonly in Japanese conversations, suggesting that they form a
template that creates expressions showing the speaker’s reaction to something.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Split Clauses as a Byproduct of Speaker Incongruent Stance


and/or Action Misalignment in Mandarin Conversational
Interaction

Panel contribution

Prof. Hongyin Tao 1


1. UCLA

One of the manifestations of atypical clauses in Mandarin is a situation where major components of a full clause
are split into multiple parts but are eventually produced over the course of several turn constructional units.
This is illustrated in Extract (1), which is taken from an international telephone call between a couple.
(1) M：�-, 我等-, 我等着就是了.
Wo, wo deng-, wo dengzhe jiushi le.
1SG, 1SG wait-, 1SG wait-STAT just PRT
‘I, I’ll wait-, I’ll just wait (for your letter) then’.
The first two prosodic/punctuation units may not be considered typical full clauses as they either lack a predicate
altogether or lack a full predicate; it is in the third unit where the full clause is finally realized.
In this paper I examine the dynamic production of such atypical clauses in Mandarin conversation. I argue that
atypical clauses such as those illustrated in (1) are byproducts of interactional moves in dispreferred interac-
tional contexts such as incongruent stance and/or action misalignment (Stivers 2008). Thus in Extract (1), prior
to these utterances, M (the husband) has asked his wife to stop talking about the mail she has sent him a few
days ago and focus instead on a more pressing matter, yet the wife keeps giving more detail about the mail -
upon hearing which M produces (1).
Overall it will be shown that the online production of typical and atypical clauses such as those splits in Man-
darin conversation is attributable to a host of grammatical, semantic, and interactional pragmatic factors, and
stance congruence and action alignment seem to be among some of the most prominent ones to be taken into
account.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The (a)typicality of main clauses of relative clauses in Finnish


conversation: syntactic and pragmatic lightness

Panel contribution

Prof. Marja-Liisa Helasvuo 1 , Prof. Ritva Laury 2


1. University of Turku, 2. University of Helsinki

Our study shows that in everyday Finnish conversation, copula clauses and existential clauses are overrepre-
sented as main clauses of relative clauses (RCs). They are used as main clauses of RCs much more frequently
than in our corpus as a whole. In our data from the Arkisyn Corpus of Finnish conversation, these two clause
types account for well more than half of the main clauses of RCs (61%), while they account for less than a quar-
ter (22.5%) of all clauses in the corpus. Below, the main clause of the RC in example (1) is a copula clause and
example (2) has an existential main clause.
(1) sehän on tilaisuus jota sponsoroi Prisma
DEM-CLT be-3SG event REL-PAR sponsor-3SG P.
‘that is an event that Prisma sponsors’
(2) siin on se Veeti joka heitti sitä lunta sillon talvella
DEM.INE be.3SG DEM V. REL throw-PST.3SG snow-PAR then winter-ADE
‘there’s that Veeti who threw that snow in the winter’
Existential and copular clauses are atypical in that instead of predicating about some state or event, they char-
acterize or classify some referent or place a referent in some location. They are also one-participant clauses
and lack transitivity. Such clause constructions are called ‘nonverbal’ by Haspelmath (2022).
It was also quite common in our data for RCs to occur without any main clause, with only a free NP (e.g., Ono &
Thompson 1994; Tao 1996; Helasvuo 2001) as head. Consider example (3):
(3) ja sitte kukkakauppias jolla #e# joka oli kaikkien tuntema tässä talossa
and then florist REL-ADE REL be-PST all-PL-GEN know-PTCP this-INE house-INE
‘and then the/a florist who was known by everyone in this house’
Thus, the main clauses of RCs in conversational Finnish tend to be syntactically simple and informationally light
(cf. Fox & Thompson 1990), if there is a main clause at all. We suggest that these structural and informational
characteristics reflect their function. They might also be characterized as ‘pragmatically light’, serving merely a
framing or presentational function, introducing the referent of the head noun then predicated upon in the RC.
In this way, the RCs regularly contain information more central to the interaction than what is expressed in the
main clause: they are more likely than the matter in the main clause to be further discussed in the conversation
(cf. Thompson (2002) regarding object complement clauses in English conversation).
References
Arkisyn database of conversational Finnish. Compiled at the University of Turku, with material from the Uni-
versity of Helsinki and the University of Turku.
Fox, Barbara – Thompson, Sandra A. 1990: A discourse explanation of the grammar of relative clauses in English
conversation. Language 66 (2) 297-316.
Haspelmath, Martin 2022: Nonverbal clause constructions. Draft, February 11.
Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa 2001: Syntax in the Making. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ono, Tsuyoshi – Thompson, Sandra A. 1994: Unattached NPs in English conversation. BLS 20: 402–419.
Tao, Hongyin 1996: Units in Mandarin conversation: prosody, discourse and grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Thompson, Sandra A. 2002: ”Object complements” and conversation: Towards a realistic account. Studies in
Language 26 (1): 125–164.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The atypicality of two-place clauses in Indonesian


Conversation

Panel contribution

Dr. Michael Ewing 1


1. University of Melbourne

Although transitive clauses have traditionally been a common starting point for grammatical analyses, it has
become increasingly evident that much of language use is dominated by intransitive clauses. This is clearly the
case for colloquial Indonesian conversation, where intransitive predicates make up roughly 85% of total predi-
cates with the remaining 15% being predicates that would conventionally be classified as transitive. This picture
can be further problematised when we consider that in naturally occurring Indonesian discourse, arguments
are rarely expressed explicitly. In a sample of 673 predicate constructions from a corpus of conversational In-
donesian, 367 (54.5%) had no explicit arguments , 280 (41.5%) had one explicit argument (whether intransitive
or transitive), and only 25 (4%) had two explicit arguments.
This presentation examines these less-frequent transitive clauses. I first provide an overview of (potentially)
two-place clauses in Indonesian conversation, including those in Agentive Voice (1 and 3) and Patientive Voice
(2 and 4) formats, and in elaborated formats with a range of explicit arguments (1 and 2) and minimal formats
with no explicit arguments (4 and 5).
(1) Weni: Kan aku bagi-bagiin brosur yang untuk lomba-lomba model kan,
PART 1S distribute-APPL brochure 2S for competition model PART
‘I was distributing brochures for a modelling competition you know,’
(2) Febri: Kamu di-cari sama Om Soman tuh.
2SG PV-look.for by uncle Soman PART
‘Uncle Soman is looking for you.’
(3) Alfa: Can pernah nyoba emang?
not.yet.SUN ever AV-try indeed
‘(You’ve) really never tried (it)?’
(4) Asmita: O jadi di-bagi-in gitu?
oh therefore PV-divide-APPL like.that
‘Oh so (you) share (your cigarettes) is that it?’

Focusing on atypicality, I conduct a close analysis the elaborated clauses (e.g. 1 and 2) in order to better un-
derstand what discourse functions and social actions such infrequent formats might be playing in interaction.
These elaborated formats typically appear in narrative portions within conversation, however interestingly not
part of relating the sequence of events being narrated (which usually involve given, tracked referents that are
not stated explicitly), but rather in setting up a narrative scene (as in (1) which introduces a new narrative)
or segments that link the narrator to the narration, such as evaluations. Reporting on actions going on in the
moment of interaction (such as discussing orders at a restaurant or using apps while on a device) is another
typical location for elaborated transitive clauses, as are statements that introduce entirely new topics (as in 2).
Precisely because fully elaborated clauses are rare, identifying distinctive patterns across contexts where they
are used can be problematic, nonetheless some commonality emerges. Noting that more minimal predicate
constructions with few if any explicit arguments often occur during the incremental development of narratives,
exchange of ideas and negotiations of stance, elaborated transitive clauses seem to do much of their interactional
work at the edges of ongoing talk, e.g. framing and evaluation. Further exploration of larger and more diverse
data sets should help shed more light on the role of these atypical constructions, which far from being anomalies,

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

occur consistently if infrequently in interaction.

884
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The atypicality of verb-final clauses in Japanese conversation

Panel contribution

Prof. Sandra A Thompson 1 , Prof. Tsuyoshi Ono 2 , Dr. Yasuyuki Usuda 3


1. University of California Santa Barbara, 2. University of Alberta, 3. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

We have observed that a typical constructed clause of Japanese in previous research looks like this:
(1)
Shoichi ga hon o yonda.
NOM book ACC read
‘Shoichi read a book.’
Typical examples involving verbs in our conversational data, however, look like this:
(2)
shoogakkoo san shii go nen gurai ni kakete zenbu yonda no ne
grade.school 3 4 5 grade about at over all read FP FP
‘(I) read (it) all during about (the) 3rd to 5th grades (in) grade school
Many features distinguish these two examples, but one obvious difference is that the verb is followed by further
elements in (2). In fact, only roughly 6% of 26,000 verbs taken from the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversa-
tion have verbs in finite form followed by a pause without any further elements (hereafter, ‘bare’ final verbs).
The remaining 94% are followed by further elements, such as final particles, as in (2). Such post-verbal elements
have long been known to convey a wide range of social meanings (references provided on request); we argue
that a realistic account of Japanese clauses must therefore include the fact that the post-verbal marking of social
meaning is grammaticized into their organization.
‘Bare’ final verbs, featured as typical Japanese clauses in much previous literature, are thus atypical and quite
rare. But do these ‘bare’ verbs really occur in clauses like (1)? Our data suggests that they do not; the utterances
they occur in differ from (1) in two key respects.
First, the distribution of verbs in this minority type is markedly different from the majority type, where the verb
is followed by further elements. For example, verbs such as aru ‘be’, chigau ‘differ’, and omou ‘think’ comprise
roughly 35% of roughly 1500 tokens, but these occur in only 13% of the majority type.
Second, the use of such bare verbs tends not to be of the clausal form seen in (1). In (3), for example, Masa is
telling students about music that was popular when he was younger.
(3)
1 Masa: ‘(during) my student time, folk song was hip’
2 Taka: fookudansu toka no kooyuu yatsu desu ka
‘is (it) folk dance like this?’
3 Masa: chau chau cha-
‘no no no’
4 ALL: laugh
In line 3, Masa immediately refutes Taka’s question using chau, a shortened form of chigau ‘differ’, repeated
three times. Though bare, the repeated chau (without associated arguments), produced quickly in one intona-
tion contour, are not at all like (1). We suggest that the verb chigau in chau chau cha-, in fact, is a ‘reactive token’
(Clancy et al. 1997),
responding to Taka’s question, and not three separate clauses.
We find that post-verbal elements are so deeply embedded into the grammar of Japanese that verbs rarely
occur without them in everyday interaction. In the 6% of cases where bare verbs apparently do occur, closer
examination reveals that they are doing a very narrow range of highly specialized social work.

885
Prosody, gesture, and
conversation (organized
by Margaret Zellers,
Maria Graziano, David
House)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gestures and information structure manage common ground


to adhere to pragmatic frame

Panel contribution

Ms. Sofia Koutalidis 1


1. Bielefeld University

In communication, we constantly exchange information and update the common ground shared with our co-
speakers. Information structure refers to the means with which information is marked on sentence level to most
optimally convey our communicative intentions. Information can be given or new, the topic of an utterance, or
can be focused or backgrounded (Féry & Krifka, 2008). The linguistic means assigned to information structure,
are already existent in the language’s repertoire (Dipper et al., 2007) and recent research has revealed that
gestures are also employed to highlight information in our utterances (Ebert et al., 2011; Rohrer et al., 2022) . In
German next to gestures those means can be prosodic or syntactical (Pittner & Berman, 2015).
Utterances are not produced arbitrarily in speech though. Combined coherently they enable discourse contex-
tualization to comply with the given communicative goals the interactive situation poses. Pragmatic frames,
meaning pre-patterned speaking practices, will trigger expectations about verbal packaging since they define
how discourse will be structured and what is expected from speakers (Günthner & Knoblauch, 1994; Rohlfing
et al., 2016).
This study focuses on the role information structure and its gestural marking plays regarding the communica-
tive demands the pragmatic frame sets during language acquisition. Focus is considered to express pragmatic
aboutness or at-issueness of the highlighted element (Koev, 2018) and should thus adhere to the given prag-
matic frame. Utterances of 10 German preschool children in a setting of explaining a game were analyzed with
that in mind [1]. Initial findings suggest that multimodal marking of information structure functions on utter-
ance level drawing on available linguistic means to keep discourse on track, but simultaneously operates on
contextualization level, in order to meet speakers’ expectations and the general goals of the pragmatic frame.
References:
Dipper, Stefanie., Goetze, Michael., & Skopeteas, Stavros. (2007). Information structure in cross-linguistic cor-
pora : annotation guidelines for phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and information structure (p. 210).
Universitätsverlag Potsdam.
Ebert, C., Evert, S., & Wilmes, K. (2011). Focus Marking via Gestures. Sinn & Bedutung, 15, 1–15.
http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/mitarbeiter/ebert/papers/CESEKW-SuB-gestures.pdf
Féry, C., & Krifka, M. (2008). Information structure: Notional distinctions, ways of expression. In P. van
Sterkenburg (Ed.), Unity and Diversity of Languages (pp. 123–135). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.141.13kri
Günthner, S., & Knoblauch, H. (1994). “Forms are the food of faith”: Gattungen als Muster kommunikativen
Handelns. Kölner Zeitschrift Für Soziologie Und Sozialpsychologie, 46(4), 693–723.
Koev, T. (2018). Notions of at-issueness. Language and Linguistics Compass, 12(12).
https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12306
Pittner, K., & Berman, J. (2013). Deutsche Syntax .Ein Arbeitsbuch. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Rohlfing, K. J., Wrede, B., Vollmer, A. L., & Oudeyer, P. Y. (2016). An alternative to mapping a
word onto a concept in language acquisition: Pragmatic frames. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(APR), 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00470
Rohrer, P. L., Florit-Pons, J., Vilà-Giménez, I., & Prieto, P. (2022). Children Use Non-referential Gestures in
Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661339

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

[1] EcoGest: https://scs.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ecogest/

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal entrainment in conversation: a pilot study on


parallel gestures and phonetic variation in Swedish

Panel contribution

Ms. Martina Rossi 1 , Dr. Maria Graziano 2 , Dr. Margaret Zellers 1


1. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2. Lund University Humanities Lab

The phenomenon of entrainment refers to the increasingly synchronized communicative behavior that inter-
locutors often adopt over the course of a conversation (e.g., Wynn & Borrie, 2022). In face-to-face interactions,
entrainment has been observed to occur in different modalities: in gestures, through the paralleling or mirror-
ing of (some aspects of) each other’s gestures, as well as in speech, through the repetition of lexical items or
phrases and mutually converging phonetic values (Kimbara, 2006; Graziano et al., 2011; Levitan & Hirschberg,
2011; Holler et al., 2011; inter alia). Not many studies, however, have paid attention to the possible interac-
tion between modalities in the achievement of entrainment (Rasenberg et al., 2020). This pilot investigation
attempts to assess whether, and to what extent, entrainment in one modality is accompanied by entrainment
in another modality by observing parallel gestures alongside the variation of phonetic features in face-to-face
interactions.
We analyzed excerpts from 3 conversations from the Spontal corpus (Edlund et al., 2010), each involving 2
Swedish native speakers, for a total of 15 minutes of dialogue. Conversations were transcribed and divided into
turns. Using ELAN (Wittenburg et al., 2006), we identified all instances of parallel gestures, i.e., those sequences
where one of the two speakers repeats, completely or partially, a gesture previously made by his/her interlocu-
tor. A total of 17 parallel gestures were identified. To investigate global entrainment (Wynn & Borrie, 2022),
each dialogue was subdivided into 5 sections of 1 minute each using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2022). F0 (in
semitones above 1 Hz) and intensity (in dB), both normalized for the speakers’ means, were subsequently ex-
tracted from the sections, in order to compare, for each conversation, the values of the sections where parallel
gesturing is present to those where it is not.
Preliminary results point towards a possible cooperation of phonetics and the gestural modality for entrain-
ment, and to an increased similarity between the speakers over the course of the conversation. For instance, the
mean F0 in one conversation and the mean intensity in another become more similar to those of the speakers’
conversational partners in the sections where a parallel gesture is present, especially in the dialogue sections
closer to the end. In the third conversation, entrainment in the phonetic parameters seems to occur indepen-
dently of the presence of a parallel gesture. This could be explained by the fact that, in this dialogue, parallel
gestures mainly occur at the end of the speaker’s utterance, during silent pauses, and not together with speech,
as in the other two conversations. It is also possible that, in this case, the entrainment in the gestural modality
might be accompanied by entrainment in other phonetic features that we have not yet analyzed.
These preliminary observations suggest that entrainment could be a cross-modal phenomenon. Further anal-
yses on a larger dataset will involve more phonetic values (e.g., voice quality and speech rate), also at the turn
level, as well as the lexical content of the turns with or without parallel gestures. Finally, entrainment will be
quantified using inferential methods.

889
18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the coordination of prosody and hand gestures in


native-nonnative conversations

Panel contribution

Mr. Valentijn Prové 1 , Prof. Bert Oben 1 , Dr. Kurt Feyaerts 1


1. KU Leuven

It is a well-established fact that native speakers (NS) slow down their speech rate when interacting with non-
native speakers (NNS). This general feature of NS-NNS interactions has been studied as the consequence of
speaker adaptations at more detailed phonetic levels such as segmental articulation (e.g. syllables are extended,
Scarborough et al. 2007) and prosodic chunking (e.g. more pauses occur, Derwing 1990). However, the available
empirical studies leave slow speech rate to be a rather monolithic phenomenon, so we know little about its
dynamicity in NS-NNS conversations and the functions it serves correspondingly. In this paper, we aim at a
more fine-grained account that is anchored in a multimodal study of intonation phrases (IP’s) and that focusses
on the coordination of prosody and hand gesture. Based on Kendon’s (1972) seminal hypothesis that gesture
closely follows the structure of speech at different phonetic levels, we should expect that speech and gesture
continue to be coordinated, even if the speech production is segmented into smaller chunks. Such behavior
would enhance transparency for non-native interactants as to how an utterance is formulated.
Based on a video corpus of spontaneous speech with 46 NS of Dutch each having a free conversation with both
another NS and a NNS (creating within-subject conditions), we investigate whether, in NS-NNS compared to
NS-NS conversations:
(a) Hand gestures overlap more tightly with co-expressive IP’s.
(b) Gesture size and gesture velocity are more strongly correlated with speech rate in the co expressive IP’s.
In our quantitative approach, we use nested mixed-effects linear models with the IP as observation level. We
annotated gesture units using the Neuroges coding system (Lausberg 2013) and we extracted two-dimensional
movement data using the OpenPose framework for pose estimation (Cao et al. 2017) to calculate different kine-
matic measures in terms of gesture size. We transcribed the conversations orthographically and we used the
BAS WebService pipeline (Kisler et al. 2017) to temporally align the transcribed words with the sound signal.
Subsequently, we kept IP’s that were delimited by pauses more than 200 ms (Cucchiarini et al. 2002) and that
temporally overlapped with a gesture unit.
While most of the annotation work is done, we are still working on the analyses. We expect to find that gesture
and speech are more closely coordinated in NS-NNS conversations, that is, there is a more strict temporal overlap
between speech chunks and co-expressive gestures. Moreover, we expect larger and slower gestures to correlate
with a reduction in speech rate. As such, gestures might contribute to the multimodal prominence of speech
rate adaptations. We think this paper is relevant for the panel ‘Prosody, Gesture and Conversation’ because it
provides the basis for a functional explanation of the interdependence of prosody and gesture in conversation.

890
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of nonverbal and paraverbal features in Lingua


franca communication in therapeutic mental health
encounters. A case study.

Panel contribution

Prof. Leona Van Vaerenbergh 1 , Dr. Sofie Van de Geuchte 1


1. University of Antwerp

Communication is an essential aspect of mental health: it is used not only during anamnesis but also to make
a diagnosis and to treat patients. These conversations are marked by a complex interplay of verbal, nonverbal
(gesture), and paraverbal elements (prosody): “[…] for both counselor and client, voice tone and rhythm, smiles,
frowns, and body positions play a central role in the interaction […]” (Donovan et al. 2017: 12). When the
psychiatrist and the patient do not speak the same language and try to communicate in a common foreign
language (lingua franca), the extra-verbal messages gain importance and become more prominent.
This paper investigates the role of nonverbal and paraverbal features in lingua franca conversations in mental
health. The basis for this study are four psychiatric interviews with a Rwandese patient in a psychiatric hospital
in Flanders (Belgium). The interlocutors used French, a foreign language for both the psychiatrist and the pa-
tient. The consultations were video recorded in 2018 over a period of 4 months in which the patient was treated
ambulatory. The recordings were transcribed and analyzed using conversation analysis, focusing on verbal,
nonverbal, and paraverbal features.
We noticed that the nonverbal and paraverbal elements could have two different functions. The first function is
to indicate communication difficulties. Interlocutors show, among other things, that they are looking for words
by gesturing, looking away, pausing, and stuttering. The second function is to compensate for the lack of verbal
messages (see Albl-Mikasa 2022: 69; Watzlawick et al. 2017: 58-59). Nonverbal expressions like gestures and
facial expressions are used to replace words, and nonverbal and paraverbal elements make it clear to the other
participant that something was understood (or not).
By taking the multimodal nature of conversation into account in the analysis, we can observe how the lingua
franca consultation unfolds and how the interlocutors manage to understand one another, which would not be
possible without the nonverbal and paraverbal elements.
References
Albl-Mikasa, Michaela (2022). English as a lingua franca: A paradigm shift for translation and interpreting?. In:
Slovo.ru: Baltic Accent 13(1): 65-81.
Donovan, James M. / Osborn, Kristin A. R. / Rice, Susan (2017): Paraverbal Communication in Psychotherapy.
Beyond the Words. New York/London: Rowman & Littelfield.
Watzlawick, Paul / Beavon, Janet H. / Jackson, Don D. (2017 [1969]). Menschliche Kommunikation. Formen,
Störungen, Paradoxien. 13th unchanged edition. Bern: Hogrefe.

891
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Turn uptake in potentially-competitive contexts using manual


gestures by speakers of Luganda

Panel contribution

Dr. Margaret Zellers 1


1. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Turn-taking in conversation is observed across a variety of languages to function relatively smoothly without
large gaps or overlaps (Sacks et al., 1974; Stivers et al., 2009). However, overlapping speech arises in many con-
texts (Çetin & Shriberg, 2006; Kurtić et al., 2013), and often without causing any problems in the conversation.
For example, many backchannels arise in overlap with ongoing speech, without disrupting the main speaker’s
turn; this may partly arise since their phonetic form reflects their placement, normally being quieter and hav-
ing a lower pitch than the ongoing turn (Gardner, 2001). Even when overlapping speech does not consist of
a backchannel, though, it is not the case that overlapping speech is always problematic for participants in a
conversation. Rather, overlapping speech can be classified as turn-competitive or non-competitive, with com-
petitive contributions often showing increased pitch and loudness compared to surrounding speech (French &
Local, 1983; Kurtić & Gorisch, 2018).
Gesture, and specifically hand gesture, has long been recognized as a resource for turn uptake. Schegloff (1984)
identifies turn uptake as a context in which a person who is not the active speaker can use a hand gesture, and
gestures as turn-uptake tools have been identified in such diverse languages as Ilocano (Streeck & Hartge, 1992),
French (Mondada & Oloff, 2011) and Mandarin (Li, 2014).
An emerging body of evidence supports the argument that prosody and gesture comprise a single system within
linguistic, and there is substantial support for the idea that prosody and gesture interact in complex ways, for
example, in the expression of prominence (Swerts & Krahmer, 2010; Wagner et al., 2014; Prieto et al., 2015;
Ambrazaitis & House, 2017, 2022, inter alia). However, there has been relatively little investigation of the ways
in which prosodic and gestural cues interact in the context of turn uptake. The current study investigates this
interaction using data taken from two Luganda conversations. Luganda is a Bantu language spoken in Uganda;
the current data consist of excerpts from two-party conversations which were recorded in July 2019 in Kam-
pala. A salient feature of the data is the frequency with which a self-selected next speaker will indicate the
desire to take up a turn by initiating a hand gesture before the current speaker’s turn has ended. So far, 24 to-
kens of such pre-gestures have been identified in 12 minutes of annotated data from two conversations. Initial
analysis suggests that these early gestures may be a tool for avoiding the need to treat overlapping speech as
turn-competitive, which may be a face-threatening action; neither the turn launches that immediately follow
the early gestures, nor the turn ends with which they overlap, appear to display the prosodic features associ-
ated with turn-competitiveness (e.g. increased pitch or loudness). This contribution will investigate the extent
to which such pre-gestures may either replace prosodic marking of turn-competition, or avoid the treatment of
turns as competitive by giving early warning of an interlocutor’s desire to take the floor.

892
Rapport management in
onsite and remote
interpreting (organized
by July De Wilde, Jelena
Vranjes, Dries Cavents)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Dialogue interpreting in maternity: insights into rapport


building and intersectional challenges

Panel contribution

Dr. Elena Davitti 1 , Ms. Soumely Madell 1


1. University of Surrey

Rapport is a key construct when investigating interactional management in dyadic, triadic and multiparty ex-
changes, especially in collaborative settings, where trust between the parties-at-talk is key to a smooth devel-
opment of the encounter. Different approaches to communication analysis have captured how rapport is co-
constructed in dialogic, interpreter-mediated scenarios across different settings, highlighting the importance to
account for the interplay between verbal and embodied resources (Davitti & Braun 2020).
This paper will explore rapport building in an underresearched setting for dialogue interpreting (DI), namely
language discordant maternity settings between midwives and pregnant women (Bridle et al. 2021). Despite
recommendations that healthcare professionals should use interpreting services for all patients requiring it,
several multilingual communication practices are adopted to offer language support. These can be placed on a
continuum from less to more ‘technologized’ (Davitti 2019) and range from using one lingua franca to ad hoc in-
terpreters to professional interpreters, either onsite or remotely connected, to relying on speech-to-text/speech
translation applications. Evidence suggests a certain lack of confidence in relation to how to handle multilingual
communication scenarios and that current language provision policy may not be fit for midwifery promoting a
women-centred and individualised-care approach (NHS 2020).
Against this landscape, this presentation will characterise the midwifery setting as a journey, from antena-
tal to intrapartum and postnatal appointments during the course of midwifery care. Rapport is an essential
component of the midwife-woman therapeutic relationship, which is conceived as a partnership built through
mutual trust, respect, empathy, appropriate use of power, through safe, effective, ethically correct, and non-
discriminatory communication. While midwifery literature has been prolific with regards to monolingual com-
munication issues, the midwifery journey has never been explored in its entirety and in terms of multilingual
communication (Akselsson et al. 2022).
Constructivist Grounded Theory is used to access the voices of midwives and childbearing women, within an
NHS Maternity Trust setting. The paper will report on rich, in-depth findings from extensive interviews with
over 40 participants, focusing on how rapport emerges from their different accounts of the multilingual prac-
tices they have experienced first-hand in both onsite and remote interpreting alongside the midwifery journey,
what interactional challenges emerged and how these affected communicative goals during maternity care. The
paper will show how such data can provide a suitable springboard for further microanalytical investigations,
especially in a setting where accessing video-recorded interactions is particularly challenging.
Akselsson, A. et al. (2022) Language-supported labor ward visits for pregnant migrant women: Staff experiences
in a Swedish hospital, European Journal of Midwifery 6(43).
Bridle, L. et al. (2021) “We couldn’t talk to her”: A qualitative exploration of the experiences of UK midwives
when navigating women’s care without language. International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare.
Davitti, E. (2019) Healthcare Interpreting, in Baker, M. & G. Saldanha Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies.
Davitti, E. & S. Braun (2020) Analysing Interactional Phenomena in Video Remote Interpreting in Collaborative
Settings: Implications for Interpreter Education, in The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 279-302.
NHS (2020) Better Births four years on progress report, NHS England Publications.

894
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring multimodal face work in video remote interpreting


and face-to-face interpreting

Panel contribution

Dr. Esther de Boe 1 , Mr. Mathijs Verhaegen 1


1. University of Antwerp

Research on dialogue interpreting has widely recognized interpreters as “fully fledged social agents”, whose
behaviour impacts on the dynamics of the interaction – including face work –, and whose “additional image of
self is at stake during the communicative event” (Merlini, 2013, p. 268). However, as Cavents and De Wilde (in
press) point out, contrary to research on monolingual face work (e.g., Culpeper et al., 2003) showing that par-
ticipants use a multitude of verbal and embodied resources (e.g., gaze, body posture, gesture) to manage face
work, in interpreting studies, there is a dearth of research investigating multimodal aspects of face work. This
paper explores the interpreter’s multimodal face work strategies during repair sequences, more specifically, in
cases in which the interpreter requests clarification, hesitates and self-corrects, and provides meta comments
on her task. These instances can be considered face-threatening, since the interpreter risks negative evaluation
from the other participant(s) concerning her professional competence. Data were collected by means of semi-
simulations in an educational setting involving a school psychologist and a certified community interpreter, as
well as an actor playing the parent role. The three participants took part in two video-mediated interpreting
events (one with all participants in a different location and one with the psychologist and “parent” together,
while the interpreter was connected remotely) and one face-to-face interpreting event. All participants wore
mobile eye trackers for the purpose of analysing their gaze behaviour, since the use of multimodal resources
such as gaze may be less efficient in remote interpreting (e.g., Davitti & Braun, 2020). Drawing on an interac-
tional, multimodal framework, the analysis of the selected excerpts provides salient insights into the ways in
which the interpreter manages face sensitivities in remote and face-to-face interpreter-mediated events.
Cavents, D., & De Wilde, J. (in press). Face-work in video remote interpreting: A multimodal micro-analysis. In E.
de Boe, J. Vranjes, & H. Salaets (Eds.), Interactional dynamics in remote interpreting: Micro-analytical approaches.
(in press, 2023) Routledge.
Culpeper, J., Bousfield, D., & Wichmann, A. (2003). Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and
prosodic aspects. Journal of pragmatics, 35(10–11), 1545–1579. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00118-2
Davitti, E., & Braun, S. (2020). Analysing interactional phenomena in video remote interpreting in collabora-
tive settings: Implications for interpreter education. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 14(3), 279–302.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1750399X.2020.1800364
Merlini, R. (2013). Changing perspectives. Politeness in cooperative multi-party interpreted talk. In C. Schäffner,
K. Kredens & Y. Fowler (Eds.), Interpreting in a changing landscape: Selected papers from Critical Link 6 (pp. 267–
283). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.109.20mer

895
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Face Threatening Acts in Telephone Interpreting

Panel contribution

Prof. Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez 1


1. Universidad de Alcalá

Telephone interpreting has increased considerably in Spain in recent years, becoming one of the most de-
manded forms of interpretation. It is an innovative technology in the language services industry, which was
introduced to facilitate communication for immigrant communities and is also proving extremely useful in en-
abling effective communication in the provision of services for tourists and other foreign-speaking populations.
As the immigrant population, tourism and other population movements increase, the demand for telephone in-
terpreting increases too, intensifying and generating the need for a more technologically advanced service. This
modality of interpretation is increasingly used in more diverse sectors and its exclusivity in the field of public
services has been left behind, since more and more private companies that provide services such as insurance,
electricity, gas, banking, etc. use the telephone as the main means of assistance to their clients, eliminating
physical offices and expanding beyond physical boundaries.
The project PRAGMACOR (Corpus pragmatics and telephone interpreting: analysis of face-threatening acts, Ref.
PID2021-127196NA-I00) aims to continue and substantially expand the line that began with the projects Design,
compilation and analysis of a multilingual corpus of mediated interactions on road assistance (Ref. CCGP2017-
HUM002) and Analysis of Face Threatening Acts in Telephone Interpreting (Ref. CM/JIN/2019-040). Once the
methodology has been validated and the usefulness of the analysis of the corpus of interactions has been proved,
the aim is to continue expanding the number of languages and conversations, extending the research beyond
road assistance to include the rest of the areas where telephone interpretation is used, focusing on a specific
aspect related to pragmatics: face-threatening acts.
Interpreted telephone conversations are an example of distance communication as opposed to face-to-face com-
munication and, on the other hand, can be considered a type of asynchronous interaction as a speaker’s speech
is reworked before reaching the final receiver (Lázaro Gutiérrez, 2021). Our starting hypothesis is that, due
to these characteristics, a high number of different face-threatening acts occur in these conversations, particu-
larly taking into acocunt the participants cultural diversity, which may cause the appearance of discriminatory
discourses. To confirm or refute this hypothesis, we set ourselves the following objectives: 1) detect FTAs, 2)
classify FTAs according to a) their type (attack against the positive or negative image) and b) their author (ser-
vice provider or user), 3) analyse their impact on the discourse and on the performance of the interpreters. Our
methodology is based on corpus pragmatics.
The aim of this contribution is to present the results of the projects Design, compilation and analysis of a mul-
tilingual corpus of mediated interactions on road assistance (Ref. CCGP2017-HUM002) and Analysis of Face
Threatening Acts in Telephone Interpreting (Ref. CM/JIN/2019-040), and the first steps of PRAGMACOR (PID2021-
127196NA-I00).
Lázaro Gutiérrez, Raquel (2021) “Analysis of Face-Threatening Acts against Telephone Interpreters”. The Inter-
preters’ Newsletter, 26.

896
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rapport management and multimodality in onsite and video


remote interpreting

Panel contribution

Mr. Dries Cavents 1 , Prof. July De Wilde 1 , Dr. Jelena Vranjes 1


1. Ghent University

In recent years, there has been a growing demand for video remote interpreting (VRI). However, few studies
have explored the influence of VRI on the management of interpersonal relations. Conversely, some studies
have already investigated the management of interpersonal relations in onsite interpreting (OSI), using Brown
and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory and, recently, also Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) Rapport Management Theory.
In addition, earlier research has pointed to the importance of both verbal and non-verbal behaviour for the
management of rapport. However, previous research into video mediated communication has also revealed
interactants’ reduced access to visual cues (Hale et al., 2022). Therefore, we hypothesise that this lack of visual
cues will influence interactants’ rapport management strategies. In order to test this hypothesis, the present
project aims to investigate (1) the (non-)verbal rapport management (RM) strategies employed by participants
to OSI and VRI interactions; and (2) the influence of the VRI setting on participants’ use of RM strategies.
To this end, we conducted experiments, for which we recruited 12 professional interpreters who were each
asked to interpret one OSI interaction and one VRI (i.e. none of the three participants joining remotely share
the same physical space) interaction. To increase ecological validity, the simulated interactions were script-
based, drawing on input from authentic cases. The experiment was recorded with video cameras and an Eyelink
Portable Remote eye-tracker. Immediately after the experiment, all participants were asked to fill in a short
survey informing about their overall experience. After having analysed the video-recorded interactions, we
conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants who were asked to retrospectively report on their
experience of the interactions and discuss the adopted rapport management strategies. Our hypotheses for the
experiment were that (1) the VRI setting would require more rapport management than the OSI setting; (2)
the participants would use more non-verbal RM strategies in OSI than in VRI; and (3) the participants would
compensate for the lack of access to non-verbal communication in VRI by using more verbal and disruptive
rapport management. The presentation will discuss the findings from the experiments and how these relate to
the proposed hypotheses. Furthermore, it will zoom in on the specific impact of OSI and VRI on how rapport
is managed in dialogue interpreting (DI). Our findings contribute to existing theories on the use of (non-)verbal
behaviour for the management of interpersonal relations in a DI context, both in OSI and in VRI.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085
Hale, S., Goodman-Delahunty, J., Martschuk, N., & Lim, J. (2022). Does interpreter location make a difference? :
A study of remote vs face-to-face interpreting in simulated police interviews. Interpreting, 24(2), 221–253.
https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00077.hal
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In H. Spencer-Oatey (eds.) Culturally Speaking Sec-
ond Edition; Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory (pp. 11–47). London, U.K. / New York, NY, U.S.A.:
Continuum International Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350934085

897
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Rapport management in remote interpreting in court settings.


A psychological perspective.

Panel contribution

Mrs. Diana Singureanu 1 , Prof. Sabine Braun 1 , Dr. Graham Hieke 1 , Dr. Joanna Gough 1
1. University of Surrey

This paper presents a selection of the findings emerging from a wider study investigating the challenges pro-
fessional interpreters face when working in court-prison video links at a busy court complex in London, and
how they respond to these challenges. Drawing on the psychological concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI), we
investigated the influence of court interpreters’ EI levels on their views regarding video-mediated interpreting
(VMI) and their coping strategies in VMI. This is a multi-method study that combined qualitative methods, which
consisted of observing and interviewing interpreters, and quantitative methods, namely the TEIQue self-report
inventory used to assess interpreters’ levels of emotional intelligence.
Our study corroborates some of the inherent VMI challenges established in previous research in terms of defen-
dants’ reduced sense of presence (Fowler, 2018; Davitti and Braun, 2020) but also reaffirms that that interpreters’
perspectives on VMI varied considerably (Devaux, 2016; Braun, Davitti and Dicerto, 2018). Aimed at investigat-
ing psychological factors that may contribute to this variation, our cross-analysis between the qualitative and
the quantitative data showed relationships between interpreters’ EI profiles and their rapport management
approaches. For example, interpreters with a high level of social awareness appeared more perceptive of the
lack of engagement exhibited by the remote defendant showing an increased understanding of the role of gaze
in bridging the physical distance in VMI. Furthermore, high levels of emotion perception, empathy and social
awareness seemed to translate into these interpreters having a better insight into the impact of the busy court
environment on the rapport between co-present parties and the remote defendant.
This presentation will introduce the data and the methodological instruments used in the cross-analysis and
then exemplify and discuss what the identified relationships between the different data sets reveal about the
interpreters’ rapport management in VMI in court settings.
This study offers an innovative way of looking at VMI through a psychological lens, highlighting that inter-
preters’ individual differences have an impact on how they approach and/or cope with a VMI assignment in
court, including how they manage the rapport between the participants; it strongly suggests that EI as an in-
trapersonal aspect needs to be considered whenever interpreters’ views are sought or when the appropriateness
of different approaches to implementing VMI is discussed.
Braun, S., Davitti, E. & Dicerto, S. (2018) ‘Video-Mediated Interpreting in Legal Settings: Assessing the Implemen-
tation’, in Napier; Skinner and Braun (ed.) Here or There - Research on Interpreting via video-link. Washington
DC: Gallaudet University Press, pp. 144–179.
Davitti, E. and Braun, S. (2020) ‘Analysing interactional phenomena in video remote interpreting in collaborative
settings: implications for interpreter education’.
Devaux, J. (2016) ‘When the role of the court interpreter intersects and interacts with new technologies’, in
P. Henry-Tierney and Karunanayake (eds) Intersect, Innovate, Interact. CTIS Occasional Papers, 7. Centre for
Translation and Intercultural Studies, Manchester, pp. 4–21.
Fowler, Y. (2018) ‘Interpreted prison video link: The prisoner’s eye view’, in R.S. J. Napier and S. Braun (eds).
DC: Gallaudet Washington: Here or there: research on interpreting via video link., pp. 183–209.

898
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social workers’ perceptions and experiences on rapport


management in onsite and remote interpreting

Panel contribution

Dr. Anu Viljanmaa 1


1. Tampere University

This paper looks at service providers’ experiences on rapport management in onsite and remote interpreting.
More concretely, it reports findings from a qualitative exploratory study that focuses on Finnish social workers’
experiences in using technology-mediated interpreting services in child welfare, family work and integration
services. Specific focus is laid on the social workers’ perceptions and experiences of managing rapport with
the service user and the interpreter in situations where the interpreters’ presence is reduced, i.e. technology-
mediated interpreting (video-remote or telephone interpreting) is used.
Interpreter-mediated social work is a field of practice that comprises practical and interactional challenges
and requires a high degree of professional discretion in order to optimize client outcomes (Connor, Zubrzycki
& Foreman 2021). Previous studies on interpreter-mediated social work report social workers experiencing
difficulties in engaging families and building relationships when sessions are carried out with an interpreter
(Kriz & Skivenes 2010; Tipton 2016; Westlake & Jones 2018). Much of the existing research on the challenges of
interpreter-mediated social work is concerned with problems related to poor verbal renderings, i.e. problems
relating to inaccurate or incomplete translation, but also to questions of trust (Sawrikar 2015, Tipton 2016,
Westlake & Jones 2018).
The multimodal aspects of rapport management in social work using technology-mediated interpreting deserve
more attention. This exploratory study sets out to address this gap by investigating the impact of the interpreter’s
reduced presence on the service provider’s experiences on how they can manage and do manage rapport.
The study sets out to answer following research questions: What are the challenges social workers’ associate
with rapport management in interpreter-mediated social work when distance vs onsite interpreting is used?
In technology-mediated interpreting, how is the interpreter’s active involvement in interaction management
experienced to challenge the direct contact between service provider and service user? And finally, what are
the social worker’s rapport management strategies in technology-mediated interpreting?
The research is based on qualitative in-depth interviews conducted with social workers in Finland. The in-
terviews explore social workers’ perceptions and experiences of working with interpreters. The analysis con-
ducted is a thematic analysis focusing on patterns of multimodal elements of rapport building and management
in interpreter-mediated social work.
References
Connor, S., Zubrzycki, J. & Foreman, D. (2021). Social work with interpreters in the disability sector: Developing
Practice Principles. Australian Social Work¸ DOI: 10.1080/0312407X.2021.2001833.
Kriz, K. & Skivenes M. (2010). Lost in translation: How child welfare workers in Norway and England experience
language difficulties when working with minority ethnic families, British Journal of Social Work, 40, 1353–1367.
Sawrikar, P. (2015). How effective do families of non-English-speaking background (NESB) and child protection
caseworkers in Australia see the use of interpreters? A qualitative study to help inform good practice principles,
Child and Family Social Work, 20, 396–406.
Tipton, R. (2016). Perceptions of the ‘occupational other’: Interpreters, social workers and intercultures, British
Journal of Social Work, 46, 463–479.
Westlake, D. & Jones, R. K. (2018). Breaking down language barriers: A practice-near study of social work using
interpreters, British Journal of Social Work, 48, 1388–1408.

899
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Staying connected: The effect of interpreting modality (onsite


vs. video-mediated) on rapport management in
interpreter-mediated police interviews

Panel contribution

Prof. Sabine Braun 1


1. University of Surrey

Interpreting in police interviews requires professional skill and a high level of sensitivity to the communicative
situation (Hale et al., 2017). As in other instances of dialogue interpreting, a crucial aspect of interpreting in
police interviews is rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2008), especially through the selection of appropri-
ate strategies to enhance, maintain and/or challenge the relationship between the primary interlocutors and
the interpreter. Rapport management strategies draw on a wide range of resources, including direct verbal
interventions (e.g., requests for clarification) but also ‘small’ verbal and embodied cues ranging from changes
in volume and prosody to gestures, gaze and posture. It has been argued that many of these resources are more
difficult to use effectively in the fractured ecology of video-mediated communication (e.g., Due & Licoppe, 2021),
leading to reduced social presence and creating difficulties with ‘staying connected’ in online communication.
Against this backdrop, the increasing use of different configurations of video-mediated interpreting in legal
and other settings (Braun, 2015), including police interviews (Braun, 2013; Hale et al., 2022), raises important
questions about how the fractured ecology of video-mediated communication and video-mediated interpreting
impacts the management of rapport in interpreter-mediated police interviews when the interpreter is offsite,
and what the implications may be for cross-lingual police communication involving vulnerable people.
This presentation addresses these questions through analysis of a corpus of (simulated) police interviews in-
volving experienced police officers and qualified police interpreters. The interpreters were either co-located
with the primary interlocutors or connected via video link. The presentation first identifies the multimodal
resources and strategies employed in each of the two interpreting modalities to manage rapport and then in-
vestigates the relationships between rapport management and interpreting modality.
The analysis and interpretation of the findings draws on Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) comprehensive framework
of rapport management, which is particularly relevant to the complex context of interpreter-mediated police
interviews, as it emphasises the different dimensions of rapport management such as interactional goals, face
work, and interlocutors’ sociality rights, which are linked to equity, fairness and social inclusion/exclusion.
The presentation and interpretation of the findings will be followed by a discussion of the wider social implica-
tions of the increased use of video-mediated interpreting in the context of cross-lingual police interviews and
fairness of justice.
References
Braun, S. (2013) “Keep Your Distance? Remote Interpreting in Legal Proceedings.” Interpreting 15:2, 200-228.
Braun, S. (2015) “Remote Interpreting.” In H. Mikkelson & R. Jourdenais (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Interpret-
ing. London/New York: Routledge, 352-367.
Due, B.L. & Licoppe, C. (2021) “Video-Mediated Interaction (VMI).” Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Hu-
man Sociality 3:3.

Hale, S., Goodman-Delahunty, J. & Martschuk, N. (2019) “Interpreter Performance in Police Interviews: Differ-
ences Between Trained Interpreters and Untrained Bilinguals.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 13:2,
107-131.
Hale, S., Goodman-Delahunty, J., Martschuk, N. & Lim, J. (2022) “Does Interpreter Location Make a Difference?

900
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Study of Remote vs Face-to-Face Interpreting in Simulated Police Interviews.” Interpreting 24:2, 221-53.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Face, (Im)politeness and Rapport. London/New York: Continuum.

901
Re-considering
discourses of war and
peace: 21st century
transcultural
perspectives (organized
by Cornelia Ilie)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Beyond war: Turbulent landscapes and affective regimes of


Bosnia-Herzegovina

Panel contribution

Prof. Maida Kosatica 1


1. University of Duisburg-Essen

This paper seeks to carefully demonstrate the results of an interdisciplinary work which brings together and
builds upon a range of critical theories (e.g. trauma theory (LaCapra, 2016), performance theory (Bell and Gi-
bons, 2011)) that call for different ways of approaching the complex politics of language and communication in
post-war societies. Theories the paper builds upon are framed as discursive and semiotic inquiries of remem-
bering which predominantly, but not exclusively, rely on ‘raw’ material memory in physical space, and thus are
situated under the umbrella of memoryscapes research. Aiming to understand (the sites of) trauma in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, my paper is designed in a way that recognizes the power of war memory which is implicated in the
production of complex, affect-filled spaces and discourses of remembering (Kosatica, 2022). To illustrate how
war memory meaningfully and affectively prevails in public space, I look at different genres of data and com-
munication domains in which the 1992-1995 war is discursively and semiotically (re)constituted. There are two
datasets at the heart of this paper. The first considers post-war monuments evidencing the habitual struggle to
disrupt and reorder space and reinterpret the violent past. The second data-set includes eerie murals depicting
a war criminal sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes com-
mitted in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this regard, I am taking a multimodal social semiotic
approach (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001) concerned with meaning and semiotic resources such as textual con-
tent, visuals, color, design, emplacement, and material. Historical acts of violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina are
conveyed, (re)negotiated and generally remembered in quite ordinary, banal ways. It is through the remember-
ing of the past, through different communicative modes, that the country endures as a traumascape (Tumarkin,
2005) with the past war extending into the present. And often in quite material, consequential ways – the war
is by no means over even though the killing has ceased.
Bell, A. and A. Gibson (2011), Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance. Journal
of Sociolinguistics, 15(5): 555–572.
Kosatica, M. (2022), The Burden of Traumascapes: Discourses of Remembering in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Beyond.
London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Kress, G.R. and T. van Leeuwen (2001), Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Commu-
nication. London: Arnold.
LaCapra, D. (2016), Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What remains? History and Theory, 55: 375-400.
Tumarkin, M. (2005), The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy. Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Pub-
lishing.

903
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Debating war (and the chances for peace) in the German


public and media. Two open letters to the German chancellor
and their uptake in the German quality press

Panel contribution

Prof. Helmut Gruber 1


1. Department of Linguistics, Vienna University

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, marked a turning point in (European) history. Although
being part of NATO (which backed Ukraine from the beginning of the war with arms supply), Germany found
itself in a difficult situation because of its historical role in the so-called “bloodlands” of Europe (Snyder, 2012)
of which Ukraine is part of. This resulted in an initial reluctance of the German government to supply Ukraine
with heavy arms and a public discussion on this issue. This discussion was fueled by the successive publication
of two open letters to German chancellor Olaf Scholz by different groups of German intellectuals and public
figures, one opposing and one supporting Germany’s heavy arms supply for Ukraine, at the end of April and
beginning of May. These two open letters (as well as an article by philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a supporter
of the open letter against heavy arms supply and a public call for the immediate start of peace negotiations on
the Ukraine war published some weeks later by yet another group of German public figures) caused a heated
discussion in the German speaking quality press.
In my presentation, I will firstly analyse the claims, the representation of social actors (concrete vs. abstract, van
Leeuwen, 1996), the types of emotive pro and contra arguments (Macagno & Walton, 2014), and the justification
strategies used (van Leeuwen, 2007) in the four public statements. In the second part of my presentation, I will
present the results of an analysis of the public discussion of these four texts in the German speaking quality
press. I limit my analysis to quality press texts as the tabloid press mainly echoed the discursive positions
which were put forward in the quality papers, and as an analysis of the huge amount of social media posts on
this issue is far beyond the reach of this presentation. The current corpus size is about 40 texts which may,
however, slightly increase. This second part of the analysis will focus on the recontextualization of claims,
arguments and justification strategies from the four “source” texts in the public discussion as well as evaluations,
metapragmatic expressions, and argumentations used in the media texts. The general aim of the presentation
is to provide a concise and nuanced picture of one aspect of the current war-discourse in Germany through a
socio- and discourse-pragmatic lens.
References:
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Douglas Walton. Emotive Language in Argumentation. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2014.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. ‘The Representation of Social Actors’. In Texts and Practices, edited by C.R. Caldas-
Coulthard and M. Coulthard, 32–70. London: Routledge, 1996.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. ‘Legitimation in Discourse and Communication’. Discourse & Communication 1, no. 1:
91–112, 2007.

904
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How do States Reminisce? Building Relations Through


Bonding Narratives

Panel contribution

Prof. Zohar Kampf 1 , Dr. Tracy Adams 2 , Prof. Gadi Heimann 3


1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. Yale University, 3. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This study asks how national memories are harnessed for building and maintaining peaceful interstate rela-
tionships in political speeches made during foreign states visits. We focus on the practice of reminiscing, the
recounting past events (Butler 1963), and demonstrate how it is used to create the emotional glue binding two
states and, through which peaceful interstate relationships can be sustained. We suggest that reminiscing is
done through a specific type of strategic narrative, which we term a bonding narrative. Such a narrative har-
nesses cultural, ideological, and historical sources and resources to construct and sustain positive relations
between two collectives by underlining their common history, experiences, and values.
We consolidated three separate datasets of speeches delivered to and by three Western states during state
visits—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Studying evocations of past events in 455 speeches
delivered between 2010 and 2020, we demonstrate the prevalence and significance of bonding narratives, high-
lighting the discursive efforts that political leaders invest in establishing and strengthening commonality be-
tween states.
Our findings show that in the process of narrating the intersections of their states’ legacies, state actors hier-
archically organize events from the past, selecting the most relations-advancing components history can offer.
The better the component serves the strategic narrative of bonding, the better it will serve the dyadic tale of
peaceful relations. Accordingly, political leaders prefer to rely on a shared past that is based on cooperation
between their collectives rather than a parallel past, which is limited to similar experiences and values. They
tend to prefer ongoing and recent events that still live in the memory of the collectives over specific and distant
events. When the opportunity arises to further harness the past for strengthening relationship, political leaders
present a familial connection or personalize a past events in order to create an appearance of kinship, the most
intimate tie in human relations.
Alternately, when past shadows of war hover over the peaceful relations, political leaders mitigate the traumatic
past, transforming the events into a resource for bonding in the present. We conclude by arguing that despite
the unique nature of bonding narratives, the bilateral collective memory mostly relies on shared memories of
wars, once again underlining the link between nations and violence.
References
Butler, Robert. N. 1963. “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged.” Psychiatry 26(1): 65
– 76.

905
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Legacies of war, cosmopolitan spaces & diasporic discourses:


Insights from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in London

Panel contribution

Dr. Lavanya Sankaran 1


1. King’s College London

This paper seeks to understand the role of conflict legacies and conflict discourses in processes of forming dias-
poric spaces and diasporic identities within the Sri Lankan Tamil community in London. Drawing on a Lever-
hulme funded linguistic ethnographic project carried out between 2015-18 (Leverhulme Trust Ref: RPG-2015-
279), the paper will examine how conflict & post-conflict discourses in relation to the Sri Lankan civil war move
across borders and are reshaped in London’s urban cosmopolitan environment. Specifically, the interview and
questionnaire data that focus on participant biographies, aspirations, routines, beliefs, experiences as newcom-
ers to the UK/Europe, language ideologies, civil war experiences, language practices and linguistic repertoires
will inform the analysis.
In order to avoid regarding the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora as a homogeneous group, the project has adopted a
theoretical framework that views diaspora as social and communicative practice and analyses the production
of diasporic spaces as a discursive and affective project (Brubaker 2005). To explore how diasporic imaginings
are created, reproduced and changed over time, I examine what role language socialisation (Ochs & Shieffelin,
2012) has in shaping discourses related to identity, home, belonging and involvement in conflict & post-conflict
socio-political action, taking into account factors related to intra-group dynamics and varied migratory trajec-
tories. Such an approach focuses on the analysis of socialising interactions, offering an empirical grounding in
the study of identity formation. Given that diasporas are not always formed as a direct outcome of migration
movements and that it is possible to become a diaspora through developing a new imagination of a commu-
nity, even many years after the migration/s took place (Sökefeld 2006:267-268), the project investigates how
“younger or newer members of communities are socialized to the beliefs and sociocultural and linguistic prac-
tices of their communities, both explicitly and implicitly,… while also being socialized to community-specific
ways of using language” (Baquedano-Lopez & Kattan 2007:74). This suggests that the role that ‘memory’ plays
and its interaction with participants’ experiences in a multi-ethnic metropolis is also important.
The findings reveal that there is currently no consensus on what should be codified as the mainstream conflict
discourse in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora and that there are several difficulties around articulating one
that seems acceptable. However, amongst the younger generation there is the need to remember the past
as a matter of ‘duty’ toward their family and community and to show respect for the trauma and hardships
endured by the older generations.

References
Baquedano-Lopez, P. & Figueroa, A.M. (2012). Language Socialization and Immigration. In Duranti et al (eds.),
Handbook of Language Socialization. Wiley Blackwell. 536-563.
Brubaker, R. (2005). The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (1): 1-19.
Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (2012). The theory of Language Socialization. In Duranti, A., Ochs, E. & Schieffelin,
B. B. (eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization. Blackwell Publishing. Blackwell Reference Online.
Sökefeld, M. (2006). Mobilizing in transnational space: A social movement approach to the formation of dias-
pora. Global Networks, 6(3): 265-284.

906
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Nationalist rhetoric in political speeches as a strategic


manoeuvre to mobilise for war. A Discourse-Historical
Approach

Panel contribution

Prof. Martin Reisigl 1


1. Department of Linguistics, Vienna University

Political speeches have many functions, including remembering the past, taking stock of the present or prepar-
ing future decisions. Sometimes they also serve to legitimise acts of war and military aggression. Nationalist
rhetoric plays a key role in this. This will be examined in detail in my paper within the framework of a compar-
ative discourse-historical analysis.
Empirical basis for my analysis is formed by influential speeches that were held on various historical occasions.
Among others, the following speeches will be taken into consideration: Slobodan Milosevič’s commemorative
speech delivered in 1989 on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the “Battle of Blackbird Field” in 1389,
George W. Bush’s speech delivered in January 2007 in Fort Benning (in which he announced the increase of
troops in Iraq), Barak Obama’s speech in West Point, New York, in December 2009 (in which he announced the
increase of troops in Afghanistan), Vladimir Putin’s speeches on the occasion of the annexation of the Crimea
and Sevastopol in 2014, Joe Biden’s speeches on the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in August
2021, and Vladimir Putin’s speeches at the beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022.
First and foremost, the critical discourse-historical analysis will look (a) at nationalist argumentation patterns
referring to causes and consequences of specific war events in the past and (b) at nationalist argumentation
patterns that aim at justifying military attacks or entries into wars. Second, the paper will identify tropological
(metaphorical, metonymical and synecdochic) patterns employed in order to discursively deal with important
dimensions of wars. These tropes can fullfill important argumentative functions. A central analytical focus
will be given on the ways how the “national body” is discursively imagined in the speeches – for instance as a
“wounded, injured body” whose past integrity or unity must be restored.
Rellstab, Daniel, Christiane Schlote (eds.) (2015): Representations of War, Migration and Refugeehood: Interdis-
ciplinary Perspectives. New York etc.: Routledge.
Reisigl, Martin (2007): Nationale Rhetorik in Fest- und Gedenkreden. Eine diskursanalytische Studie zum „öster-
reichischen Millennium“ in den Jahren 1946 und 1996. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Reisigl, Martin (2008): Rhetoric of political speeches. In: Wodak, Ruth, Koller, Veronika (eds.): Handbook of
Communication in the Public Sphere (HAL 4). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter (Herausgeber der Serie:
Antos, Gerd, Knapp, Karlfried). 243-269.
Reyes, Antonio (2011): Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: From words to actions. In: Discourse
& Society 22(6): 781-807.
Van Leeuwen, Theo (2007): Legitimation in discourse and communication. In: Discourse & Communication 1(1):
91-112.
Wodak, Ruth, De Cillia, Rudolf, Reisigl, Martin, Liebhart, Karin (2009): The Discursive Construction of National
Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

907
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Peace into war transformation in Ukraine: What media


keywords suggest

Panel contribution

Prof. Serhiy Potapenko 1 , Mr. Oleksii Deikun 1


1. Kyiv National Linguistic University

Media keywords, belonging to the sociopolitical group of terms referring to ideology and culture (Jeffries,
Walker 2018: 4), occur in headings and news texts to attract and keep the reader’s attention. Consequently,
the research question of this presentation is whether media keywords can be organized into successions indi-
cating the peace into war transformation.
Drawing on the BBC’s online news texts of 2013 to 2022 when peace in Ukraine gradually converted into a full-
fledged war, the presentation singles out three media periods of that process. The pre-crisis of 2013-2015 is
indicated by the succession of keywords unrest – protests – standoff – conflict – crisis (potential war). The pre-
war of 2021-2022 is divided by the keywords conflict – crisis – tension – war. The two active stretches are linked
by an intermediary period termed by the keyword crisis, characterized by the complexities of the word-concept
relationship (Freeden 2017: 14).
The changes within the stretches are best captured by image schemas, i.e. cognitive patterns of body-
environment interactions (Johnson 1987: xix), with the COUNTERFORCE schema focusing on the head-on meet-
ings of forces represented by source, vector and target (Johnson 1987:46).
In the pre-crisis period the keywords unrest and protest differentiate an increase in COUNTERFORCE sources’
strength; stand-off indicates the inability of either source or target to overcome each other while conflict offers
a balanced representation of COUNTERFORCE. Meanwhile, the keyword crisis adds BLOCKAGE components
resulting in imbalance and enhancing the inability of the COUNTERFORCE opponents to find the way out. This
understanding of crisis is in concert with its interpretation as impasse and deadlock (Freeden 2017: 23). At the
end of the period, the noun war doesn’t function as a media keyword: it denotes a potential COUNTERFORCE of
a large scale in textual background positions: in Ukrainian politicians’ quotes, analytical publications etc.
In the pre-war period the keyword conflict introduces the events associated with small-scale COUNTERFORCE
targets: chemical plants, besieged ports, murdered civilians etc. The keyword crisis foreshadows events based
on large-scale COUNTERFORCE targets and combines with the units describing panic, risks, fear etc. The tension
stage is mainly characterized by the words of speaking (say, accuse, threaten etc) and the modal verb can im-
plying an imminence of an armed conflict. The war stage evokes COUNTERFORCE sides of global, international,
national, local or individual status.
To conclude, the BBC’s construction of peace into war transformation in Ukraine falls into three periods with
crisis ending the initial stretch, dominating throughout the intermediary stage and being emotionalized before
the period of tension. Moreover, the singled out successions seem useful for placing other disturbances on the
post-Soviet territories between peace and war. The Kazakhstan clashes of early 2022 termed by the keyword
unrest can be positioned at the outset of the peace-war succession. The Belarus post-electoral protests of 2020
are a step further while the Belarus / Poland border crisis of 2021 moves a step on though remains distant from
war being devoid of emotions and pre-war tensions.

908
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Re-writing history through fabricated historical narratives: a


discursive “justification” of war.

Panel contribution

Dr. Chang Zhang 1 , Dr. Anastasia Stavridou 2


1. Communication University of China, 2. University of Manchester

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has spelled tremendous geopolitical consequences to Europe
and brought enormous sufferings to global populations. How did Putin mobilise discursive resources to justify
the Russian-Ukrainian war is of great value to the investigation of war discourse. While Russia receives intense
denouncement from several countries for its violation of international law, resulting in sanctions on Russian
energy exports by the international community (Dodd, 2022), Putin seems to think the opposite. In a series
of speeches Putin delivered the around the war outbreak, he eloquently defended his decision to initiate the
war and justified Russia’s aggressive and unjustifiable invasion. While some studies have elicited the line of
arguments embedded in Putin’s speech (Laruelle & Grek, 2022; Ugoala, 2022), they are mainly single text analysis
rather than systematic analysis of Putin’s speeches before and after the invasion.
Taking this as a reference point, this paper analyses seven speeches made by Vladimir Putin prior to and af-
ter the invasion to Ukraine (between 12 December 2021 and 27 March 2022) in order to unpack the historical
narratives that Putin has formulated to shape collective memories about the Russian-Ukrainian relationships
to reinforce the pro-Russian propaganda (Pearce, 2018). Inspired by Goddard’s (2015) legitimation theory, the
paper argues that the legitimation strategies of the wager of war will significantly shape the response of the
rivals and the international community, thus the trajectory of war in a broader sense. Employing the method-
ological tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2013), we seek to unpack the discursive devices
Putin draws on to formulate historical narratives. Preliminary findings suggest five key themes that shall be
understood inter-textually with Putin’s broader historical memory narrative. These include (i) the denial of the
Ukrainian statehood, (ii) the romanisation of Russian-Ukraine relationship, (iii) the securitisation of the West,
(iv) the radicalisation of Ukrainian elites, and (v) the proposal of returning to history and revamping the inter-
national system.
The research aims to contribute to the fields of political science and discourse studies by employing critical
discourse analysis to the emerging tensions of Russo-Ukraine war. With this small-scale study, we intend to
promote interdisciplinary dialogue that indicates the value of political rhetoric analysis in understanding the
rise of wars and political conflicts.
Reference list
Dodd, D. (2022). EU moves closer to boycott of Russian energy. Financial Times.
https://www.ft.com/content/fb395048-6096-496c-bf5f-ccbbe0ef2660.
Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis: The critical study of language (2nd edn). Routledge.
Goddard, S. E. (2015). The Rhetoric of Appeasement: Hitler’s Legitimation and British Foreign Policy, 1938–39.
Security Studies, 24(1), 95-130.
Laruelle, M., & Grek, I. (2022). Decoding Putin’s Speeches: The Three Ideological Lines of Russia’s Military In-
tervention in Ukraine. Russia matters. https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/decoding-putins-speeches-three-
ideological-lines-russias-military-intervention-ukraine.
Pearce, J. (2018). The use of history in Putin’s Russia [Doctoral Thesis, Anglia Ruskin University].
https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/704511/1/Pearce_2018.pdf.
Ugoala, B. (2022). Power in words: An analysis of the flaming devices in President Vladimir Putin’s speech before
the February 2022 attack on Ukraine. KIU Journal of Humanities, 7(2), 171-179.

909
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reframing from interpersonal to intractable conflicts: an


argumentative approach

Panel contribution

Dr. Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria 1


1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)

Reframing is broadly defined by the conflict resolution dictionary as the “technique of relabeling or redefining
a particular concept or reality so as to give it a slightly different and more constructive perspective” (Sapos-
nek, 1983: 42). The literature has established that it can contribute to the “tractability of intractable conflicts”
(Shmueli, Elliot & Kaufman 2006), i.e. “violent and prolonged [conflicts]” (Bar-Tal 2013), ideally reversing or at
least interrupting the negative spiral of conflict escalation (Glasl 2004) that in worst case scenarios inevitably
lead to tragic outcomes such as armed conflicts. In fact, reframing allows for “frame convergence” – a prereq-
uisite for conflict resolution (Drake and Donhoue, 1996). This is true for any type of conflict: as long as people’s
framing of events and other agents involved in the conflict differ in incompatible ways, conflicts cannot be
solved. For example, in interpersonal conflicts if one views the other party’s behaviour as a personal attack (in-
stead of, let’s say, originating from a misunderstanding), s/he will not be ready to open a fruitful dialogue with
that party. This readiness to communicate must be present in order to really explore peaceful options for con-
flict resolution. However, a clear definition of what reframing actually is was lacking. Relying on the definition
of reframing developed by the author’s PhD dissertation’s, the author proposes a theoretical reflection on how
this definition can be applied to “intractable conflicts” – presenting a case study as an illustrative example. The
findings discussed in Jermini-Martinez Soria (unpublished PhD dissertation “Reframing as an argumentative
competence in dispute mediation”) derive a definition of reframing as an “umbrella term” which includes four
different argumentative phenomena: 1) changes of discussion issues not supported by arguments; 2) changes
of discussion issues supported by arguments; 3) counterarguments; 4) reformulations. This definition is de-
rived from an analysis of two multilingual corpora of data on interpersonal conflicts of different kinds (such
as workplace conflicts, divorces, neighbourhood conflicts and so on) – 26 transcriptions of role-played medi-
ation sessions (approx. number of words: 200’000) with professional mediators working in Switzerland and
volunteers playing the roles of the conflicting parties (for more details see Jermini-Martinez Soria 2021). In this
contribution, the author is going to discuss how this definition of reframing can be useful in the attempts of reso-
lutions of “intractable conflicts”, firstly discussing it in relation with relevant literature, such as the contribution
of communication scholars Shmueli and colleagues (2008) and secondly proposing an analysis of a case-study
of a public conflict in Switzerland with the potential of becoming intractable, concerning the regulations about
the hunting of wolves in order to prevent the killing of sheep bred for agricultural purposes – with the aim of
illustrating the conflict-resolution potential of reframing.

910
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Toxic masculinity, toxic femininity and war

Panel contribution

Dr. Jana Valdrová 1


1. University of Innsbruck

Masculinity and femininity are research topics of gender studies, more particularly, gender scheme theory (cf.
Bem 1983, Starr/Zurbriggen 2017, Valdrova 2018) and critical men’s studies (von Heesen 2022, Tippe 2021). Toxic
masculinity is a manifestation of masculinity that emphasizes aggressiveness, competitiveness, strength, sexual
performance, superiority, the need to lead and control others, suppression of emotions. It is a social construct
that harms women, men and society as a whole. Underestimating the influence of toxic masculinity leads to the
deepening of social inequalities in a given society, the suppression of different opinions and identities, and the
increase in the incidence of violence, which can end up in armed conflict and war. From this point of view, I
will critically follow one of the ways whereby an insignificant member of the KGB, nicknamed the Pale Moth,
became a Russian dictator admired by some as an idol of manhood.
My research is based on two corpora: the first one contains selected TV-shows of the Russian First Channel
(Pervyi kanal) before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From the perspective of Bem’s gender scheme theory I
will analyze how these talk shows construct the „only correct“ versions of masculinity and femininity, every day,
many years. I also will observe how Pervyi kanal promoted the image of Putin as an all-knowing and adored
leader (cf. Kress/van Leeuwen 2020, Galeotti 2022, Hunter 2022).
The second corpus consists of recordings of independent media after February 24, 2022: Navalnylive, Freedom,
Unian, Telekanal Doshd (tvrain.ru) and others. I will bring evidence for the clearly observable erosion of the
instilled toxic masculinity and toxic femininity in Russian Society.
And last but not least, as a Czech native speaker, I will use a few examples to compare approaches to toxic
masculinity in Russia and the Czech Republic.
References:
Alexandrova-Zorina, L. 2017. Russia on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In https://granta.com/russia-verge-
nervous-breakdown/, 31.05.2017.
Bem, S. L. 1983. Gender Schema Theory and Its Implications for Child Development: Raising Gender-Aschematic
Children in a Gender-Schematic Society. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (4). Pp. 598–616.
Galeotti, M. 2022. Does Putin’s toxic masculinity‘ really matter? In https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-
putin-s-toxic-masculinity-really-matter-, 29.06.2022.
Hunter, K. 2022. Vladimir Putin’s Performative Masculinity. In https://womensmediacenter.com/news-
features/vladimir-putins-performative-masculinity, 06.04.2022.
Kress, G., van Leeuwen, T. 2020. Reading Images. Routledge: London.
Starr, C. R., E. L. Zurbriggen 2017. Sandra Bem’s Gender Schema Theory Af-
ter 34 Years: A Review of its Reach and Impact. Sex Roles 76 (9-10). In
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299503228_Sandra_Bem’s_Gender_Schema_Theory_After_34_Years_A_Review_of_its
Tippe, S. 2021. Toxische Männlichkeit. Erkennen, reflektieren, verändern. Köln: edigo.
Valdrová, J. 2018. Reprezentace ženství z perspektivy lingvistiky genderových a sexuálních identit. Praha: SLON.

911
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Vladimir Putin’s war rhetoric: between cold reflexion and loss


of control

Panel contribution

Prof. Daniel Weiss 1


1. University of Zurich

My talk aims at elucidating the whole width of Vladimir Putin’s war rhetoric by focusing on two of his na-
tionwide broadcasted speeches delivered at the same location (the Georgievyj Hall in the Kremlin) to the same
auditory (the two chambers of the Russian parliament) on two similar occasions: the annexation of the Crimea
(18.3.2014) and the annexation of four occupied Ukrainian territories on September 30, 2022. The preceding
steps that seemingly legalized these acts were also the same: in both cases Russia had imposed fake referenda
on the local population that allegedly approved their separation from Ukraine. Despite these commonalities, the
contrast between the two speeches could not be more striking. The triumphant 2014 appearance (Guttke 2015,
Nedashkivska 2015) took place during a rise of patriotic enthusiasm in Russian society, marked by such slogans
as “The Crimea is ours!” or “Putin has raised us from our knees!” Putin’s verbal legitimization of the annexa-
tion was based on a host of factual knowledge (percentage of voters of the Crimea referendum, surveys made in
Russia, numbers of inhabitants of the Crimea and Ukrainian workers in Russia) and pseudo-rational arguments
(mostly analogical reasoning) related to the history of Crimea, Russia and NATO’s alleged approaching Russia’s
borders in space and time. Many formulations invite an analysis in terms of relevance theory including irony,
metaphors and humoristic accents, others defy a reliable interpretation due to their vagueness; this holds in
particular for the attribute “historical” (“our historical borders”, “historical Russia”, “historical unity”).
By contrast, the 2022 speech was held after several defeats of the invader’s army on the occupied Ukrainian
territories and Putin’s announcement of partial mobilization. The overall strategy has radically changed: 77%
of the whole speech is now dedicated to the West and its alleged misdeeds, which encompasses accusations
of colonialism and US subjugation of its “vassals”, the wish to dismember Russia’s territories (!) and above all
a cultural degeneration attested by having same-sex parents (“mother one and two”) or sex transformations
offered to children. All this culminates in the accusation of satanism. The Western threat is thus located on
the ideological axis and described as an attack against traditional values, “russophobia” being a new manifes-
tation of racism. The whole strategy has switched from pseudo-argumentation to blunt aggression. Thus, the
overwhelming part of this speech has no relation whatsoever to the reason for the celebration at hand, i.e. the
annexation of the four Ukrainian territories. The only figurative device left are rhetorical questions, otherwise,
we see a considerable amount of abusive language. On the whole, one may conclude that this speech points
to a striking loss of a sense of reality and self-control due to the disastrous failure of Putin’s warfare. It may
however be added that similar losses of control are attested much earlier in Putin’s verbal behavior.
The main tools serving to analyze this contrast are proximization theory (Cap 2013, 2017, Weiss 2019, 2020),
cognitive metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2014, Musolff 2004) and relevance theory including implicatures
and irony (for the first speech).

912
18th International Pragmatics Conference

War-peace dialectic revisited: Scrutinizing neutrality-focused


discourses in Sweden

Panel contribution

Prof. Cornelia Ilie 1


1. Strömstad Academy

Most conventional accounts of war and peace belong to a binary frame of thinking based on a sharp distinction
between the two, which ”is not fit for the 21st Century” (Fry 2019). According to Perot (2019), the growing
challenges of the post-cold war phenomena of hybrid warfare and aggressive political subversion point to the
role of aggressive autocracies like Russia in a perceived dissolution of the boundaries between war and peace.
The grey zone between war and peace that we have been experiencing in recent times has been captured by
Leonard (2021) in two interrelated labels: ’unpeace’ and ’unwar’. They encapsulate the new world disorder,
which is persistently unstable and crisis-prone.
It is in this new geopolitical climate that neutrality, which has long been viewed as impartiality in war (and
generally in armed conflicts), has been called into question. Neutrality as a legal concept dates back to the
early 1600s (Grotius 1646/1925). During WWII, neutrality amid total warfare was a precarious condition, and
the conflict began with a spectacular violation of Belgium, despite its status being internationally guaranteed.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has prompted a reconsideration of the concept of neutrality in international
law, as well as a reassessment of geopolitical alliances and many countries’ security position. Sweden is a case
in point: its NATO application, which was submitted (together with Finland’s) in May 2022, marks a major shift
away from its longstanding position as a neutral state, stretching back to 1812 (Agius 2006).
After Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Sweden, regarded as a ‘nation of peace’ due to its neutrality (Parker
2017), recognised that it would need military cooperation and assistance from other states to realistically pre-
pare for a possible Russian military aggression in the Baltic Sea area. While Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014
was seen by Sweden as a wake-up call, Putin’s and Russia’s barbaric and senseless war in Ukraine in 2022 was
promptly understood as a potentially existential threat to Sweden’s independence and sovereignity. Thereby
Sweden wisely abandoned the neutrality principle in favour of the dictum ”Si vis pacem para bellum” (If you
want peace prepare for war).
Using Sweden as a case study, this paper aims to identify and problematize recurrent patterns of argumentation
in neutrality-related discourses delivered by top Swedish politicians before and after the NATO application that
triggered wide-ranging public debate. A pragma-rhetorical and argumentation framework of analysis (Ilie 2018,
2021) will be used to de-construct and re-construct the arguments meant to persuade Swedish citizens about the
justification and legitimacy of the decision for Sweden to join NATO, while abandoning its traditional status of
neutrality. Particular attention will be given to examining the strategic socio-cultural keywords used by Swedish
politicians to reevaluate and reconceptualize the notion of neutrality in relation to the currently blurred war-
peace distinction. This analysis will be carried out based on Rigotti and Rocci’s (2005) mixed approach to both
argument and keyword analysis, and on Steinmetz et al’s (2017) conceptual history approach.

913
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Argumentative Patterns in Peace Discourse”

Panel contribution

Prof. Manfred Kienpointner 1


1. University of Innsbruck

The concept of “argumentative patterns” was recently introduced by Frans van Eemeren as part of the ex-
tended theory of Pragma-Dialectics and defined as follows: “a particular constellation of argumentative moves
in which, in dealing with a particular kind of difference of opinion, in defence of a particular type of standpoint
a particular argument scheme or combination of argument schemes is used in a particular kind of argument
structure” (van Eemeren 2018: 150). Argumentative patterns which are typical for a certain communicative
activity type are called “prototypical argumentative patterns” (van Eemeren 2018: 165). In my contribution to
the panel, I would like to describe prototypical argumentative patterns within peace discourse, a subtype of
political argumentation.
In order to do this, I have assembled a small corpus of four texts which argue for peace from a pacifist point
of view (although not all authors are pacifists in a strict sense). The texts (three treatises and one speech) are
written in different languages and come from different epochs and cultures: Erasmus of Rotterdam’s (1469-
1536) Querela pacis (“The Complaint of Peace”; first published 1517), Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) Zum ewigen
Frieden (“Toward Eternal Peace”; 1795), Emma Goldman’s (1869-1940) Speech Against Conscription and War
(1917) and Mahatma Gandhi’s (1869-1948) History of the Satyagraha Ashram (1932).
My study has a threefold purpose: 1. A detailed argumentative analysis will try to explore which constellation
of argumentative schemes is prototypical for the genre of peace discourse as manifested within the four texts
I have chosen for illustration. 2. Apart from the descriptive perspective I will also try to critically evaluate the
argumentation within these four texts. 3. Furthermore, I would like to show how the argumentative patterns
which are characteristic for peace discourse react to (some of) the arguments brought forward in justifications
of war. From a practical perspective, this is important because there is no doubt that discourse which justifies
war represents the culturally hegemonic discourse in most of the contemporary societies (cf. Ivie 2016: 127ff.).
References:
Eemeren, Frans van (2018): Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Springer: Cham.
Erasmus von Rotterdam (2018): Die Klage des Friedens. Lateinisch und deutsch hg.v. K. Brodersen. Wiesbaden:
Marix.
Gandhi, Mahatma (1999 [1932]): “History of the Satyagraha Ashram” In: The Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi (Electronic Book). New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India. Volume 56. 142-
193. (cf. https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/mahatma-gandhi-collected-works-volume-
56.pdf; last seen October 10, 2022).
Goldman, Emma (1917) “Speech Against Conscription and War” Forward Hall, New York. 14 June 1917. [cf.
http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/goldman/Writings/Speeches/170614.html; last seen October 10, 2022]
Ivie, Robert L. (2016): “Introduction: Hegemony, Instabilities, and Interventions: A Special Issue on Discourses
of War and Peace”. In: Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11 (1-2). 125-134.
Kant, Immanuel (2008 [1795]): Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf. Hg.v. Rudolf Malter. Stuttgart:
Reclam.

914
Reading Bauman &
Briggs’s “Poetics and
performance” three
decades later: How can
a/typical interactions,
spaces and temporalities
critically inform
pragmatics? (organized
by Daniel Silva, Daniela
Palma)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Black women fighting for justice: a comparative study of


narrative performances of Brazilian and American social
movements

Panel contribution

Dr. Liliana Bastos 1 , Dr. Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Every year, thousands of people —mostly young, Black individuals— are killed by the police in Brazil. Rio de
Janeiro, in particular, consistently ranks as the city with the highest rates of police brutality in the country.
Some of these victims’ mothers have engaged in social movements such as the Rede de Comunidades e Movi-
mentos contra a Violência to fight for justice. Similarly, in the U.S., where Black people are often victimized by
police brutality, movements such as Mothers Against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter have been fighting
structural racism and State-sanctioned violence. In general, social movements demand change and denounce
problems in the public sphere while making use of different repertoires of contention (Tarrow,2009). In this
paper, we argue that movements such as these, more than merely pursuing justice in the context of racialized
police brutality, employ storytelling as one of their most important strategic repertoires. Narratives are instru-
mentalized through artful modes of speech — that is, by means of a performance which, in Bauman and Briggs’
(1990) words, “puts the act of speaking on display — objectifies it, lifts it to a degree from its interactional set-
ting and opens it to scrutiny by an audience.” We argue that such performances constitute an enactment of the
poetic function of language, a highly reflexive mode of communication through which Black women simulta-
neously express pain and grief over the loss of a child, and engage in resistance against the invisibilization, or
the banalization, of young people’s murders. The purpose of this qualitative interpretive paper is to carry out a
comparative analysis of the performances of Black Brazilian and African-American mothers engaged in social
movements which seek justice. To do so, we observe how the narratives told by these mothers, in different con-
texts of production, speak to wider issues of structural and structuring racism in their respective countries and
denounce the banalization of violence against Black communities. Performed in public places and largely re-
ported by the media, these mothers’ discourse travels through time and space, reaching broader audiences and
granting these women visibility across the world. The study’s corpus comprises narratives, available on web-
sites such as YouTube, told by both Black Brazilian and African-American mothers at events and demonstrations.
The analysis also draws on an ethnography of demonstrations in Brazil and the U.S. in 2018/2020. Understanding
narrative as a device which organizes human experience (Bruner,1997) and as a productive discursive lens by
which to examine social life (Bastos;Biar, 2015), initial findings suggest the existence of a prototypical narrative
performance which organizes the suffering of losing a child and draws attention to both the act of expression
and to the performer herself. When the performances of both Afro-Brazilian and African-American mothers
are taken together, what emerges is not only the repetition of the same tragedies and the collectivization of these
women’s pain, but also an understanding that these fights, rather than isolated or limited to any given country,
may be perceived as transnational efforts to address the same issue — namely, structural racism.

916
18th International Pragmatics Conference

De-/Re-contextualized Western Mono Performances: from


Settler-colonial “Texts” to an Emergent Mono Language
Performance Genre

Panel contribution

Prof. Paul Kroskrity 1


1. University of California, Los Angeles

This paper celebrates the sea change in verbal art research that is so deftly represented in the landmark re-
view by Bauman and Briggs’s (1990): “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and So-
cial Life.” Here I contrast two different historical presentations of Western Mono storytelling and how they
demonstrate that “decontextualization and recontextualization of performed discourse bear upon the political
economy of texts, texts and power” (Bauman and Briggs 1990:76). The Western Mono are an Indigenous com-
munity, numbering about 1,800 members, who live in such Central California towns as Northfork, Auberry, and
Cold Springs. A Numic language from the Uto-Aztecan family, Western Mono is currently spoken by about 20
traditional speakers in a revitalizing language community that includes learners and “new” speakers.
The first representations of Mono storytelling appears in academic and popular cultural representations of
Western Mono narrative traditions. These are entextualizations that translate the Mono language narratives
into recipient-designed English texts. In the popular cultural examples, they eliminate or reduce features of
the Mono originals that are viewed as unnecessary “repetitions” or excessive in their use of dialog by story
characters (Judson 1912; Gifford and Block 1930). In academic examples, such as Gayton and Newman (1940,)
these scholars critique the style of Mono traditional narratives as deficient because they lack “typical” features
of contemporary English language narratives. These decontextualized representations typically fail to consider
the cultural contexts in which the narratives occurred or even the fact that these performances were instances
of an oral tradition in which engaging vocal delivery was a fundamental part of the storyteller’s art (Kroskrity
2015). The power to extract these cultural texts and subject them to a hegemonic gaze displays both the control
and power of the settler-colonial state and its attendant cultural products.
But running parallel to the historical trend to move from “text-centered” approaches to “performance-centered”,
as observed by Bauman and Briggs (1990) is the movement away from decontextualized texts as artifacts of
dispossession disguised as a natural history that erases Indigenous authors, their communicative goals, and
their communities. The second representation of Mono storytelling performances refocuses agency not on out-
siders who radically de-contextualize but rather on a Mono storyteller, Rosalie Bethel (Kroskrity 2009, 2017)
who reconextualizes these narratives for her own purposes, including not only personal, conversational use
but also as an instance of an emergent performance product—a pedagogical story that is offered as a prospec-
tive exemplary teaching performance. In this novel recontextualization of Coyote Races Mole, Bethel includes
an explanatory coda that is not an expected feature of this Western Mono narrative genre but one she regards
as now necessary to better reach youth who have not been socialized to traditional narrative contextualization.
The performance focus is thus necessary for understanding this atypical and emergent genre as an emergent
vitality (Perley 2011) of Western Mono language revitalization.

917
18th International Pragmatics Conference

De/centering vulnerability: A/typicality and communicative


justice in a squat in Athens

Panel contribution

Dr. Birgul Yilmaz 1


1. University of Reading

This contribution approaches vulnerability ethnographically and how it is shaped and contested in interna-
tional law and the everyday communicative practices of refugees living precariously in a squat in Athens. I
focus on vulnerability as a legal categorisation and its de/centralisation (Bauman and Briggs 1990) in everyday
communicative practices of refugees and squatters in a neighbourhood of Athens. When refugees apply for
asylum, their vulnerability is measured according to their gender, age and health conditions. However, the
invention of vulnerability as a protective measure in refugee governance, brings various kinds of complexities
including refugees’ co-dependency on humanitarian aid and problems around agency and autonomy while they
are trapped in the asylum procedures.
During and after the so called “refugee crises” in Europe, squats in Athens, often associated with transgression
and a/typicality in government discourses (as they alternate themselves to state infrastructures such as refugee
camps) hosted and continue hosting migrants fleeing war and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and var-
ious other North African countries. However, since the right wing political party New Democracy came into
power, most squats in Athens have been evicted, leaving many vulnerable people on the streets. By engaging
with Bauman and Briggs’s work on poetics and performance and Butler et al.’s work on Vulnerability in Resis-
tance (2016), I account for the processes of the de/centralisation of vulnerability in a self-organised squat and the
entanglements that emerge in relation to communicative justice (Briggs 2017). Based on these theoretical and
analytical vantage points, and my fifteen month long ethnographic fieldwork in alternative spaces in Athens, I
examine interactions that took place during Monday assemblies where squatters including refugees, the home-
less, former drug users, anti-authoritarians, leftists and anarchists invested in interpretation and translation
from Turkish, Arabic, Farsi to English and Greek as a form of democratic participation in communal life and
the entanglements emerged in these interactions. I will also examine legal documents and policy papers, reports
(as well as news stories) for an in depth ethnographic account of the de/centralisation of vulnerability.
References
Bauman, R., and Briggs, C.L. (1990). Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social
Life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19,59-88.
Briggs, C.L. (2017). Towards Communicative Justice in Health, Medical Anthropology, 36:4, 287-304.
Butler, J., Gambetti, Z. and Sabsay, L. Eds. (2016). Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke University Press.

918
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Disputes and textual trajectories of the sexuality of a gay


military officer in Brazil

Panel contribution

Dr. Flávia Correia Lima Huber da Costa 1 , Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar 2
1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, 2. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

In this article, we accept Bauman and Briggs (1990) invitation to reflect on how certain individuals gain rights to
particular modes of transforming speech. We also resort to the Foucauldian concept of discursive order, within
a multi-sited ethnographic perspective, in order to better understand the process of entextualization - decon-
textualization and recontextualization - of the story of a openly gay Brazilian Army officer.
After choosing to open up about his sexuality in the barracks, the officer suffered virtual lynching processes on
digital platforms. In the flow of text movements, prints of virtual groups where the defamations occurred are
presented. Next, the narrative of the participant who resists the will to truth of the hegemonic masculinity in
the barracks is analyzed. The repercussion in the media is also object of investigation because it creates other
meanings in the discursive chain of viralization.
The aim is to discuss which meanings emerge from each movement of the textual transit, observing the elements
of the text-event that are recovered, erased and transformed. The aim is to highlight historical, social and
cultural structures that participate in the construction of the homophobia discourse in the Brazilian military
context. It also explores how the officer creates meaning for his life story while resisting the order of discourse
rooted in the military scenario.
The results indicate that, in the textual trajectories, meanings about homoaffectivity circulate and are disputed
in different orders, sometimes adhering to, sometimes defying the will of institutional military truth. It is ob-
served that despite the veiled persecutions the officer may suffer, he chooses to open up about his private life
in the contemporary panopticon of social networks. He also seeks to establish a new order of discourse in the
military context concerning the acceptance of other ways of experiencing sexuality.
In addition to the theoretical framework, the study seeks to contribute to understandings about the current
conflict between the legal and institutional acceptance of the presence of homosexuals in the barracks and
their rejection by individuals who occupy this same space.

919
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Indexical Disorder: From the Situated Nature of Power to the


Power to Situate Nature

Panel contribution

Prof. Jonathan Rosa 1


1. Stanford University

Through their reconceptualization of poetics and performance, Bauman and Briggs have profoundly con-
tributed to scholarly analysis of the culturally situated nature of meaning making and knowledge production.
Importantly, for Bauman and Briggs, poetics and performance must be understood neither as derivative of
purportedly pure language use nor as essentialized enactments of cultural difference. Instead, poetics and
performance are crucial sites for and perspectives from which to examine the reflexive (re)production and
(trans)formation of ideologies, relations, and structures. While Bauman and Briggs’ framework attends to the
role of power in structuring the creation and interpretation of poetics and performance, I’m interested in exam-
ining the tension between focusing on the situated nature of power on the one hand, and the power to constitute
situatedness—context, being, meaning—on the other. I seek to put Bauman and Briggs’ approach in dialogue
with Povinelli’s recent provocations in Between Gaia and Ground, which critically examines the stakes of fo-
cusing our analyses on the diversity of ontologies, interpretations, and experiences globally, as compared to
the colonial and imperial capacity to constitute global ontologies, interpretations, and experiences. Put differ-
ently, this is the tension between studying Silversteinian (2004) indexicality as compared to Inoues’s indexical
inversion (2003); or Silverstein’s indexical order (2003) as compared to what Briggs has formulated as indexical
disorder (2018). By bringing these frameworks to bear on the analysis of boundary-making and transgression in
the context of raciolinguistic ideologies and formations (Rosa and Flores, 2017), I argue for refocused attention
to naturalization, inversion, and disorder in the study of poetics and performance.
Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles L. (1990). Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language
and Social Life, Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59-88.
Briggs, Charles L. (2018). Indexical Disorders and Ritual (De)Centers of Semiosis, Signs and Society, 6(1), 205-224.
Inoue, Miyako. (2004). What Does Language Remember?: Indexical Inversion and the Naturalized History of
Japanese Women, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(1), 39-56.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2021). Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastro-
phe of Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.
Rosa, Jonathan and Flores, Nelson. (2017). Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective,
Language in Society, 46(5), 621-647.
Silverstein, Michael. (2003). Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life Language & Communica-
tion, 23(3-4), 193–229.
Silverstein, Michael. (2004). “Cultural” Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus. Current Anthropology, 45(5),
621–652.

920
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Performance, Memory, and Poetics: The Role of Scribal


Memory in the Transmission of Ancient Texts

Panel contribution

Dr. Raymond Person 1


1. Ohio Northern University

This paper draws from the similar range of scholarly work as in Bauman & Briggs (1990), drawing significantly
from both the comparative study of oral traditions and Conversation Analysis (CA). The comparative study of
oral traditions has led to discussions of scribal performance in the transmission of ancient (Person 1998; Ready
2019) and medieval literature (O’Keefe 1990; Doane 1994) and the role of scribal memory within scribal perfor-
mance (Kirk 2008; Miller 2019). Scribal performance and scribal memory build upon the analogy of multifor-
mity in the oral composition of traditions as an explanation for textual fluidity and textual plurality of literary
texts, characteristics that allow text-critical “variants” to exist within the tradition. Although Bauman & Briggs
were clearly aware of early studies in CA, it is unfortunate that they did not have access to Gail Jefferson’s
“On the Poetics in Ordinary Talk” (1996), especially since in my opinion Jefferson’s work on poetics has not
received the recognition it deserves both within CA and beyond. In recent work (Person forthcoming) I have
drawn from Jefferson’s poetics to describe cognitive-linguistic mechanisms in which text-critical “variants” are
produced within scribal memory in the composition/transmission process of ancient texts. In order to make
this argument, I must overcome common assumptions of (1) a wide gulf between the “typical” (e.g., ordinary
talk) and the “atypical” (e.g., poetics and performance) and (2) the “crystallization” that occurs in entextualiza-
tion, especially of “canonical” texts. Drawing from Jefferson’s understanding of the relationship of poetics to
both “ordinary talk” and “the work of poets,” I will discuss examples of text-critical “variants” in the compo-
sition/transmission history of literary texts that are foundational to the “Western canon”: the Hebrew Bible,
the New Testament, and Homeric epic. I will demonstrate that these “variants” that are found even within
canonical texts (the “atypical”) draw significantly from mechanisms found in the “typical”—that is, the “po-
etic” mechanisms of “sound-triggering” and “category-triggering” that Jefferson identified in “ordinary talk.”
This conclusion certainly continues the trajectory identified by Bauman & Briggs—that is, from a “traditionalist
view” to “communicative action” (1990: 79).
Doane, Alger N. 1994. “The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” Oral Tradition 9: 420-39.
Jefferson, Gail. 1996. “On the Poetics of Ordinary Talk.” Text and Performance Quarterly 16: 1-61.
Kirk, Alan. 2008. “Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid: Orality and Memory in Scribal Practices.” Pages
215-34 in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text. Edited by Tom Thatcher. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Miller, Shem. 2019. Dead Sea Media. Leiden: Brill.
O’Keefe, Katherine O’Brien. 1990. Visible Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Person, Raymond F., Jr. 1998. “The Ancient Israelite Scribe as Performer.” Journal of Biblical Literature 112:
601-09.
Person, Raymond F., Jr. 2002. Scribal Memory and Word Selection. SBLTCS. Atlanta: SBL Press.
Ready, Jonathan. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

921
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Psychic Doppelgängers: Poetic Resonance During the


Therapeutic Encounters

Panel contribution

Prof. Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas 1


1. Emory University

In their groundbreaking article, Poetics and Performance (1990), Bauman and Briggs provided a framework for
understanding how verbal interactions travel around taking a variety of forms. Moving away from analyzing
verbal performance as a single bounded interaction, they approach it instead as forming a web of intertextual
encounters. Pushing this framework forward, and taking at face value Freud’s idea that the psyche is extended,
in this paper I focus on the concept of resonance as an embodied practice that defies the here-and-now of sound
production through the poetic function by analyzing how words sound and resound in the listener. I explore
“the music in the words” or how messages/sound/words resonate in the therapeutic encounter. By analyzing
excerpts of the Multi-Family Structured Psychoanalytic Therapeutic communities in Buenos Aires, where both
analysands and analysts shift their attention from semantic content to the poetic function during the therapeutic
encounter, I question what kinds of textual artifacts are being produced in this setting when the emphasis is
not in the text but what the text invokes in the listener.
The therapeutic encounter is quintessential heteroglossic (Bakhtin 1986) and intertextual. Multiple voices (au-
dible and non-audible) are present and emerge during the dialogic encounters between an analysand and ana-
lyst and the emergence of their psychic doppelgängers. Through resonance, inside the Multi-Family Structured
Psychoanalytic Therapeutic, the interactional framework expands to everyone attending the meetings (and be-
yond). In this setting, a particular form of reported speech emerges in which what is being reported is not an
indirect or direct form of quotation, but instead the report of unconscious motives and actions. The attention
shifts to what the words invoke in the listener rather than on their denotational content. Thus, the type-token
relationship in this form of quotation becomes complex, because many different tokens of the same type can
emerge (e.g., when more than one listener interprets different meaning out of the same statement). Thus, there
is no clear contextialization framework.
If, as Bauman and Briggs convincingly show, the illocutionary force of an utterance emerges from the indexical
relations between the performance and other speech events that precede and succeed it, I ask what is the index-
ical relation in resonance? If a text that is being recontextualized is in itself a text that has no clear trajectory
(source) but that is part of a broader discourse that does not rely on a direct sign-object relation, what kinds of
centering/re-centering is happening? What role does reflexivity plays in contextualization? I intend to explore
some of these questions by analyzing the concept of resonance and the emergence of what I call the “psychic
doppelgänger” during analytic encounters.

922
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reading ‘trans-’ perspectives through Bauman & Briggs’s


‘entextualization’: Reformative or Destructive?

Panel contribution

Dr. Sender Dovchin 1


1. Curtin University

Recent debates in bi/multilingual studies have problematised some paradigms, such as codeswitching for reify-
ing static language boundaries and for their inability to account for creative communicative practices. Instead,
‘trans’ perspectives, reflective of new terms such as translingualism, translanguaging, transidiomia, transglos-
sia etc., have been introduced to capture the critical ‘languaging’ practices, which reflects the fluid movement
between and across languages. Drawing on Bauman & Briggs’s idea of ‘entextualization’, some of the key ter-
minologies such as recontextualisation’, ‘re-semiotisation’, ‘translocalisation’ and ‘relocalisation’ and so forth,
have started emerging in trans- perspectives. The main ethos of these terms is to understand language as ‘fertile
mimesis’ (Pennycook, 2010, pp. 35–37) - a form of language repetition that creates a difference and linguistic
forms and resources take on locally relevant or even new meanings, depending on different localities.
Note, however, that the idea of ‘entextualization’ has been both celebrated and problematicised by conflicting
language ideologies. While reformists celebrate entextualizaion as linguistically ‘creative’, ‘novel’, ‘eccentric’
and ‘innovative’, the traditionalists seem to oppose the idea as linguistically ‘destructive’, ‘pollutive’ and ‘con-
tagious’. Drawing on longitudinal online linguistic ethnographic studies from various parts of/from the Global
South, this study presents how ‘entextualization’ can indeed be linguistically and discursively constructed in
trans- perspectives. Yet, the presumed entextualization is neither to celebrate nor to deplore but something to
observe and examine with interest like anything else. I conclude, following Higgins and Coen (2000, pp. 14-15),
‘we accept that as Homo sapiens, we are all the same in terms of genetic structure and cognitive potentiality …
Beyond that, we do not think that as humans we have anything in common but our differences …’ Linguistic
entextualization is rather common - a necessary condition of linguistic commonality is its entextualization.
References:
Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on
language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 59–88.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423
Dovchin, S. (2017). The ordinariness of youth linguascapes in Mongolia. International
Journal of Multilingualism, 14(2), 144-159.
Higgins, M. J., & Coen, T. L. (2000). Streets, bedrooms, and patios: The ordinariness of
diversity in urban Oaxaca. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press
Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. London: Routledge.

923
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The ethnopoetics of reverie: Direct reported thought as


(a)typicality.

Panel contribution

Dr. Alex Pillen 1


1. University College London

This paper addresses how thought surfaces in interaction amongst other quoted utterances as direct reported
thought. To broach this topic, I not only rely on Bauman & Briggs’s article on poetics and performance from 1990.
A seminal piece by Briggs & Bauman published two years later on ‘Genre, Intertextuality and Social Power’ also
underpins this paper. Inner worlds are often made up of an inner conversation we carry on with ourselves.
Inner speech comes in at least two different varieties, the monologue of ordinary verbal thought and dialogic
thinking, or conversation between more than one internal point of view. The subjective feeling is often one
of talking to oneself. Given our comprehensive knowledge on poetics and performance in an outer world, the
ethnopoetics of inner performance fascinates but eludes us. We can but invoke elements of generic ambiguity
and dynamism between mundane interactive speech and inner conversation.
In this paper I hone in on a few instances of direct reported thought found within my corpus on language
practice amongst Kurdish speakers in London. These take the form of “I said to myself” or “I thought” followed
by a direct, verbatim quotation reflecting the here and now of inner conversation. In Kurdish, this window on
an inner world is shaped by the direct reported speech patterns of daily interaction. Such well-trodden citation
paths include a reported inner conversation with oneself, but also self-quotation in real time as speech unfolds.
The latter is brought to the attention of interlocutors by means of “as I am telling you”, or “as I always say”
followed by a direct quotation. Direct reported thought fits within this wider ecology of quoting oneself as one
speaks. Both unique and habitual utterances and thoughts can be rendered in this manner.
This leads me to address seminal work by Bauman & Briggs in terms of contemporary (geo)political challenges.
The ‘Kurdish question’ is often framed in geopolitical terms, and the globalisation of the shape of inner inter-
action is no exception. The indirect reported speech marker ‘ku’ has featured in Kurdish novels and the media,
since the beginning of the 20th century. The novel as a genre is characterised by a literary simulation of inner
speech by writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. Novels in the Kurdish language are seen as an important
cultural symbol of the nation, articulated in equally modernist terms. Nation and indirect narration go hand
in hand and offer a contemporary political backdrop to direct reported thought and the inner conversations
of diverse Kurdish speakers. With this paper I commence a conversation about ethnopoetic reverie, a state of
being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts - in Kurdish - despite ongoing cultural pressure.

924
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The poetics and performance as critical perspectives: Young


Bangladeshi Professional Women

Panel contribution

Prof. Shaila Sultana 1


1. University of Dhaka

Young Bangladeshi professional women have given rise to a kind of new womanhood through their financial
freedom, life-style, consumption of modern amenities, and locatedness in the social milieu. However, globally
women at the margin are represented as unidimensional, subjugated and oppressed in a patriarchal society
by social institutions, cultural practices, and religious prejudices. They are considered stable, ahistorical, and
reductive homogeneous powerless groups within the monolithic notion of patriarchy, shared oppression, and
male dominance. In other words, there is an ‘ethnocentric universality’ in how women at the margin are con-
ceptualised.
Hence, it seems important to understand the discursive construction of new womanhood in Bangladesh at the
crux of the normative societal, cultural, and religious norms and explore the possible differences and disso-
nances Young Bangladeshi professional women may experience in their life trajectories. Keeping in considera-
tion the contemporary take on poetics and performance as critical perspectives, the paper intends to see in what
ways these young Bangladeshi professional women’s decontextualization and recontextualization of performed
texts help their gender performativity.
This study combined digital ethnography with face-to-face interviews. The aim was to venture beyond screen-
based/text-based observations through the long-term observation of, and contact with, the participants in on-
line and offline contexts. The initial focus was on participants’ digital practices on social media. The data were
collected over two years (2000-2022) and included around 1700 screenshots of Facebook wall interactions. In
addition, in-depth interviews with each participant were conducted. They were asked about their life trajecto-
ries as Bangladeshi women, focusing on their lived experiences. The research was interested in participants’
interpretations and opinions about expected norms of womanhood in Bangladesh, so questions were based on
these topics.
As suggested by Bauman and Briggs (1990), Leppänen, Kytölä, Jousmäki, Peuronen, and Westinen (2013) and
Blommaert & Varis (2015), young Bangladeshi women seem to enjoy authority and the power of their individual
agency when they decide which resources they want to decontextualize and show their legitimacy and compe-
tence in reusing and assessing differential values associated to various linguistic and multi-modal resources.
However, this authority is not valueless – it is influenced by socio-cultural ideologies, eligibility, accessibility to
institutional structures, legitimacy, cultural propriety, and the competence to conduct decontextualization and
recontextualization. The decisions and choices made during the process of decontextualization and recontextu-
alization are also closely related to what identity individuals prefer to perform. The same agency is observable
in their pragmatic maintenance of the tactic of silence and a ‘positive face’ in front of family members, col-
leagues, and acquaintances offline.
The paper concludes that the poetics and performances through carnivalesque contextualization and decontex-
tualization in social media and pragmatics of silence in offline spaces should be explored with reference to their
societal, cultural, and religious boundaries. Only then a better understanding may be achieved of the linguistic,
societal, cultural, and religious inequalities and marginalisation even educated professional women to face in
a South Asian context like Bangladesh.

925
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The poetics and politics of pornographic rhetoric: high


performances in an extremist right wing government

Panel contribution

Dr. Branca Fabricio 1 , Dr. Luiz Moita-Lopes 1


1. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

In their article Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life, Bauman and Briggs
draw attention to the “poetics and politics” of texts, highlighting the inextricability of artful language and day-
to-day life. In this paper, we resort to such an understanding to approach the high performances of the former
extremist right wing government in Brazil and the pornographic scripts they index. These performances de-
ploy lexis, metaphors, and imagery whose apparent concern is the denouncing of the sexualization of society.
They allegedly understand that such degenerate practices have reached harmful levels, particularly in regard
to children they want to save from left wing parties and the “sickening” minds of their followers. As such, they
invoke sexualized imagery, filled with perversions that threaten family values and morality, which circulate
intensely on social media to the horror of many. To use a Foucauldian formulation, these practices excite and
incite moral panic. Such route is pursued by the extreme right wing in many parts of the world, as its members
make recourse to political agendas that defend totally masculinist societies, in which women would solely serve
for human reproduction, equating feminism with anarchy and with the apocalypse. Others totally reject LGBT+
lives (Sedgewick, 2019). These practices thrive on Internet post trolls, pranks, and memes. As Nagle (2017, p.
17) argues, “the view of psychopathy and rejection of imposed morality runs through the ethos and aesthetic
of the rightist trolling culture”. While presidents and members of extreme right wing governments have used
sexuality to attack their opponents, in Brazil, the president and some of his ministers have been artfully in-
volving themselves with intricate and sophisticated semiotic labor that conveys pornographic meaning-effects.
We analyze two of these semiotic events in particular, drawing attention to how pornography is entextualized
in them. The first is a social media post by the former Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, immediately after
his inauguration in 2019, which has been popularly referred to as the “golden shower post.” The second is a
speech given by the female minister of Family and Human Rights in 2022, while campaigning for the reelection
of the president, in which she described how children are sexually abused on an island in northern Brazil. The
analysis detects highly stylized and well-planned semiotic performances that, orienting to a pornographic sto-
ryline, operationalize a pedagogic agenda. These findings indicate that everyday troll culture on the Internet
has colonized governmental posts and addresses beyond any expectation levels.

926
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Marielle vive”: The work of mourning and the politics of


poetics and performance in contemporary Brazil

Panel contribution

Dr. Daniel Silva 1 , Dr. Daniela Palma 2


1. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Periods of prolonged mourning resulting from political disappearances and the slow resolution of crimes
against life in Latin America raise challenges for both the sociology of social movements and the psychoanalysis
of mourning. In Freud’s (1917) pioneering approach, mourning is treated as a normal affect wherein the inhibi-
tion of interest for the external world is accompanied by an over-investment in the image of the lost object. He
suggests that through resources that include affective over-investment and reality-testing, the libido will eventu-
ally be redirected and grief alleviated. Although Freud speaks little of the role of performance in “Mourning and
Melancholia” (Briggs, 2014, 2015), we now know the importance of the materiality of rituals and poetics in the
work of mourning, including in the necessary reality-testing that facilitates libidinal reinvestment. Yet how does
one perform reality-testing in situations where reality itself defies the limits of credibility? How to complete the
work of mourning when it is uncertain whether the loved one is really dead? How to undertake reality-testing
when real knowledge about criminal responsibility is foreclosed? This paper draws from the research project
“Trajectories of peripheral lives: Violence between the ordinary and extraordinary in (auto)biographical nar-
ratives and poetics” (funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation/Fapesp, Proc: 2021/02618-8) and examines
the work of mourning following the assassination of Marielle Franco, a Black, LGBT councilwoman from a Rio
de Janeiro favela. The project has built an archive documenting textual, imagetic and political expressions of
the mourning movement for Marielle. This documentation serves as the basis for an analytical work that looks
at the poetics and performance (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) of the collective work of mourning as dimensions of
politics in Brazilian peripheries. As of January 2023, almost five years have passed since Marielle’s brutal assas-
sination in an ambush, and it is still unclear who ordered the crime and what their motives were. Yet, rapidly
the murder of this Black woman – a member of the largest but least politically and economically included de-
mographic segment in Brazil – has been recontextualized as a crime against democracy, with major political
consequences. The repetition of poetic elements that reenact her “presence” (such as the chant “Marielle vive”,
or “Marielle lives”) plays a central role in performances that reclaim accountability for her death and cele-
brate her memory. The ritualized biographical time in this work of mourning is forged by the iteration of her
“presence” and remembrance and is coupled with projections of future and hope – and has both individual and
collective consistency. Alongside Briggs’s (2015:267) suggestion that “[p]erformances weave tapestries of life in
particular ways, which are then picked apart and rewoven in subsequent performances,” we will analyze the
interweaving of quotes, chants, images, and temporal reinventions in the Marielle Franco Staircase, built in São
Paulo as a grassroots monument. The analysis of the condensation of entextualized “fragments” and the con-
tinuous juxtaposition of their layers may be instructive for understanding the poetic and temporal dimensions
of an open and inconclusive mourning process.

927
Recruitment of
environmental resources
for interactional
purposes in the early
years (organized by
Amanda Bateman,
Friederike Kern)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Creating private space as a requirement for interaction: The


Case of an Autistic Child

Panel contribution

Prof. Friederike Kern 1


1. University of Bielefeld

Recent empirical research in the area of Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) children’s interac-
tions has addressed the use of objects and space as environmental resources in collaborative play and various
learning activities. Studies have shown how children employ such resources to shape their friendships (Bate-
man, 2011) or exclude other children (Evaldsson & Karlsson 2020); others have demonstrated how spaces create
opportunities for learning activities (Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017), such as language-learning (Bjork-Willen, 2017).
Building on research on children’s use of objects and space as resources for interactional purpose, the paper
presents a case study on an autistic child who, during an ongoing playing time with another child and an edu-
cator, employs environmental resources in order to create an area in which he can separate himself from the
other participants. The analysis draws on video recordings of playing time sessions in an inclusive nursery
school. Micro-analysis informed by EMCA will focus on the embodied practices with which the child moves in
and out of interactions with others, and how he uses the affordances of the room and its equipment to build a
spot where he can be alone. The analysis suggests that building an exclusive space provides the child with the
crucial opportunity to have control over his interactions with others.
The findings will be interpreted with regards to diagnostic features described for autistic children in the Ameri-
can Psychiatric Association (2013, p. 50), especially their assumed difficulties in communicating and interacting
with others.
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSMV (5th
edition), Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Bateman, A. (2011). Huts and heartache: the affordance of playground huts for legal debate in early childhood
social organization. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 3111–3121.
Bjork-Willen, P. (2017). The Preschool Entrance Hall: A Bilingual Transit Zone for Preschoolers. In A. Bate-
man and A. Church (Eds.). Children and knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis. (pp 169-187)
Singapore: Springer.
Evaldsson, A.-C. & Karlsson, M. (2020). Protecting interactional space: Collusive alignments and territorial ar-
rangements of two-against-one in girls’ play participation. Journal of Pragmatics 15, 163–176.
Kyratzis, A. & Johnson, S. J. (2017). Multimodal and Multilingual Resources in Children’s Framing of Situated
Learning Activities: An introduction. Linguistics and Education, 41, 1–6.

929
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal interactional competence in the early years

Panel contribution

Dr. Christophe Parisse 1 , Mrs. Sophie de Pontonx 2 , Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern 3


1. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 2. CNRS-Paris Nanterre University, 3. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

For most authors, the visual-gestural modality is more accessible to hearing children than the audio-vocal
modality. Children’s gestures are interpreted as constructing meaning earlier than their vocal productions
(Rowe et al. 2022) and are considered to facilitate learning (Hall et al. 2022). Infants’ imitation and general
production of gestures has been studied as a precursor to constructing prelinguistic concepts, as a pathway into
the symbolic function of language, and as a bridge between language and embodiment. Gestures are viewed as
representational structures, often constructed through imitation, which are enacted overtly and can be shared
with others. Gestures are also presented as having a compensatory function for both L1 and L2 language learn-
ers’ expressive difficulties (Graziano & Gullberg, 2018) as well as at the end of the lifespan (Göksun et al., 2022).
However a close analysis of children’s development of gesture demonstrates how they do not emerge as a full-
fledged complex semiotic system but are constantly endowed with meaning by scaffolding expert interlocutors.
Multimodal approaches to interaction have highlighted the sensory features in the organization of social in-
teraction thanks to the affordances that are perceived. Various types of behaviors (gaze, speech, gestures) and
their (a)synchronicity have been analyzed (C. Goodwin, 2013, Mondada, 2011). Haptic formats were identified
as being a means for adults to control and shape children’s embodied actions both in family and primary school
contexts.
In this paper, we present an integrative view of language development in which all semiotic resources are
progressively deployed according to children’s motor, cognitive and linguistic skills but also to the expectations
and language practices of the children’s cultural community.
Our analyses were conducted on a series of data sets combining multi-party family dinners and dyadic longi-
tudinal recordings of children between 9 months and 6 years old. We annotated all participants’ actions, gaze,
and languaging (Linell, 2009) throughout our data using the software ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan).
We show that in their early years, children’s blossoming gestuality is less elaborate and skillfully produced,
gaze is less expertly controlled and movements are less fluid than later in development. But for young children’s
“expert” interlocutors, they might seem easier to interpret and to endow with full-blown meaning than budding
vocal productions. Indeed adults seem to have greater formal expectations for verbalizations, possibly based
on the impact of their own schooling and the importance of literacy.
Our detailed qualitative analyses illustrate how language development is variably multimodal. Children’s
speech and gesture develop simultaneously and nourish each other constantly. Their first syncretic, holistic,
multimodal buds blossom into more complex constructions, and bloom into full multimodal intricate produc-
tions containing positioning, displacement, and argumentation. With constant exposure to language through
interaction, scaffolding, reformulation, and repair, children’s language gradually develops into rich linguistic
constructions containing multiple cross-modal elements subtly used together for communicative functions in
which speech, as a very powerful tool, takes a very important part.

930
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prickly peas and potato walls: The affordances of food


pretend play during preschool lunches in Sweden

Panel contribution

Dr. Annerose Willemsen 1 , Prof. Sally Wiggins Young 1 , Prof. Jakob Cromdal 1
1. Linköping University

The question of whether young children should be allowed to play with their food during mealtimes can elicit
strong stances on food being primarily for consumption. However, studies have indicated that play could have
a positive effect on children’s willingness to taste foods (e.g., Coulthard & Sealy, 2017) and enhance their par-
ticipation in mealtime interactions (Bae, 2009). Little research so far has taken a detailed look at food play
sequences providing insight into how these come about and what they afford. This is of particular interest in
early childhood education and care settings, where the mealtime is both a pedagogical and a social setting: the
children learn how to eat and behave in the presence of their teacher(s) and peers, while the mealtime also
facilitates togetherness and peer relations (Os, 2013) where opportunities for food play may arise.
This presentation gives a detailed insight into food play during mealtimes at Swedish preschools and demon-
strates how it is initiated and responded to, and what these play sequences afford. The data comprise 100
lunches video-recorded in four preschools over a series of consecutive weeks. At each lunchtime, two to seven
children between 2 and 6 years old eat a meal together with one to three teachers. Within this dataset an induc-
tive collection of food pretend play was conducted: occasions where the food was oriented to as something other
than just food. Discursive psychology and multimodal conversation analysis were used to explicate the inter-
actional practices of the participants employing a multitude of resources to manipulate their food and utensils
and invite others into their pretend worlds where peas can be ‘prickly’ and potatoes can be walls trapping other
food items.
The analyses demonstrate that both children and teachers initiate food pretend play during mealtimes and
that these initiations of play receive various degrees of uptake. While in some cases the play constitutes brief
comments receiving little to no uptake or even a correction by the teacher, in other cases the play develops into
complex narratives where other participants join in and extend it. On some occasions, the teacher engages in
these narratives and gradually steers back towards eating the food, for example by recommending to be careful
while eating the prickly peas. Our findings reveal therefore that preschool mealtimes provide rich contexts
for play and, moreover, that this play does not necessarily disrupt the mealtime. Instead, it can function as
a collaborative and multimodal means affording enjoyment of food and social participation during preschool
lunches, and even provides teachers with a resource for stimulating eating without explicitly exerting control.
References
Bae, B. (2009). Children’s right to participate – challenges in everyday interactions. European Early Childhood
Education Research Journal, 17(3), 391-406. https://doi.org/10.1080/13502930903101594
Coulthard, H., & Sealy, A. (2017). Play with your food! Sensory play is associated with tasting of fruits and
vegetables in preschool children. Appetite, 113, 84-90.
Os, E. (2013). Opportunities knock: Mediation of peer-relations during meal-time in toddler groups. Nordic
Early Childhood Education Research, 6, 1-9. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7577/nbf.460

931
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Recruiting objects to scaffold spatial thinking in early


learning environments

Panel contribution

Dr. Amelia Church 1 , Dr. Amanda Bateman 2 , Dr. Caroline Cohrssen 3


1. university of melbourne, 2. University of Waikato, 3. University of New England

The aim of this presentation is to illustrate how teachers can recruit local resources to scaffold children’s learn-
ing about spatial concepts. The analysis here explores how early childhood professionals ‘teach mathematics’ to
demonstrate how real-life child-teacher interactions illustrate responsive engagement – a practice principle in
most early childhood frameworks or curricula. Key findings include effective teaching practices through partic-
ipation frameworks co-produced through question answer sequences and “collaboratively organized embodied
action” (Goodwin, 2018, p.318).
The video for this presentation is an extended extract of a teacher guiding four-year-old children in an Australian
kindergarten to see spatial relationships between objects – specifically the principle of bilateral symmetry (as
the teacher says, “a really difficult question”). We draw directly on Goodwin’s (2007; 2018) depiction of environ-
mentally coupled gestures to see how the teacher recruits local resources to scaffold children’s spatial thinking,
both in questioning and providing feedback through pointing at the shape and position of blocks on a light ta-
ble. The analysis shows how teachers can use the salient features of resources in the immediate environment to
reinforce or illustrate the concept under discussion. The conversation analytic approach to the unfolding action
reveals distinct participation frameworks – here the activity of a teacher and three children gathered around
and orienting to shapes on a lightbox – to show how concept development depends on embodied action (Good-
win, 2000). Importantly, we discuss how embodiment is not simply sequential (i.e. the teacher does something
and the child does something else next), but visible as shaped and moderated by the actions of interlocuters.
Understanding the practice of responsivity necessarily needs us to pay attention to all the resources children and
teachers are using to construct meaning, display understanding and scaffold concepts. Here, we demonstrate
the pragmatic utilization of environment resources, including bodily orientation to specific objects (e.g. tapping
blocks on the lightbox), and gesture that co-occurs with question-answer shaped talk to emphasize the salient
properties of the objects in relation to each other (i.e. the concept of symmetry). Illuminating the details of these
interactions has implications for pedagogical practice across curricula in early childhood education.
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489-
1522.
Goodwin, C. (2007). Environmentally coupled gestures. In S. D. Duncan, J. Cassel & E.T. Levy (Eds.) Gesture and
the Dynamic Dimension of Language: Essays in Honor of David McNeill (pp. 195-212).Amsterdam / Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Goodwin, C. (2018). Environmentally coupled gestures. In Co-operative action (pp. 221-242). Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.

932
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social interactional affordances of walking outdoors in


preschools in Sweden and Japan

Panel contribution

Prof. Asta Cekaite 1 , Prof. Matthew Burdelski 2 , Dr. Olga Anatoli 1


1. Linköping University, 2. Osaka University

This presentation discusses the interactional affordances constituted during group walking among preschool
teachers and children (1 to 5 years old) within (sub)urban environments in Sweden and Japan. The data come
from approximately 100 hours of video-recordings of naturally occurring social interactions in two early child-
hood educational settings, they are presented using multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis shows that
walking along sidewalks, roads, and through outdoor places—often to arrive at a specific destination (e.g., gym,
park)— constitutes a liminal space where children and adults recruit multisensorial resources in the environ-
ment, such as other people, sounds and objects (Mondada, 2019), to perform pragmatic acts and engage in social
interactions.
Previous educational research has drawn on the notion of “affordances” (Gibson 1977) and argues for the im-
portance of “unedited” natural landscapes, with an idealized depiction of, for example, a forest, as potentially
more engaging for children than a playground (Aziz and Said, 2015; Hammarsten, 2021). We propose to broaden
this approach and look at affordances not as a static characteristic of environments, but rather as engendering
dynamic and dialogically constructed pragmatic meaning. Previous research has described adult-child inter-
actions during outdoor walking as an educational activity for encouraging “environmental noticings” among
children (Bateman, 2015: 102–104), as well as an opportunity for playful “occasioned knowledge exploration”
(Goodwin, 2007). In this talk, we build on this research to look at walking that while instrumental—a compelled
activity or “a mode of transport” (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020)—affords opportunities for the co-construction of
meaning. We suggest that for young children, walking outdoors allows for initiating spontaneous conversa-
tions that draws upon environmental resources, while at the same time “mastering” their bodies (Kern, 2018)
in relation to their surroundings.
References
Aziz NF and Said I (2015) Outdoor Environments as Children’s Play Spaces: Playground Affordances. In: Evans
B, Horton J, and Skelton T (eds) Play, Recreation, Health and Well Being. Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 1–22.
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-4585-96-5_7-1.
Bateman A (2015) Conversation Analysis and Early Childhood Education: The Co-Production of Knowledge and
Relationships. Directions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Publishing Company.
Gibson J J (1977) The theory of affordances. In Shaw R., Bransford J. (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing:
Toward an ecological psychology (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

Goodwin MH (2007) Occasioned knowledge exploration in family interaction. Discourse & Society 18(1). SAGE
Publications Ltd: 93–110. DOI: 10.1177/0957926507069459.
Hammarsten M (2021) What are Schoolchildren doing Out There? Children’s Perspectives on Affordances in
Unedited Places. Built Environment 47(2): 186–205. DOI: 10.2148/benv.47.2.186.
Kern F (2018) Mastering the body: Correcting bodily conduct in adult-child interaction. Research on Children
and Social Interaction 2(2): 213–234. DOI: 10.1558/rcsi.37389.
Loukaitou-Sideris A (2020) Special issue on walking. Transport Reviews 40(2). Routledge: 131–134. DOI:
10.1080/01441647.2020.1712044.
Mondada L (2019) Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality

933
18th International Pragmatics Conference

and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 145. Quo Vadis, Pragmatics? 47–62. DOI:
10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.016.

934
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Toddlers’ humorous use of environmental resources in peer


interactions within an ECEC setting in Iceland

Panel contribution

Ms. Bryndis Gunnarsdottir 1


1. University of Iceland

Within ECEC in Iceland, the outside play area is an important environmental space that plays a large role in
children’s everyday lives in the settings. On average, children in Iceland spend around 8 hours a day in ECEC
settings (Statistic Iceland, 2021), and between 1-4 hours of those are spent outside, depending on the season
(Minstry of Education and Science, 2011). The outdoor space offers certain affordances for young children to
interact with each other that are not found in indoor spaces (e.g. Dinkel et al, 2019). The play materials available
in the environment can provide opportunities for interactions between children through multimodal resources
that they use to co-construct their peer culture within the peer group (Corsaro, 2017; Løkken, 2010). This they
often do in playful and humorous ways.
Two-year-old children (toddlers) are competent at expressing their understanding and intentions in peer-to-
peer interactions through embodied gesture (Kidwell, 2005; Engdahl, 2011; Bateman & Church, 2017). This
age group often utilise objects and materials in the outdoor natural environment in humorous ways to engage
their peers and co-construct their cultural understanding of what is acceptable and what is not (Pálmadóttir &
Johansson, 2015).
The study reported on in this presentation is an ethnomethodological study using CA to transcribe and analyse
the interactions of toddlers that were video recorded over a period of nine months in Iceland. The study exam-
ines humorous embodied use of environmental resources in the outdoor space in peer interactions within an
ECEC setting. This presentation will be focusing on the role that environmental resources play in supporting
peer to peer interactions.
Preliminary findings suggest that toddlers are competent in utilising different play resources in the outdoor
space to initiate and support their interactions with their peers. Through humorous embodied interactions
intertwined with vocalisation and short sentences, they participate in these playful interactions through turn-
taking and repair resulting in acceptance and succesful interactions.
References
Bateman, A. & Church, A. (2017). Children’s knowledge-in-interaction: An introduction. In
A.Bateman & A.Church (Eds.), Children’s knowledge-in-interactions: Studies in
conversation analysis (pp.1-11). Springer.
Corsaro, W. (2017). The sociology of childhood (5th ed.). Pine Forge Press.
Dinkel, D., Snyder, K., Patterson, T., Warehime, S., Kuhn, M., and Wisneski, D. (2019). An
exploration of infant and toddler unstructured outdoor play. European Early
Childhood Education Research Journal, 27(2), 257-271.
Engdahl, I. (2011). Toddler interaction during play in the Swedish preschool. Early Child Development and Care,
123(1), 89-100.
Løkken, G. (2010). Tracing the social style of toddler peers. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 44(2),
163-176.
Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. (2011). National curriculum guide for play-,
elementary and secondary schools. Author.
Pálmadóttir, H. & Johansson, E.M. (2015). Young children’s communication and expression of values during play
sessions in preschool. Early Years: An International Research Journal, 35(3), 289-301.
Statistics Iceland. (2021). Börn í leikskólum 2020 (Children in preschools 2020). Retrivied from https://statice.is/

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Young children’s local deployment of material resources:


negotiating social relationships during peer play

Panel contribution

Dr. Magnus Karlsson 1


1. University of Gothenburg

In collective settings such as preschools, children are afforded a rich environment of play spaces and materials
that they can use in play interactions with others. The properties and characteristics of objects influence and
shape their local uses by participants, but participants might also creatively use them for their various social
purposes at the local level (Cobb-Moore et al., 2010; Danby et al, 2017).
This presentation focuses on a specific case of this relationship between objects and the daily construction
of children’s social world, namely the role of objects in peer play interactions and in the local negotiations
of relationships, positions, and spaces within moment-to-moment social interaction. Drawing from video-
ethnographic research in a Swedish preschool, and by utilizing an integrative framework that combines the
paradigm of (peer) language socialization (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2012), and a multimodal approach to human
social action (Goodwin, 2018; Mondada, 2019), an extended sequence of naturally occurring play with objects
among children aged 5 is investigated.
As the analysis illustrates, through children´s multimodal categorizations (Burdelski & Fukada, 2019), and
positioning of objects in the play space, they index affiliative or disaffiliative stances toward playmates, co-
constructing thereby the social organization of the peer group. Specifically, children use the affordances of the
environment, i.e. play objects and spaces, both to engage with others or restrict their access to the current ac-
tivity. These various practices, involving deployments and interactions with specific objects (and the material
environment), are relevant to children’s local negotiation of their respective positions in the social organization
the peer group, which regards both children’s friendships and (dis)affiliative relationships and the hierarchical
power structure of the peer group (see Kyratzis 2004). In the discussion, an agentic view of children’s deploy-
ment of objects that takes into consideration the affordances of a specific setting is put forward. It is argued that
this perspective can cast light on the (cultural) ways through which multimodal resources are used by children
to co-construct complex interactions, negotiate hierarchies and relationships in the early years.
References

Burdelski, M., & Fukada, C. (2019). Multimodal membership categorization and storytelling in a guided tour.
Pragmatics and Society, 10(3), 337–358.
Cobb-Moore, C., Danby, S., & Farrell, A. (2010). Locking the unlockable: Children’s invocation of pretence to
define and manage place. Childhood, 17(3), 376–395.
Danby, S., Davidson, C., Theobald, M., Houen, S., & Thorpe, K. (2017). Pretend play and technology: Young
children making sense of their everyday social worlds. In S. Lynch, D. Pike & C. Beckett (Eds.). Multidisciplinary
perspectives on play from birth and beyond, Vol. 18, pp.231-245. Singapore: Springer.
Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, M. H., & Kyratzis, A. (2012). Peer language socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, & B. Schieffelin (Eds.),
The handbook of language socialization. Wiley-Blackwell.
Kyratzis, A. (2004). Talk and interaction among children and the co-construction of peer groups and peer culture.
Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 625–649.
Mondada, L. (2019) Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality
and multisensoriality in social interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 47–62.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘Transformation objects´ – A help for bilingual preschoolers


to transit from home to preschool and vice versa

Panel contribution

Prof. Polly Björk-Willén 1


1. Linköping University

The aim of the presentation is to highlight how young preschoolers’ language-switch between their mother
tongue and Swedish and vice versa, is accomplished through language and nonverbal interchange between
parents, the preschool teachers and themselves where the preschool entrance hall environment plays an im-
portant part in this process.
The present data draws on a video study focusing on everyday talk and social interaction between parents,
children and teachers in the entrance hall of two Swedish preschools at drop-off and pick-up time (Björk-Willén,
2017). From an ethnomethodological view (Garfinkel, 1967), the participant’s interaction has been analysed in
detail, sequentially to shed light on how they orient themselves to each other in this unique environment (Sacks,
1984; Schegloff, 1999; 2007).
Seeing the entrance hall as a transit zone for a child’s travel between home and the preschool, it will be shown
how a child’s language-switch is a joint accomplishment where the parent, the preschool teacher and the child
participate in different ways and to different extents. A couple of illuminating examples have been analysed,
and chosen from a collection of events when a parent uses both her mother tongue and Swedish. The analyses
show how the child’s transfer consists of embodied (Goodwin, 2003) and sometimes sensitive actions (Goodwin,
M. H., 2017) together with the language-switch (Cromdal, 2004). The analysis also shows how concrete artifacts
(shoes, mittens etc.) work as transformation objects and constitute a transition point that scaffold the child’s
language commuting between home and preschool, and in addition these transition signals help the child to
develop pragmatic skills that are necessary to manage the language and the cultural switch (Björk-Willén, 2017).
References
Björk-Willen, P. (2017). The Preschool Entrance Hall: A Bilingual Transit Zone for Preschoolers. In A. Bateman
and A. Church (Eds.). Children and knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis. (pp 169-187)
Singapore: Springer
Cromdal, J. (2004). Building bilingual oppositions: Code-switching in children’s disputes. Language in Society,
33: 33-58.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc.
Goodwin, M. H. (2017), “Haptic sociality: The embodied interactive construction of intimacy through touch”, In
Intercorporeality Emerging Socialities in Interaction (Christian Meyer, J Streeck, J. Scott Jordan, eds.), Oxford,
UK, Oxford University Press, pp. 73-102.
Goodwin, C. (2003). The semiotic body in its environment. In J. Coupland and R. Gwyn (eds.), Discourses of body,
19-22. New York: Palgrave.
Sacks, H. (1984). Notes on methodology. In J. M. Atkins &J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social actions: Studies
in conversational analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

937
Recycling and reshaping
previous turns in
multimodal interactions
(organized by Vanessa
Piccoli, Biagio Ursi)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Forms and functions of repetitions in doctor-patient


interaction in cancer treatment encounters

Panel contribution

Prof. Piera Margutti 1 , Dr. Vittoria Colla 1 , Dr. Valeria Barbieri 1


1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Cancer treatment involves a long and complex process, featuring many medical encounters in a variety of spe-
cializations (e.g., oncology, surgery, and radiotherapy). During this process, patients often acquire a substantial
amount of medical knowledge, to which they refer in talking with the physicians they meet along their treat-
ment path (Colla & Margutti, forth.). This aspect affects the management of epistemic authority (Heritage, 2013;
Fatigante et al., 2020; Lindström & Weatherall, 2015), turn taking, and the overall a/symmetry framework of
interaction, entailing negotiations on dotors’ deontic authority and patients’ agency. In the oncology-related
visits we examine here, doctors display to be oriented to patients’ prior knowledge about their health con-
ditions, while patients often stage themselves as consciously aware of their health status. Owing to such a
‘knowledgeable patient’, these visits are characterized by an interactive process of knowledge co-construction,
whereby physicians and patients cooperatively establish suitable treatment. Such features are particularly vis-
ible in the participants’ multimodal forms of repetitions of one another’s contributions. Drawing on a corpus
of 80 oncology-related visits video-recorded in 5 Italian hospitals, and relying on the intrinsically multimodal
analytic framework of Conversational Analysis, this paper illustrates how physicians and patients repeat and
reshape one another’s utterances and/or gestures in their own turns and change the course of the ongoing action
as a resource to negotiate epistemic primacy and achieve a shared decision on the treatment.
In the following extract an example of the phenomenon. In line 1 P is reporting what she has been told by
another doctor.
BL PZ6 VS1 v.1 (13.35-14.08)
1 P: e lei mi ha spiegato che appunto va fatto perché- euhm::-
and she explained to me that indeed it must be done because- euhm::-
2 D: un tem[po togliEvano-
in the past they used to remove-
3 P: � [in è quella che sostituisce la
to put it simply it’s what substitutes
4 D: � [>in parole povere<-
to put it simply
5 P: mastectomia.
mastectomy.
6 D: sì un tempo facevano la mastectomia, adesso si è visto nel
yes in the past they did the mastectomy, now it has been observed
7 corso degli anni, che appunto i risultati son sovrapponibili,
in the years, that indeed the results are the same,
In the course of P’s word search (l. 1), P and D enact practices such as repetition rephrasing of the other’s turn,
producing action changes on a moment-by-moment basis, with the aim of maximizing their mutual understand-
ing. In our collection, these practices are performed by participants relying on multimodal resources (verbal
and bodily conduct, as well as prosody.
Selected references
Fatigante, M., Heritage, J., Alby, A., & Zucchermaglio, C. (2020). Presenting treatment options in breast cancer
consultations: Advice and consent in Italian medical care. Social Science & Medicine, 226, 113175.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in action: action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language
and Social Interaction, 45(1): 1–29.
Lindström, A., & Weatherall, A. (2015). Orientations to epistemics and deontics in treatment discussions. Journal
of Pragmatics, 78, 39–53.

940
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Painting hands: recycled visitors’ gestures in a museum


guided tour

Panel contribution

Dr. Biagio Ursi 1


1. Université d’Orléans

In the last few years, more and more work has been done on sensoriality which is considered as a primordial
analytical dimension for taking into account the complexity of actions performed by social actors in the field
of multimodal interactional studies (Mondada 2019). In particular, research involving several types of video
data has proposed important methodological reflections (Greco et al. 2019) as well as analytical insights into
the sequential organization of sensorial experience in institutional (Routarinne et al. 2020) and various settings
(Cekaite & Mondada 2020).
In this contribution, I study guided tours that deal with the tactile exploration of painting reproductions by
visually impaired and sighted people in a contemporary art museum in Italy (Ursi 2020). The guide, who pro-
vides bodily assistance and verbal explanations, accompanies visitors’ experience of the tactile reproductions.
Visitors sometimes relate their personal sensory experience of the artwork by performing representational
gestures (McNeill 1992), within multimodal configurations. Some gestures are reused by coparticipants in the
reformulation of previous remarks and the description of their own experience.
Here, I will specifically focus my attention on the visitors’ gestures that are reproduced and mobilized by the
guide in turns-at-talk for expressing affiliation with visitors. These multimodal resources can be considered
as conversational routines (Chernyshova et al. 2022) that are used by the guide not only to stabilize meaning
and ensure mutual understanding, but also to construct her professional discourse. Thus, multiple multimodal
resources are retrospectively recognizable as a whole and sequentially mobilized for practical purposes. By
relying on these resources, the guide can eventually point to visitors’ assessments as well as to the spatial and
temporal trajectories of the museum guided tour.
References
Cekaite A. & Mondada L. (Eds) (2020). Touch in Social Interaction. Touch, Language, and Body. London: Rout-
ledge.
Chernyshova E., Piccoli V. & Ursi B. (2022). Multimodal conversational routines: talk-in-interaction through the
prism of complexity. In K. Lund et al. (Eds), Language is a complex adaptive system. Explorations and evidence
(pp. 131-146). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Greco L., Galatolo R., Horlacher A.-S., Piccoli V., Ticca A. C. & Ursi B. (2019). Some theoretical and methodological
challenges of transcribing touch in talk-in-interaction. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality
2(1).
McNeill D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mondada L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality
and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 145, 47-62.
Routarinne S., Tainio L. E. & Burdelski M. (Eds) (2020). Special Issue: Human-to-human touch in institutional
settings. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 3(1).
Ursi B. (2020). L’analisi multimodale di turni sintatticamente incompiuti: una prospettiva interazionale. Bulletin
suisse de linguistique appliquée 111, 85-109.

941
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Recycling turns in multimodal dance instructions

Panel contribution

Prof. Oliver Ehmer 1


1. University Osnabrück

This paper addresses a specific type of recycling material from previous turns in interaction, namely recycled
turns in multimodal instructions. A common feature of instructional interaction is that in the course of an
instructional project (Reed/Szczepek Reed 2013) instructors address one and the same learnable several times.
For example, an instructor may give a first instruction (Deppermann 2018) in front of a group and then guide
individual learners through their trials, by giving further explanations or directives to be complied with more
or less immediately. While it has been shown that instructors adapt the design of their instructions to local
contingencies (e. g., Helmer 2021), recent research has also demonstrated that instructions may conventionalize
within a single interaction. Based on recordings of self-defense trainings in German Stukenbrock 2021 has
shown that by means of repetition and routinization multimodal gestalts may sediment, often leading to highly
reduced forms. Building on these recent findings the paper analyzes how instructors recycle previous turns
in Spanish spoken instructions of dancing Argentine Tango. The main claim of the paper is that in recycling
multimodal instructions there are two competing interactional affordances. This is, on the one hand, a need for
the recognizability of the instruction on behalf of the student (often under time pressure). On the other hand,
there is the need for adjusting the instruction to local contingencies (in the sense of Sacks et al. 1974). These
competing affordances lead to locally conventionalized instructional patterns that are still flexible in nature.
The aim of the paper is to showcase the emergent nature of language (in the sense of Hopper 1997) in recycled
instructions, that is, grammatical structures being in a continual movement towards sedimentation while at the
same time always being provisional. The paper will analyze recycling of multimodal turns that occur within
a single interaction, i. e. a single class of dance teaching (cf. Keevallik 2010). It is based on a large corpus of
authentic classes on dancing Argentine tango, recorded in Argentina 2018-2019 which will be analyzed using
methods of multimodal interaction analysis.
References
Reed, Darren/Szczepek Reed, Beatrice (2013): Building an instructional project: Actions as components of music
masterclasses. In: Szczepek Reed, Beatrice/Raymond, Geoffrey (Hgg.): Units of Talk – Units of Action, Amster-
dam: Benjamins, 313–342.
Stukenbrock, Anja (2021): „Multimodal Gestalts and Their Change Over Time: Is Routinization Also Grammati-
calization¿‘, Frontiers in Communication 6.
Deppermann, Arnulf (2018): „Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives
and imperatives“, International Journal of Applied Linguistics 28 (2).
Helmer, Henrike (2021): „Humorous or occasioned instructions: Learning the “shoulder check” in theoretical
and practical driving lessons“, International Journal of Applied Linguistics 31 (1), 109-131.
Hopper, Paul J. (1987): Emergent Grammar, Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society, 139–157.
Keevallik, Leelo (2010): „Bodily Quoting in Dance Correction“, Research on language and social interaction 43
(4), 401–426.
Sacks, Harvey/Schegloff, Emanuel A./Jefferson, Gail (1974): „A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of
Turntaking for Conversation“, Language 50, 696–735.

942
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Repetition and instruction in blind pedestrians training with


guide-dogs

Panel contribution

Dr. Monica Simone 1 , Dr. Chloé Mondémé 2 , Prof. Renata Galatolo 1


1. University of Bologna, 2. CNRS, Triangle (Lyon) & Cefres (Prague)

This study investigates how reuse of a sequentially prior verbal instruction is employed by next speakers to
implement a subsequent instructive action addressing non-human recipients.
Using videorecorded data from training sessions in French in which trainers teach blind persons to walk with
their prospective guide dogs, our analysis focuses on instructional activities that entail navigational tasks such
as crossing a street and heading for a door or a sidewalk with the guide dog.
We identify two distinct configurations underlying the organization of such instructional activities. In the first
configuration, the trainer produces an instruction to tell the blind trainee what to do next to (or with) the dog
(e.g., “Here you can reward the dog”), and the trainee produces the complying action (e.g., patting and praising
the dog).
In the second configuration, the trainer produces an instruction telling the trainee what to tell the dog to do next.
In this configuration, the trainer’s instruction projects repetition as the relevant next action that is expected from
the trainee.
Our focus is on this second configuration. The results of our analysis show that the trainer’s instruction may
either formulate re-saying as the relevant next action (e.g.: Dis lui traverse, “Say cross to him”) or occur in
an elliptical format consisting only of the verbal cue to be given to the dog (e.g.: “Trottoir”). These elliptical
instructions are delivered in specific ways as regards both their timing and prosodic design to provide the blind
trainee with the appropriate verbal cue required to instruct the dog while simultaneously ‘neutralizing’ the
potential of the cue to be interpreted as a direct command to the dog.
As far as the trainee’s subsequent repetitions are concerned, we identify three different formats: exact repe-
tition, addition or subtraction around a pivotal term from the previous instruction, and re-organisation of the
previous linguistic material.
We observe a systematic relationship between the formatting of first and second (repeated) instructions and
ongoing activity contingencies that may put pressure on the participants to get the dog to promptly accomplish
a certain action. More specifically, we show that the trainer’s elliptical instructions are routinely followed by
the trainee’s immediately adjacent exact repetition. Also, such repetitions are delivered with louder voice than
their first saying to ensure prompt reception by the dog.
Overall, our study illuminates the routine organization of repetition in a setting where this practice is integral
to the instructional activity at hand rather than being configured as an emergent phenomenon. Our analysis
highlights the co-operative (Goodwin, 2018) achievement of actions in the setting under examination by show-
ing how participants reuse materials inherited from previous turns to build new actions and progress current
activities. This ultimately challenges the view of repetition as the same thing happening again (Cf. Brown, 1999)
suggesting in fact that even exact repetition may include reshaping and tailoring of previous actions to different
recipients up to accomplishing a different and new action.
Brown, P. (1999). Repetition. JLA 9(1/2):223-226.
Goodwin, C. (2018). Why Multimodality? Why Co-Operative Action? Social Interaction 1(2).

943
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reproducing multimodal configurations in


interpreter-mediated healthcare interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Vanessa Piccoli 1 , Prof. Véronique Traverso 2


1. Université Paris Nanterre, 2. CNRS, ICAR

In recent years, an important body of research has explored the dynamics of interpreter-mediated communi-
cation in healthcare consultations (Baraldi & Gavioli 2012, Ticca & Traverso 2015 among others). These studies
have shown that in this kind of interactions the interpreter accomplishes the very delicate task to coordinate
talk-in-interaction while ensuring mutual understanding between the patient and the physician. However, in
this triadic configuration, a full intersubjectivity is hard to achieve. The changing participation framework en-
tails the risk of letting out momentarily some of the participants. For instance, some studies have shown that pa-
tients’ contributions may be marginalized (Davidson 2000) and so may be their affective manifestations (Farini
2016). In order to convey both the participants’ contributions and their affective stance (Koole 2015), the inter-
preter may reproduce some of their emotional manifestations through multimodal practices (e.g. adopting the
same mimics or reproducing the same gestures) (Ticca & Traverso 2017, Piccoli 2019). In these cases, the trans-
lation process is not only realized through verbal turns but rather using a plurality of multimodal resources,
which can be described as a ‘multimodal gestalt’ (Mondada 2015), i.e. a configuration involving different semi-
otic resources that make sense together and are accomplished for practical purposes in talk-in-interaction.
Grounding on a corpus of 91 naturally occurring interactions collected in the framework of the REMILAS project
(Refugees, migrants and their languages in healthcare encounters, 2016/2020), this contribution deals with multi-
modal repetitions and reformulations in interpreter-mediated healthcare interactions. A sequential analysis of
some selected excerpts will be proposed, focusing on the recycling and reshaping of multimodal configurations.
These practices will be considered both as communicative resources – for reaching intercomprehension – and
as affective resources – for showing emotional alignment. Particular attention will be paid to cases in which all
three participants reproduce the same configuration in a sequential order.
References
Baraldi, C., Gavioli, L. (Eds.) (2012). Coordinating Participation in Dialogue Interpreting. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Davidson, B. (2000). The interpreter as institutional gatekeeper: The social-linguistic role of interpreters in
Spanish-English medical discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4, 379-405
Farini F. (2016). Affective formulations in multilingual healthcare settings. In Prior M. T. & Kasper G. (Eds.), Emo-
tion in Multilingual Interaction, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 177-201.
Koole T. (2015). Emotion display. In Östman J.-O. & Verschueren J. (Eds.) IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics. Amster-
dam: Benjamins.
Mondada L. (2015). Multimodal completions. In Deppermann A. & Günthner S. (Eds.), Temporality in Interac-
tion. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 267-308.
Piccoli V. (2019). (Re)transmettre la souffrance émotionnelle : une analyse interactionnelle de consultations
entre soignants, demandeurs d’asile et interprètes en France. Langage et société, 167(2), 175-198.
Ticca A. C. & Traverso V. (Eds.) (2015). Traduire et interpréter en situations sociales. Santé, éducation, jus-
tice. Langage et société, 153.
Ticca A. C. & Traverso V. (2017). Parole, voix et corps : lorsque l’interprète et le soignant s’alignent dans les
consultations avec migrants. L’autre – clinique, culture et société 18(3).

944
Referential practices in
action: A usage-based
perspective on canonical
and non-canonical uses of
pronouns referring to
persons (organized by
Jens Lanwer, Wolfgang
Imo, Evelyn Ziegler,
Gillmann)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Non-canonical uses of man ‘one’ and vi ‘we’ in medical


consultations in Finland Swedish

Panel contribution

Prof. Camilla Wide 1 , Prof. Camilla Lindholm 2


1. University of Turku, 2. Tampere University

This paper analyzes non-canonical uses of the indefinite pronoun man ‘one’ and the first person plural pronoun
vi ‘we’ in doctor-patient interaction in Swedish in Finland. We focus on cases where either the doctor or the
patient is referring only or primarily to themselves by using these pronouns.
The use of first person plural pronouns such as vi by doctors is well-known (Skelton et al. 2002). Indefinite
pronouns such as man are also frequently deployed as resources in doctor-patient consultations (Norrby et al.
2015). But in what situations are these pronouns used in non-canonical ways? Are they used to solve commu-
nicative problems or to carry out non-preferred actions?
Non-canonical uses of pronouns are interesting also from the perspective of the tendency in Finland to avoid
emphasizing the person. As discussed by Yli-Vakkuri (2005), impersonal, ambiguous and vague expressions are
used in Finland both when referring to oneself and others. How does this affect the use of the pronouns man
‘one’ and vi ‘we’ in medical consultations?
Our data consist of 20 consultations between 5 doctors and 20 patients with fibromyalgia (Lindholm 2003). We
use Conversational Analysis to analyze the occurrences found in their situated contexts.
References
Lindholm, C. 2003. Frågor i praktiken. Flerledade frågeturer i läkare-patientsamtal [Questions in Practice. Multi-
unit Question Turns in Doctor-Patient Conversations]. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland.
Norrby, C., Wide, C., Lindström, J. & Nilsson, J. 2015. Interpersonal relationships in medical consultations. Com-
paring Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish address practices. Journal of Pragmatics 84:121–138.
Skelton, J. R., Wearn, A. M., & Hobbs, F. D. 2002. “I” and “we”: a concordancing analysis of how doctors and
patients use first person pronouns in primary care consultations. Family practice 19(5):484–488.
Yli-Vakkuri, V., 2005. Politeness in Finland: evasion at all costs. In L. Hickey & M. Stewart (Eds.), Politeness in
Europe, 189–203. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

946
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Perspectivation and typification – on generic uses of “ich”,


“du” and “man” in German talk-in-interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Jens Lanwer 1 , Ms. Nathalie Bauer 1


1. University of Münster

The interactive achievement of person reference in conversation is a phenomenon that has been thoroughly
studied in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics (Auer 1984; Enfield 2013; Lerner/Kitzinger
2007; Stivers/Enfield/Levinson 2007). But so far, the focus has been primarily on reference to non-present
persons in the spirit of the seminal paper of Sacks/Schegloff (1979). Less attention has been paid to referential
practices that anchor referents deictically in the participation framework (Sidnell/Enfield 2017), as it is already
assumed in classical grammatical descriptions regarding 1st and 2nd person pronominals (Jespersen 1922:123).
Against this backdrop, practices of generic reference involving the non-canonical use of these pronouns have
received even less attention in interactional research. Regarding German talk-in-interaction, first studies on
the generic use of du (‘you’) have recently been conducted from a usage-based and interactionally oriented
perspective (Auer/Stukenbrock 2018; Stuckenbrock/Bahr 2017). Furthermore, Imo/Ziegler (2019) offer an
analysis of usage patterns of man (‘one’) in the context of interactional construction grammar, which already
reveals initial differences between different kinds of genericity evoked by generic du and generic man. Still,
a theoretical framework is missing, which would allow an integration and systematization of the diverse
observations of context-sensitive functional descriptions of the whole inventory of generics in interaction. Such
a systematization seems essential to further contribute to the grammatical description of the “systematically
ordered inventory […] of reference practices for persons” (Schegloff 1996:467) with respect to the analysis of
spoken German. This is the starting point for our talk, in which we aim to develop a classification scheme for
the functional description of generic uses of ich ‘I’, du (‘you’) and man (‘one’) in a data-driven fashion. Based
on sequence analytical work on dinner conversations from northern Germany we will try to illustrate (1)
the added value of describing generic reference with respect to aspects of the intersubjective perspectivation
and typification (Schütz/Luckmann 1979:90–124) of social agents and (2) that with respect to perspectivation
and typification functional differences between the generic uses of the pronominals ich (‘I’), du (‘you’) and
man(‘one’) become apparent.

References
https://go.wwu.de/qdtu5

947
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Practices of Displaced Person Reference Forms in Interaction:


Uses of Possessor-Possessive-Constructions for Self- and
Other-Reference

Panel contribution

Prof. Susanne Günthner 1


1. University of Münster

This presentation – based on German WhatsApp-interactions – addresses practices of ‘third-person reference


forms’ used to refer to speaker and addressee; i.e. to participants present in the interaction. In particular, I
will focus on possessor-possessive-constructions – e.g., „Drücke meinem Enkelchen [=ADRESSAT] die Daumen¡‘;
’Keep my fingers crossed for my dear grandson [=ADDRESSEE]’ – used as routinized communicative practices in
computer-mediated interactions.
I will argue that possessor-possessive-constructions – mobilized in the place of default deictic pronouns “I” (ich)
or “you” (du/Sie) – go against the „preference for using a minimal form” (Sacks/Schegloff 1979) and do more
than simply refer to speaker and addressee: In activating these ‘quasi-direct’ forms (Vološinov 1929) of person
reference, participants evoke „social indices“ (Silverstein 1976: 37) to contextualize meanings which would
be hidden in cases of „referring simpliciter” (Schegloff 1996) by means of the deictic pronouns „ich” (‘I’) and
“du/Sie” (’you’). Speakers (e.g., a student informing her boyfriend „Dein Schatz [=SPRECHERIN] vermisst ihren
Kuschelbär [=ADRESSAT]“; ‘Your darling [=SPEAKER] misses her teddy bear [=ADDRESSEE])’ not only mobilize
these non-canonical forms as an interactional resource to reconfigure self and other in specific roles (e.g. as
a grandson, grandma, lover, etc.), but this reference practice (including possessive pronouns) also turns out
to be closely connected with ongoing social activities and contextually induced stance-taking in the process of
interaction.
References:
Sacks, Harvey/Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1979): Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in
Conversation and Their Interaction, in: Psathas, George (ed.): Everyday Language. Studies in Ethnomethodol-
ogy, New York, 15-21.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1996): Some Practices for Referring to Persons in Talk-in-Interaction: A Partial Sketch of
a Systematics, in: Fox, Barbara (ed.): Studies in Anaphora, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 437-485.

948
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Practices of Using the Overt First-Person Singular Pronouns in


Japanese Conversation: The Case of Displaying Disaffiliative
Stance to Assertions

Panel contribution

Ms. Miyabi Ozawa 1


1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

The use of first-person singular pronouns in conversation is marked in Japanese, which is a predicate-oriented
language. The markedness is attributed to the structural and socio-cultural considerations. Therefore, the overt
forms occur for not only disambiguation (i.e. referential motivation) but also for other causes, including “frame-
setting” and “emotion” (Ono & Thompson, 2003). In addition, in “opinion-negotiation sequence”(Mori, 1999), the
utterance with overt form occurs in different social actions depending on the co-participants’ stance toward the
target they are discussing (Ozawa, 2022). One of them is to display the speaker’s (lack of) epistemic access
toward the target(s) as the evidence in account when they have different opinions (Ozawa, 2022).
Given these features of the use of the overt first-person singular pronouns in Japanese, this study investigates
how the overt forms are deployed in conveying disaffiliation to the stance displayed in the co-participant’s as-
sertion (Vatanen, et al., 2021). The targets of the assertion in this study include the ones that are accessible to
the co-participants, namely the third person, things, events or the speakers themselves. For this study, I analyze
face to face social interactions among two to four speakers of symmetrical relationships, taken from the Corpus
of Everyday Japanese Conversation curated by the National Institute for Japanese Language and the author’s
video-recorded collection.
The study shows that the utterances with overt forms are used to display either lack of epistemic access or epis-
temic primacy to the target, which implies that the overt first-person singular pronoun in Japanese interaction
is relevant to indexing epistemic authority (Heritage & Raymond, 2005). For example, the following excerpt
includes the first-person singular pronoun watashi at line 3, when the speaker displays disaffiliative stance to
the presupposition indicated in Taka’s utterance at line 1, which is that Maya is not always modest.
01 Taka: nani sono kenkyo na no
what that modest COP FP
‘Why are (you) so modest?’
02 Maya: hahaha
‘hahaha’
03 Maya: iya kenkyo desu yo watashi itsumo. desho?
no modest COP FP I always right
‘Well, I am always modest, right?’
As shown in this example, where Maya displays her first-hand knowledge about herself, the utterance with
overt form can be used to claim the epistemic authority toward the target in conveying disaffiliation in Japanese
conversations.
References
Heritage, J. & Raymond, G. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in
talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly, 68 (1), 15-38.
Mori, J. (1999). Negotiating agreement and disagreement in Japanese: Connective expressions and turn con-
struction. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Ono, T., & Thompson, S. A. (2003). Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku ‘l’: They’re not just pronouns. Cognitive Linguis-
tics, 14, 321-47.

949
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ozawa, M. (2022, November). The use of overt first-person singular pronouns in opinion-negotiation sequence
in Japanese conversation [Paper presentation]. The 25th Annual Meeting of the Pragmatics Society of Japan,
Kyoto, Japan.

Vatanen, A. et al. (2021), Cross-linguistic investigation of projection in overlapping agreements to assertions:


Stance-taking as a resource for projection. Discourse Process, 58 (2), 1-20.

950
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of non-canonical usage types of personal


pronouns in Lingála (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Panel contribution

Prof. Michael Meeuwis 1


1. Ghent University

On the basis of naturally occurring data culled from corpora, five non- (or less) canonical usage types of the
personal pronouns in the Bantu language Lingála (Meeuwis 2020) are discussed. The first pertains to the well-
known pro-drop parameter (Camacho 2013; Rohde 2019): Lingála being a null-subject language, speakers may
choose to explicate the pronoun in subject position to effectuate contrast and highlighting.
Second, the plural pronouns bísó (1PL) and bínó (2PL), although already denoting a plural referent, may be
inflected with the nominal pluralizing prefix ba- to convey a simulative (“associative”, “non-additive”) plural
(i.a. Daniel & Moravcsik 2013), i.e. to express that the referent of the pronoun is an example of the totality.
(1)
A�ling�í ba�bísó té
3SG.AN�like�PRS1 PL�1PL NEG
‘He doesn’t like people like us.’
Third, speakers can make use of the anticipatory (or “inclusory”) plural, a non-canonical strategy only recently
explored in Bantu studies (Gunnink 2022). A first or second singular pronoun in a conjoining construction may
be pluralized, although its referent remains singular, to convey an inclusory and comitative meaning for the
construction.
(2)
Bísó na Pierre to�kend�ékí na Ø�wenze
1PL and Pierre 1PL�go�PST1 to 9�market
‘I and Pierre went to the market together.’
Fourth is the use of plural personal pronouns as identical conjuncts. Each of the conjuncts is the same pronoun,
designating the same referent. This is used to stress that the event obtains exclusively among the referents.
(3)
ma�kambo óyo ba�yéb�í bangó na bangó
6�matter REL 3PL.AN�know�PRS1 3PL.AN and 3PL.AN
‘the things that only they know (among themselves)’
A fifth non-canonical usage type with pragmatic effects is that of personal pronouns co-referring with the subject
(but not reflexive) and appearing in a prepositional adjunct (with the preposition na ‘in’, ‘with’, ‘to’) which imme-
diately follows the verb. The prepositional adjunct is optional. Speakers use such constructions as a discourse
strategy to intensify the subject referent’s “involvement”, “agentivity”, or “accountability”, a phenomenon rem-
iniscent of but not coinciding with so-called non-argument datives (e.g. Horn 2008). In some cases this stresses
that the subject acts intentionally, consciously, purposefully, with determination, or accountably.
(4)

Ba�sómb�ákí na bangó mó�tuka


3PL.AN�buy�PST1 with 3PL.AN 3�car
‘They had taken the firm and accountable decision to buy a car’
Also, the construction can be used with inanimate subject referents (which by definition cannot be ascribed
intentionality), in which case it expresses a surprising situation, i.e. the modality of counterexpectationality.
(5)

951
18th International Pragmatics Conference

E�búk�án�í na yangó!
3SG.INAN�break�NEUT�PRS1 with 3SG.INAN
‘What a surprise, it is broken!’
The paper will offer more discourse-strategic examples than the abstract allows.
Camacho, J. 2013. Null Subjects. Cambridge: CUP.
Daniel, M. and E. Moravcsik 2013. ‘The associative plural.’ WALS, https://wals.info/chapter/36
Gunnink, H. 2022. ‘Inclusory conjunction in Bantu and beyond.’ Paper presented at The past and present of
Bantu languages, Ghent University. 1-2 September 2022.
Horn, L. 2008. ‘The landscape of non-argument datives.’ In Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics, pp.169-192.
Meeuwis, M. 2020. A grammatical overview of Lingála. München.
Rohde, H. 2019. ‘Pronouns.’ The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics, 10.1093/ox-
fordhb/9780198791768.013.21.

952
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of the 1st person plural in Catalan


parliamentary debate

Panel contribution

Dr. Neus Nogué 1


1. Universitat de Barcelona

As it is well known, in its basic meaning the grammatical category of 1st person plural (1PL) consists of two se-
mantic features: one feature refers to the speaker and the other, to a number of animate beings, mainly persons,
greater than one. The first one is what makes it a deictic expression —because of the contextual dependence it
entails— and at the same time what makes it 1st person; and the second one, what makes it plural.
Its special plural nature (plural of approximation in terms of Jespersen (1925)) is probably related to the adoption
of a wide range of uses that go beyond the sum of the speaker and some other animate entity, participant or not
in the communicative event; hence, beyond the distinction between inclusive and exclusive 1PL.
This contribution will begin by briefly presenting the eight non-prototypical uses of the 1PL that have been
identified in Catalan (Nogué-Serrano 2010), among which the six described by Helmbrecht (2015) for other lan-
guages. In these uses, the basic reference is modified and moved in several directions (Kerbrat-Orecchioni
(1980) calls them énalages; Levinson (1988), slippages; and Vanelli and Renzi (1995), forme “alternative” a quelle
“canoniche”): in some cases, the reference to the speaker is maintained; in others, some kind of recipient (ad-
dressed or unaddressed) is included in the reference, or even people not participating in the communicative
event.
Next, the occurrences of these non-prototypical usages of the 1PL found in a corpus of more than 600,000 words
of parliamentary debate (Parliament of Catalonia, 1932-38 and 1980-2020) will be analysed. The aim is to ob-
serve which strategies are preferred by the MPs, among those available in Catalan, and which pragmatic effects
associate with them; for example, the mitigation of disagreement with MPs from other parties or with the Gov-
ernment (Brown and Levinson (1978 [2 1987]); De Cock 2011). Thus, we will see to what extent a relationship
can be established between certain strategies and a specific communicative event, the parliamentary debate.
References
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson (1978 [2 1987]). Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cam-
bridge: CUP.
De Cock, Barbara (2011): Why we can be you: The use of 1st person plural forms with hearer reference in English
and Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 43:11, 2762-2775.
Helmbrecht, Johannes (2015). A typology of non-prototypical uses of personal pronouns: synchrony and di-
achrony. Journal of Pragmatics 88, 176-189.
Jespersen, Otto (1924 [1992]). The Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwill Ltd. (Chicago: UCP.)
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine (1980 [4 1999]). L’énonciation. De la subjectivité dans le langage. Paris: Armand
Colin.
Levinson, Stephen C. (1988). Putting linguistics on a proper footing: explorations in Goffman’s concepts of par-
ticipation. In: Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds.) (1988). Erving Goffman: exploring the interaction order.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 161-227.
Nogué-Serrano, Neus (2010). La primera persona del plural en català. Llengua & Literatura 21, 155-198.
Vanelli, Laura, and Lorenzo Renzi (1995). “La deissi”. In: Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi and Anna Cardinaletti
(eds.). (1995). Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. III. Bologna: il Mulino, 261-375.

953
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Whose voice, whose experience? The open use of Finnish


person constructions in tellings of personal experience

Panel contribution

Dr. Karita Suomalainen 1


1. Åbo Akademi University

This presentation investigates the open use of Finnish person forms—i.e., pronouns and verbal forms—in the
construction of intersubjective experiences in everyday conversations. By open use, I mean person forms that
are used in a deictically open way, so that they do not exclusively refer to a specific participant of the interaction
but, rather, are open to different referential interpretations in their context of use (see e.g., Helasvuo 2008;
Suomalainen & Varjo 2020). My data consist of face-to-face conversations drawn from the Arkisyn corpus of
conversational Finnish. My methodological framework is that of interactional linguistics.
The presentation focuses on the way that openly used Finnish person constructions modify the participation
framework in sequences that contain tellings of personal experiences. It has been shown that the open or
generalized use of person forms is especially typical in sequences in which speakers share their own experiences
with others (e.g., Auer & Stukenbrock 2018; Stirling & Manderson 2011; Suomalainen & Varjo 2020). In the
tellings of personal experience in my data, the speakers may use different person forms to create open reference;
these include, e.g., first person and second person forms as well as the Finnish passive or the so-called zero-
person. These person forms affect construal of the participation framework of the speech situation differently
(see Goffman 1981), thus suggesting varying participation roles for the recipients. However, what is common
for all of the open person forms is that by using them, the speakers may present their personal experiences as
more than individual, inviting the recipients to recognize and potentially affiliate with certain aspects of the
told experience.
My presentation will also consider the responses to the tellings of personal experience and examine what kinds
of person forms are employed in these responses. I will analyze the interactional work that the recipients’
referential choices do in creating a mutuality of experience in sequences with tellings of personal experience.
By using a certain person form in the responsive turn—accompanied by other turn constructional elements,
including multimodal ones—the recipients may demonstrate recognition of the kind of experience that was
told by the previous speaker and thus show affiliation. However, the recipients may also step back and distance
themselves from the telling, thus indicating that they do not share the presented point of view.
References
Auer, Peter – Stukenbrock, Anja 2018: When ‘you’ means ‘I’. The German 2nd Ps.Sg. pronoun du between gener-
icity and subjectivity. Open Linguistics 4, 280–309.
Goffman, Erving 1981: Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa 2008: Minä ja muut. Puhujaviitteisyys ja konteksti. Virittäjä 112(2), 186–206.
Stirling, Lesley – Manderson, Lenore 2011: About you. Empathy, objectivity and authority. Journal of Pragmatics
43, 1581–1602.
Suomalainen, Karita – Varjo, Mikael 2020: When personal is interpersonal. Organizing interaction with deicti-
cally open personal constructions in Finnish everyday conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 168, 98–118.

954
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“When you ….” Non-/Generic pronouns, conditional clauses,


and the role of particles in referential practices

Panel contribution

Prof. Monika Dannerer 1


1. University of Innsbruck

Personal pronouns are a very prominent means for indicating positioning (Imo 2016:164), as references show
perspectives of inclusion into a group (wir/‘we’), exclusion or distance (sie/‘they’) as well as generalizing com-
mentaries on behaviour.
The German pronoun man/‘one’ is usually described as generic (cf. e.g. Kern 2000, Imo/Ziegler 2019), “cutting” or
“veiling” the relationship towards the speaker (Stukenbrock 2015:84), but contrary to the English one it can also
be used in a non-generic way (Zifonun 2000). Additionally, the pronoun du (‘you’) can shift between genericity
and subjectivity, with a relation to the hearer but to the speaker as well (Auer/Stukenbrock 2018).
The paper deals with the question, which verbal means are used for to differentiate or even disambiguate be-
tween a personal and a generic use of the personal pronouns I, you, we and one in German.
The focus lies on conditional clauses which can serve to formulate specific but also general conditions, which
enhances the foregrounding of a generic interpretation.
Within this focus I will also consider the role of certain particles which can encourage a disambiguation (Dan-
nerer 2022): This holds for the modal particles einfach/’simply’ and halt/ ‘just’ as well as the adverbs jetzt/’now’,
heute/’today’ and heutzutage /’nowadays’ that might be used as particles, too (Diewald 2013).
The corpus for this paper stems from various subcorpora of the “Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch”, that
favour different communicative contexts.

References
Auer, Peter, and Anja Stukenbrock. 2018. “When ‚You‘ Means ‚I‘: The German 2Nd Ps.Sg. Pronoun Du between
Genericity and Subjectivity.” Open Linguistics 4(1): 280–309.
Dannerer, Monika (2022): “You need to have a feel for it”: The role of pronouns and particles within practices
of positioning in norm conflict situations. Journal of Pragmatics 201, 76-88
Diewald, Gabriele. 2013. “’Same same but different’ – Modal particles discourse markers and the art (and pur-
pose) of categorization.” In Discourse Markers and Modal Particles. Categorization and description, ed. by Lies-
beth Degand, Bert Cornillie, and Paola Pietrandrea, 19-45. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Imo, Woflgang. 2016. „Im Zweifel für den Zweifel: Praktiken des Zweifelns.“ In Sprachliche und kommunikative
Praktiken, ed. by Arnulf Deppermann, Helmuth Feilke, and Angelika Linke, 153-176. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.
Imo, Wolfgang, and Evelyn Ziegler. 2019. “Situierte Konstruktionen: das Indefinitpronomen man im Kontext
der Aushandlung von Einstellungen zu migrationsbedingter Mehrsprachigkeit.” In Konstruktionsgrammatik
und Mehrsprachigkeit, ed. by Sabine de Knop, and Jürgen Erfurt, 75-104. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachthe-
orie [OBST]. Duisburg: UVRR.
Kern, Friederike. 2000. Kultur(en) der Selbstdarstellung. Ost- und Westdeutsche in Bewerbungsgesprächen. Wies-
baden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag.
Stukenbrock, Anja. 2015. „Verlustnarrative im Spannungsfeld zwischen erzählter Situation und Erzählsitua-
tion: Linguistische Fallanalysen.“ In Narrative Bewältigung von Trauma und Verlust, ed. by Carl Eduard Scheidt,
and Achim Aurnhammer, 76-93. Stuttgart: Schattauer.
Zifonun, Gisela. 2000. ”‘Man lebt nur einmal.‘ Morphosyntax und Semantik des Pronomens man.“ Deutsche
Sprache 3: 232-253.

955
Research involving
languages you don’t
speak: Reflections on
‘spaces of linguistic
non-understanding’
(organized by Marie
Jacobs, Ella van Hest)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Challenges and Opportunities of Linguistically Diverse Data:


Government-mandated Contact Tracing as a Multilingual Tool
to Reach Linguistic Minorities

Panel contribution

Mr. Romeo De Timmerman 1 , Ms. Anne-Sophie Bafort 2 , Dr. Sofie Van de Geuchte 2 , Prof. Mieke
Vandenbroucke 2 , Prof. Stef Slembrouck 3
1. Ghent University, 2. University of Antwerp, 3. Linguistics, Ghent University

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of collecting and disseminating public health informa-
tion from/to lay audiences to combat global health crises. During the pandemic, reaching linguistic minorities
proved to be a global challenge, which necessitated the implementation of multilingual crisis communication
across the globe (Piller, Zhang & Li, 2020). In Flanders, Belgium, reaching linguistic minority groups was largely
dependent on government-mandated contact tracing through telephone interactions, which was initially put
in place to contain the level of outbreak, but was gradually tasked with relaying important safety measures
and other information related to the pandemic. In line with this development, Flemish contact tracing over the
telephone initially supported Belgium’s three national languages, viz. Dutch, French and German, as well as
English and French as lingua francas, but this list was gradually expanded with minority languages including,
among others, Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian and Polish. Within the context of a one-year COVID-19 FWO research
project, we recorded and analyzed telephone contact tracing conversations in Dutch, English, French, Turkish
and Arabic. This list ranges from languages that the researchers are highly proficient in, to languages that they
have no knowledge of. In this paper, we would like to reflect on some of the challenges and opportunities that
accompany collecting and analyzing such a linguistically diverse dataset. More specifically, we want to consider
the ethical implications of informed consent which is mediated in multiple languages by the institutional agent
rather than the researcher, the methodological and heuristic challenges associated with transcribing, translat-
ing and analyzing linguistically diverse data in spaces of linguistic non-understanding (van Hest & Jacobs, 2022),
while underlining the epistemological value and affordances of linguistically diverse data.

957
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Co-constructing meaning through semi-understanding:


Conducting the sociolinguistic interview in an (un)known
language

Panel contribution

Dr. Carol Ready 1


1. Oklahoma State University

In my research I examine the linguistic practices of Moroccans in Spain, many of whom speak Moroccan Arabic
as well as Modern Standard Arabic, Tamazight, French, English and Spanish at varying levels of proficiency.
As part of my research, I conducted a 10-month linguistic ethnography carried out in the summer of 2017 and
the academic year of 2018 and 2019. I was able to rely on my native English and near-native Spanish language
skills for my research, but it was also necessary to use Modern Standard Arabic and even Moroccan Arabic
in my sociolinguistic interviews. I possess limited working knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic and even
more limited knowledge of Moroccan Arabic. In this presentation I will discuss one instance of conducting a
sociolinguistic interview in Moroccan Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. I conduct a discursive analysis of the
interaction and linguistic resources utilized in this 60-minute interview to demonstrate how, regardless of the
knowledge of the language being spoken by the speakers, the sociolinguistic interview remains a site of social
practice in which knowledge is co-constructed in rich and meaningful ways (see Talmy 2010). In addition, I argue
that such analysis demonstrates the value of viewing the sociolinguistic interview as a site for investigation (see
Talmy, 2011). Lastly, I aim to provide tools for further sociolinguistic research in which the researcher has
limited proficiency in the language(s) used and/or preferred by participants.
Resources
Talmy, S. (2011). The interview as collaborative achievement: Interaction, identity, and ideology in a speech
event. Applied Linguistics. 32 (1), 25-42.
Talmy, S. (2010). Interviews in qualitative Applied Linguistics. Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics. 30, 128-148.

958
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Cultivating capabilities and coping: accepting moments of


communicative opacity in multilingual encounters

Panel contribution

Dr. Emma Brooks 1


1. Birkbeck college, London

While current preoccupations with (super)diverse populations rest on the presupposition that such demograph-
ics are something new (Vertovec, 2007; Pavlenko, 2016), there is no doubt that researching in linguistically,
culturally and ethnically heterogenous communities may present challenges for the most experienced of re-
searchers, even when highly prepared with a linguistically representative team, attune to situational sensitivi-
ties (Andrews, Holmes, Fay & Dawson, 2019). This is especially true in the context of ethnographic work, where
the dynamism and unpredictability of a research setting can make it difficult to anticipate, and prepare for, the
languages spoken by potential participants.
Building on experience gathered during my doctoral journey, exploring multilingual practices in antenatal con-
sultations, this paper reflects upon how a naïve understanding of ‘multiple cultural competence’ (Vertovec,
2009) morphed into a recognition of my own linguistic shortcomings, when interaction extended beyond the
scope of my limited repertoire. Appointments routinely featured unfamiliar languages which restricted the
immediacy of inference. In turn, discomfort with my ‘linguistic incompetence’ (Phipps, 2013) was frequently
exacerbated by ongoing processes of analysis, when the circularity of transcription, translation, clarification
and (re)transcription, complexified what could be understood as ‘interpretation’ and contributed additional
layers to possible (mis)representation.
On the other hand, such experiences allowed me to accept the consulting room as a ‘third’ space (Bhabha, 1990)
of potential unknowability, which could give rise to new cultural articulations and translation of difference. A
recognition of linguistic non-understanding also offered the opportunity to take a capabilities approach and a
stance which enabled me to focus more keenly on what I was able to do (Phipps, 2013). Attention was drawn
to the corporeal and prosodic aspects of relationality demonstrated by health care professionals, and which
appeared key to enhance women’s experience of antenatal care. In this talk I hope to share my experience
of vulnerabilities which emerge during ethnographic fieldwork and data analysis, highlighting practical and
ethical considerations, as well as the advantages to be gained by open conversations about personal limitations.
References
Andrews, J., Holmes, P., Fay, R & S. Dawson. (2019). Researching multilingually in applied linguistics in McKinley,
J., & Rose, H (Eds) (2019) The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, Taylor & Francis
Group
Bhabha, H.K. (1990). Interview with Homi Bhabha: The Third Space. In Rutherford, J (ed). Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference. Lawrence & Wishart, pp 207-221.
Pavlenko, A. (2016). ‘Superdiversity and why it isn’t: Reflections on terminological innovation and academic
branding’, in Schmenk, B., Bredibach, S. and Küster, L Sloganizations in Language Education Discourse. Multi-
lingual Matters.
Phillips, A. (2013). Linguistic incompetence: Giving an account of researching multilingually. International
Journal of Applied Linguistics. Vol 23: 3
Vertovec, S. (2007). ‘Super-diversity and its implications’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6), pp.1024–1054.
Vertovec, S. (2009). ‘Cosmopolitanism in attitude, practice and competence’. MMG Working Paper (09-08).

959
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multilingualism in institutional settings:


Linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork and spaces of linguistic
non-understanding

Panel contribution

Ms. Ella van Hest 1 , Dr. Marie Jacobs 1


1. Ghent University

In the age of superdiversity, linguistic ethnographers interested in institutional settings are increasingly fo-
cusing on multilingual interactions, and therefore, more likely to be confronted with ‘spaces of linguistic non-
understanding’ (spaces of LNU) throughout their research process.
This tendency is exhibited in both our research projects. Author 1’s linguistic-ethnographic research zooms in
on multilingual interactions that take place at an abortion clinic. Her research focus on language barriers is
particularly relevant because scholarship has argued that globalisation results in an increasingly linguistically
diverse clientele in most social service settings. Author 2’s ethnographic inquiry into asylum law firms, simi-
larly, took into account the inevitably multilingual nature of its pursuit. As asylum institutions deal with the
consequences of increased transnational mobility, her research project had to take into the account the multi-
lingual intricacies of lawyer-client communication. The distribution of spaces of LNU was quite similar in both
research settings: they typically opened up when a client and a third person (mostly an interpreter or a com-
panion) interacted in a language we as researchers had no command of. Our panel contribution aims to cast a
backward glance into all stages of our investigative trajectory (fieldwork, data processing, analysis and beyond)
to discuss how spaces of LNU influenced our institutional ethnographies.
In doing so, we reflect on how we relied on collaboration with external translators who transcribed and trans-
lated the parts of the audio-recordings incomprehensible to us. Concerned about the inevitably filtering role of
translation practices, we considered, designed and employed strategies aimed at minimising such risks. Prac-
tices such as tracing omissions by replaying audio-recordings and consulting multilingual colleagues, provided
us with a certain degree of analytical control in the interpretative endeavour of making sense of our institu-
tional fieldwork settings. Interestingly, the spaces of LNU in our respective data sets also generated a form of
emic insight. Just like the researcher, the interactants in multilingual abortion or asylum encounters do not
understand all stretches of talk as they unfold throughout the interaction. This implies a shared experience
between the interactant and the observer with similar linguistic repertoires (in our case the service provider)
who might both fall victim to illusions of (mis)understanding during a consultation. This fieldwork insight into
the insider perspective of the service provider forms an analytical added value post-translation, i.e. when the
spaces of LNU have been filled.
To conclude, we want to argue that reflexivity about the multilingual research process and the negotiation of
spaces of LNU are an added value–and maybe even a necessity–for linguistic-ethnographers keen on gaining
insight into linguistically diverse settings.
van Hest, E., & Jacobs, M. (2022). Spaces of linguistic non-understanding in linguistic ethnographic research:
Analytical pitfalls and opportunities. In M. Victoria (Ed.), 14-38. Researching Transculturally: Methodological
Issues and Challenges. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

960
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The meaning making process in an ethnographic family


research in the context of flight and Asylum

Panel contribution

Dr. Jiayin Li-Gottwald 1


1. University of Kassel

Taking an ethnographic approach and based on in-depth home visits in several German cities, the study Changes
and Dynamics of Family Generational Relationships in the Context of Flight and Asylum(DyFam)[1] reveals how
family structures, family relationships and child-upbringing practices are (re)established, organised and nego-
tiated in the context of refuge and asylum in Germany (Manuela et al. 2019). Despite the non-linguistic focus
of DyFam, as a post-doc with sociolinguistic background in the project, I would like to present my reflections
during my 18-month stint on the fieldwork, in particular the situations where I encountered ‘spaces of linguistic
non-understanding’ (van Hest, & Jacobs in press).
Drawing on Silverstein’s (1985) notion of ‘the total linguistic fact’ (p. 220), I view the forming of space in the
research setting as the total experience of all participants and resources in the context of the particular place
and time (see Li-Gottwald, forthcoming). Building upon this concept, I begin with a review of the experience
of two visits when I was accompanied by a student assistant as an interpreter, and reflect on the challenges
of the linguistic and human communication I encountered. I then present a guide to fieldwork in which I was
the sole research visitor to the refugee families and reveal the non-comprehensible space with which I was
confronted. Thereafter, I reveal the multilingual space in which family members interact with each other
through a linguistic resource that is beyond my linguistic repertoire and reflect on how I make sense of it
via other linguistic resources from a broad linguistic landscape approach (Shohamy 2015, Canagarajah 2017;
Pennycook 2019). Finally I present some of the data I have collected based on a sensory ethnographic approach
(Pink 2015) in which language is not the mere focus and reveal my own interpretations on the research space
repertoire .

[1] DyFam project (2020-2023) is led by Professor Manuela Westphal at University of Kassel in Germany and
founded by German Research Foundation

References:
Canagarajah, S. (2017). Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: expanding the paradigm beyond structural-
ist orientations. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 31-54.
Li-Gottwald, J. (forthcoming). The forming of space: Parents’ social assemblages in a Chinese complementary
school in Germany. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
Pennycook, A. (2019). Linguistic landscapes and semiotic assemblages. In M. Pütz & N. Mundt (Eds.), Expanding
the Linguistic Landscape: Linguistic Diversity, Multimodality and the Use of Space as a Semiotic Resource (pp.
75-88). Multilingual Matters
Silverstein, M. (1985). Language and the culture of gender. In E. Mertz & R. Parment (Eds.), Semiotic Mediation
(pp. 219-259): Academic Press.
Van Hest, E., & Jacobs, M. (2022). Spaces of linguistic non-understanding in linguistic ethnographic research:
Analytical pitfalls and opportunities. In M. Victoria (Ed.), Researching Transculturally: Methodological Issues
and Challenges. Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Westphal, M. Motzek-Öz, S. Aden, S. (2019): “Transnational doing family in kontext von Fluchtmigration. Con-
tours of a research approach, ” in: Behrensen / Westphal (ed). Fluchtmigrationsforschung im Aufbruch: Method-
ologische und methodische Reflexionen, Springer, pp.251-272

961
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Triangulating multilingualism: incorporating ‘spaces of


linguistic non-understanding’ through the integration of
several perspectives

Panel contribution

Dr. Samantha Goodchild 1 , Dr. Miriam Weidl 2


1. University of Galway, 2. University of Vienna

In this presentation, we describe a systematic method to study multilingual settings, collecting and analysing in-
depth data, where researchers are likely to encounter ‘spaces of linguistic non-understanding’. In investigating
a multilingual and multicultural world, distinct advantages in data collection and analysis derive from fluid
research agendas, open predictions and reflecting on one’s own expectations of the research and its outcome.
Furthermore, as qualitative researchers aligning with non-positivist approaches, we embrace the position of
being a “non-knower” (Holsapple 2022) as a prerequisite for future understanding.
We take this to mean that as researchers we only have a partial interpretation of any given event we are study-
ing. To mitigate this we incorporate others’ perspectives into the analysis of the multilingual settings in question.
Using data from our ethnographic based studies on fluid multilingual language use in Senegal we will present
examples of everyday language use backed by thick descriptions of the speakers’ social realities, connected to
contexts and spaces. We will show how by integrating the perspectives of repertoire users and observers in a
triangulated fashion (Weidl & Goodchild submitted), we arrived at analyses that go beyond a priori assump-
tions about named languages. When the repertoire user and communicative event are the starting point for
analysis, translanguaging is a more appropriate way of analysing multilingual linguistic practices (Goodchild &
Weidl 2019).
Our understanding is that during multilingual and fluid translanguaging conversations involving several
(unequally-documented) languages (Li Wei 2018), but also lects, styles and registers, all interlocutors can en-
counter situations in which some kind of (linguistic) non-understanding occurs and needs to be compensated.
Consequently, western(-ised) scientific researchers have to move away from claiming an omniscient and un-
touchable position as being capable of capturing all contextualised linguistic, semiotic and semantic properties
of social interactions and accurately analysing them (e.g. Ndhlovu & Makalela 2021). In this talk we critically
self-reflect on the challenges of fieldwork using multi-perspective analysis showing how open approaches are
used to maintain high ethical standards, allow for and compensate for various kinds of non-understanding.
Using our method resulted in rich, multilayered analyses and varied understandings, which also represent the
views on language use of non-linguists, whose fluid practices and perspectives might go beyond the boundaries
of named languages.
References
Goodchild, Samantha & Miriam Weidl. 2019. Translanguaging practices in the Casamance, Senegal: Similar but
different: two case studies. In Ari Sherris & Elisabetta Adami (eds.), Making signs, translanguaging ethnogra-
phies: Exploring urban, rural and educational spaces, 133–151. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Holsapple, Christiana. 2022. Speaking “no language?”: reflections on (il)legitimate multilingualism from field-
work in Gagauzia. In Prue Holmes, Judith Reynolds & Sara Ganassin (eds.), The politics of researching multilin-
gually (Researching Multilingually 6), 327–344. Bristol ; Jackson: Multilingual Matters.
Li Wei. 2018. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1), 9–30.
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039
Ndhlovu, Finex & Leketi Makalela. 2021. Decolonising multilingualism in Africa. Recentering silenced voices
from the Global South. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Weidl, Miriam & Samantha Goodchild. Submitted. Multilingualism triangulated: perspectives & analysis. A

962
18th International Pragmatics Conference

new method for researching multilingual contexts. Multilingual Margins.

963
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“It’s a bit difficult to understand because it isn’t native


Spanish”: Silencing, voicing and adjusting linguistic
contributions in multilingual courtroom encounters

Panel contribution

Dr. Marta Kirilova 1 , Prof. Martha Karrebæk 1


1. University of Copenhagen

Although monolingual and monoglottal ideologies characterize many societies, the everyday life of key societal
institutions is often multilingual. Interpreters mediate between the institutional representatives who speak a
societally dominant language and laypersons whose linguistic repertoires may deviate in many ways from what
is preferred and expected. This is the case in medical encounters, in schools, at municipal offices, and in court.
As socially oriented linguists interested in linguistic diversity, we enter different societally important settings to
see how language is performed, understood, oriented to, and to what extent and how linguistic diversity char-
acterizes the everyday life– given institutional expectations, issues of power, and language ideologies. Although
as researchers we are not limited by institutional ideologies or regulations in terms of language choice, we often
encounter and do research in settings where there are languages, we do not speak, or in which our competence
is limited. In such cases, we have something in common with the institutional representatives who may not
understand the languages spoken around them. Yet, we cannot do justice to our data, to the participants, and to
our research questions without both making an effort to achieve understanding and acknowledging the limits
to our competence.
In this presentation, we draw on audio-recorded data from a sociolinguistic project on interpreter-mediated
courtroom encounters in Denmark. We will first give a practical account of the spaces of cultural, institutional
and linguistic non-understanding (van Hest & Jacobs, in press) we encountered while collecting the data. We
will then focus on two examples – one of an alleged non-native speaker of Spanish, the other of two speakers
of Farsi. The first example illustrates a number of dilemmas in terms of how to understand, represent (in e.g.
transcription), and analyze the data, as the register of Spanish used by the accused was far from standard Span-
ish. The second example illustrates a fundamental discrepancy in the understanding of the interpreter’s role
and it raises ethical questions in terms of communicating research outcomes to institutional representatives.
When we received the translations, we realized that the Farsi interpreter was guiding the two accused in how
to align their stories for the defense lawyer.
There exists very little research based on recordings of multilingual courtroom interaction in Denmark, but we
cannot have an informed discussion about the ideals and challenges of this type of social encounter without
engaging academically with it. Our project has enabled the beginning of this type of conversation. At the same
time, we are aware of a number of pitfalls and inherent difficulties as we are not competent in all the languages
we have met during our research.

964
Reshaping interaction in
higher/tertiary education
under the challenges of
inclusion (organized by
Christiane Hohenstein,
Magdalene Lévy-Tödter,
Agnieszka Sowińska,
Bettina M. Bock)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Accessibility and Inclusion? Reshaping academic


communication using visual-gestural modality

Panel contribution

Prof. Christiane Hohenstein 1 , Ms. Larysa Zavgorodnia 1


1. ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics

For deaf and hard-of-hearing students (DHH students), linguistic challenges in Higher and Tertiary Education
(HTE) are notorious (Hohenstein et al., 2018, Hohenstein & Zavgorodnia, 2021). Their access to the spoken and
written standard language is mediated, never immediate. Both types of students need visual cues or visual-
gestural modality (lip reading, gestures, sign language, visualizations).
In academic communication, incomplete access to the standard language poses a problem. In addition, vari-
ous academic settings, e.g., lectures, group interaction, and autonomous study tasks, set differential challenges
for perception, understanding, and interaction. Since 2020, in the wake of rapid digital transformation in HTE,
accessibility evolves around big data, machine learning, and adaptive learning developments. We argue that ac-
cessibility is not enough to bring about inclusion. This raises the question of how digital opportunities for inclu-
sion can reshape academic communication in an inclusive manner and complement a predominantly technical
pragmatism.
Using a qualitative case study approach, video observation data from two DHH students were collected in vari-
ous academic settings. They were complemented by retrospective interviews and eye-tracking data in order to
explore how knowledge-building and processes of understanding are helped by speech-to-text translation, SL
interpreting and digital media presentation of academic content. Content-based and spoken discourse analysis,
fine-grained functional-pragmatic analyses of selected video passages, and imaging techniques were used. Find-
ings reveal that combinations of visual-gestural modality, e.g., sign language interpreting, and spoken-language-
based modality, e.g., speech-to-text interpreting, lip-reading and various interactive forms of learning may pro-
vide accessible and inclusive academic communication. However, accessibility in terms of practical access to
learning spaces, language-based resources, applications and interactions does not necessarily match inclusion.
We will highlight the linguistic and pragmatic processes that can make access and inclusion happen in academic
communication. Using multimodal transcripts from lecture inputs and interactive group work in an academic
environment that strives for accessibility and inclusion, we will discuss where boundaries for inclusion still
exist. In the plenary, we would like to discuss how Universal Design for Learning (UDL 2022) could be used to
reduce specifically linguistic and pragmatic boundaries for inclusion in academic communication.
References:
CAST (2022). UDL in Higher Ed. Wakefield, MA. http://udloncampus.cast.org/page/udl_landing
Hohenstein, Christiane/ Zavgorodnia, Larysa/ Näf, Manuela/ Bouillon, Pierrette/ Rodríguez Vázquez, Silvia &
Strasly, Irène (2018). “Status quo of inclusive access to higher education. A focus on deaf and hearing-impaired
individuals in German-speaking Switzerland”. In Proceedings of the Second Barrier-Free Communication Con-
ference 2018, Geneva, 9-10 November 2018 (pp. 47–50). Geneva, Switzerland: University of Geneva.
Hohenstein, Christiane & Zavgorodnia, Larysa (2021). “The Role of Sign Language in Tertiary Education”. In
Susanne J. Jekat, Steffen Puhl, Luisa Carrer, and Alexa Lintner, eds., Proceedings of the 3rd Swiss Conference on
Barrier-free Communication (BfC2020). Winterthur (online), June 29–July 4, 2020. Winterthur: ZHAW Zurich
University of Applied Sciences. DOI: 10.21256/zhaw-3001.
Schubert, Klaus (2016). “Barriereabbau durch optimierte Kommunikationsmittel: Versuch einer Systema-
tisierung.” In Nathalie Mälzer, ed.,Barrierefreie Kommunikation – Perspektiven aus Theorie und Praxis. (pp.
15–33). Berlin: Frank & Timme.
UNESCO (2022). Education. Inclusive education. German Commission for UNESCO. Federal Foreign Office.

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https://www.unesco.de/en/education/inclusive-education

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Barriers and facilitators to inclusive communication as


revealed by students with invisible disabilities

Panel contribution

Dr. Agnieszka Sowinska 1


1. Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland (Department of Experimental Linguistics) & Universidad Católica del Norte,
Antofagasta, Chile (School of English)

Increasingly more and more universities worldwide are facing an enormous challenge to provide equitable
higher education. It is especially relevant and timely to implement support services which would cater for di-
verse students‘ needs. Yet, there is a paucity of research which explores students’ experience of inclusion in
higher education, in particular with reference to communication in a university setting. Universities seek to
eliminate any form of discrimination based on disability, and seek to develop concepts associated with inclusion,
even though with different degrees of commitment. While referring to disabilities, the UN Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) underscores the interaction between a person’s long-term impairment
and the environmental and attitudinal barriers that may prevent them from their full participation in society
on an equal basis with others, rather than the condition itself. The objective of this qualitative study is to iden-
tify the barriers and facilitators to inclusive communication in a tertiary education setting. Data comes from
semi-structured interviews conducted with university students, who volunteered to participate in the study and
who self-identified as having an invisible disability. The interviews are first analysed drawing on the thematic
analysis proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006) to identify and organize the most salient themes. Next, students‘
narratives are extracted and analysed in order to gain insight into the personal experiences of the students.
The results of this study may contribute to the development of strategies to decrease barriers and increase the
inclusion of disabled individuals in higher education.

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Interactions of people with and without disabilities in


participatory research groups

Panel contribution

Prof. Bettina M. Bock 1


1. University of Cologne

A central factor of participatory research processes, which has nevertheless hardly been analysed so far, are
the interactions between the academic and non-academic researchers in the course of the work and research
process. Only if it is possible for all researchers to participate appropriately in these interactions and to get
involved, participatory research can be considered successful.
We analysed audio- and videotaped interactions from team meetings in participatory research groups. The
participatory teams are highly heterogeneous and consist of people with and without disabilities, including in-
tellectual disability, cognitive impairments, motoric, visual and speech impairment. This heterogeneity causes
different barriers of interaction. Nevertheless, the presentation does not focus on the barriers but on how
obstacles in interaction are handled by the participants and how impaired actors function as competent par-
ticipants. In a conversation analytical sense, participation is understood as „actions demonstrating forms of
involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk“ (Goodwin/Goodwin 2004: 222) and thus
considers verbal and nonverbal multimodal communication resources.
The presentation wants to discuss two phenomena which turned out to be typical for the recorded team meet-
ings: 1. speaking-for-others as a means of securing mutual understanding. It emerges in several constellations
involving different actors in different roles (speaking for so. vs. being the one whose utterance is repeated
or paraphrased for third parties), and generally deals with the problem of being potentially face-threatening,
especially in the case of other-initiated speaking-for-others. 2. (supposed) digressions by actors and its role for
the progression of interaction. Here, we focus on how (expected) digressions contribute to the course of action,
and how participants constitute digressions by their actions.
In our closing reflections we want to discuss based on the empirical analyses in what way interactions on such
highly heterogeneous contexts are ‚atypical‘ or in the end use ‚common‘ patterns of interaction and cause ‚com-
mon‘ interactional problems.
References:
Callus, A.-M. (2021): Inclusive research. Doing participatory and emancipatory research with people with in-
tellectual disabilities. In: M. H. Rioux/J. Viera, A. Buettgen/E. Zubrow (Eds.): Handbook of Disability: Critical
thought and social change in a globalizing world. Singapore: Springer, 1-15.

Goodwin, C./Goodwin, M. H.: Participation. In: Duranti, A. (Eds.): A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology,
222–244.
Hitzler, S. (2013): Recipient Design in institutioneller Mehrparteieninteraktion. In: Gesprächsforschung Online
14 (2013), 110-132.

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Interdiscursive positioning of the sign language interpreter in


the educational translation process

Panel contribution

Dr. Priscila Regina Gonçalves de Melo Giamlourenço 1


1. Federal University of São Carlos

Sign language interpreters mediates inclusive communication for deaf students in higher education, and plural
knowledge is required for this performance. As an active interlocutor, continuous training is necessary due
to the complexity of (inclusive) communication in an higher education context (Lacerda, 2010). Their training
can be constructed through community, systematic and in-service modalities. All combined, these can increase
training experiences, which, in turn, can be expanded through distance learning (Giamlourenço, 2018).
Considering the internationalization of educational policies and the relevance of debates on the professionaliza-
tion of education professionals (Akkari, 2011), the production of international comparative studies could enable
the knowledge construction and network collaboration in a public space for reflection and discussion (Nóvoa,
2017). The implementation of multilingual, open, and free distance courses with open educational resources
provides opportunities to that end (Taziri & Akkari, 2022).
In Brazil, we investigated training needs of sign language interpreters working in federal higher education
institutions. Taking an interactionist perspective (Mizukami, 1986), we used a research-intervention approach
with participants of a continuing distance education course in Portuguese that we planned, using narratives
from written discussion forums as data.
As a method of analysis, we developed the Process of Articulation of Element, which included the following steps:
1) Successive reading of the material; 2) Elaboration of a textual scheme; 3) Identification of elements (singular,
responsive, complementary, and plural); 4) Articulation of plural elements and synthesis. This process was de-
veloped considering that interaction plays a fundamental role in the construction of the knowledge in mediated
processes, including those mediated by information and communication technology (Costa, 2014; Nóvoa, 2009).
We found three categories that we named dimensions of training needs, namely specific, educational, and pro-
fessional, each consisting of knowledge that is interrelated and interdependent.
Considering these findings, the research question of the present paper is how sign language interpreter could
develop an interdiscursive positioning in the educational translation process. In this context, this professional
can be understood as an educational agent whose performance can have linguistic, technical, political, institu-
tional, and pedagogical implications for practice and research.
References
Akkari, A. (2011). Internacionalização das políticas educacionais: transformações e desafios. Petrópolis: Vozes.
Costa, I. M. (2013). Concepções de Mediação pedagógica: a análise de conteúdo a partir da Biblioteca Digital
Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações BDTD (2000-2010). [Doctoral Dissertation, Universidade Federal da Paraíba].,
https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/handle/tede/4767?locale=pt_BR
Giamlourenço, P.R.G.M. (2018). Tradutor e Intérprete de Libras: Construção da formação profissional. [Disser-
tação de Mestrado, Universidade Federal de São Carlos]
https://repositorio.ufscar.br/handle/ufscar/10390
Lacerda, C. B. F. (2010). Tradutores e intérpretes de Língua Brasileira de Sinais: for-
mação e atuação nos espaços educacionais inclusivos. Cadernos de Educação, (36), 133-153.
https://periodicos.ufpel.edu.br/ojs2/index.php/caduc/article/view/1604
Mizukami, M. G. N. (1986). Ensino: As abordagens do processo. São Paulo: EPU.
Nóvoa, A. (2017). Ilusões e desilusões da educação comparada: Política e conhecimento. Educação, Sociedade E
Culturas, (51), 13–31. https://doi.org/10.34626/esc.vi51.82.

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Taziri, A. B., & Akkari, A. (2022). La contribution des ressources educatives ouvertes a l’amelioration de
l’education superieure dans les pays du sud: cas de la tunisie. Revista De Gestão E Avaliação Educacional, 11(20),
e70432, p. 1–18. https://doi.org/10.5902/2318133870432

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Is it a special communication in higher education? Mutual


intentions and reciprocity among interlocutors with different
neurotypes

Panel contribution

Dr. Lívia Ivaskó 1 , Ms. Regina Mezőlaki 2


1. associate professor, 2. PhD student

Provisions in recognition of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons enact that inclusion and inclusive
communication should be accessible for persons in tertiary education (UNESCO, 1998; Fazekas, 2019).
Neurodiverse students with communicative barriers reported several concerns about their well-being and their
personal, social, and academic life in relation to educational experiences (Clouder et al., 2020).
According to the literature, there are some explicitly declared barriers in social interaction between autistic
adults requiring support (level 1) and non-autistic adults (APA, 2013).
Social difficulties are linked to the autism spectrum, though communicative barriers must depend on both inter-
locutors due to the mutual and reciprocal nature of interactions. The guarantee of barrier-free communication
could be explained as a social interaction where various perspectives and accepted boundaries are considered
(Mezőlaki & Ivaskó, 2021).
Does mutual misunderstanding (Williams, Wharton & Jagoe, 2021) occur because of linguistic impairments or
because of the different perspectives of the interlocutors?
Milton (2012) claimed in the account of the double empathy problem, that similar minds seem to understand
each other easily, while Below, Spaeth, and Horlin (2021) introduce the concept of an attitude-behaviour gap,
meaning that one’s knowledge about autism and diversity is not always implemented into their behaviour in
university environment.
What are the core and most relevant features of inclusive communication?
Our aim with this presentation is to analyze the explanatory effort of the referred theories and the adaptabil-
ity of their conceptions to inclusive communication in tertiary education in a cognitive pragmatic framework
(Sperber & Wilson, 1995). The study is conducted mostly on examples from semi-structured interviews from
Hungarian autistic subjects.
Our findings would hopefully contribute to exploring the feasibility of applying theoretical frameworks to prac-
tice.
References:
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.)
Below, R., Spaeth, E., & Horlin, C. (2021). Autism in Higher Education: dissonance between educators’ perceived
knowledge and reported teaching behaviour, International Journal of Inclusive Education.
Clouder, L., Karakus, M., Cinotti, A. et al. Neurodiversity in higher education: a narrative synthesis. High Educ
80, 757–778 (2020).
Fazekas, Á. S. (2019). The journey towards Universal Design in the Teaching and Learning Environment in Hun-
garian Higher Education. THE AHEAD JOURNAL No. 9 A Review of Inclusive Education & Employment Practices.
Dublin: AHEAD Educational Press ISSN 2009-8286
Mezőlaki, R., & Ivaskó, L. (2021). Accepted boundaries in barrier-free communication between people living with
and without autism. Panel presentation at 17th International Pragmatics Conference. Winterthur. 27 June – 2
July 2021.
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the double empathy problem. Disabil. Soc. 27, 883–887.
doi: 10.1080/09687599.2012.7 10008
Sperber, D. , & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

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UNESCO (1998). World Conference on Higher Education. Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century Vision and
Action. Volume 1. Final Report. Paris: UNESCO.
Williams, G. L., Wharton, T., & Jagoe, C. (2021). Mutual (Mis)understanding: Reframing Autistic Pragmatic “Im-
pairments” Using Relevance Theory. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 616664.

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Language anxiety as a barrier to academic participation

Panel contribution

Ms. Esther Jahns 1 , Dr. Oliver Bunk 2


1. Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

In this paper, we investigate language anxiety as a factor hindering students from oral participation in univer-
sity classes and explore reasons that feed into it.
Language anxiety has been researched in various linguistic disciplines, e.g., foreign language learning (Hor-
witz 2001), and within the context of multilingualism (Sevinç and Dewaele 2018). These contributions highlight
that formal communicative situations foster language anxiety. Therefore, the academic context is an interest-
ing and important research site for language anxiety as it offers a large range of highly formal communicative
situations in a place where participation of students with different backgrounds should be ensured. We under-
stand participation not only as having access to university education, but as active participation in academic
communication.
Academic language can be conceptualized as distinctive registers that have to be acquired by students. This
acquisition is thus the prerequisite to participate, i.e., to make one’s voice heard and contribute to the process
of knowledge production. However, it is seldom made explicit what linguistic competences are expected and
that their acquisition is a process. This might trigger feelings of anxiety in the classroom, that might be further
boosted by several factors.
One of these factors is the monolingual habitus, which transpires particularly in the educational sector (Wiese et
al. 2020) and might lead to linguicism (Dirim et al. 2018). The lived experience and perception of not belonging
due to one’s linguistic repertoire (Busch 2021) is, however, also relevant for monolingual speakers. Especially
for first academics the perception of mastering the academic register to a lesser extent compared with others
might intensify the feeling of not-belonging and lead to silence (Wagner 2012). We argue that in comparison
to other types of language anxiety, it is not necessarily the pressure to master several named languages that
might lead to anxiety, but that it can arise also concerning a distinct register or language use that is supported
by prevailing language ideologies.
We present data from a focus group discussion and from individual semi-structured interviews with students
from German universities with different linguistic and social backgrounds. The analysis of the interviews is in-
spired by qualitative methods like Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2010). This means that even though we hypoth-
esize that monoglossic ideologies and a non-academic background contribute to an academic language anxiety,
the data is coded in order to discover (other) emergent categories that trigger anxiety and prevent inclusion.
Busch, B., 2021, Mehrsprachigkeit. Wien: Facultas.
Charmaz, K., 2010, Constructing grounded theory. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Dirim, İ., Köck, J. and Springsits, B. (eds), 2018, Dil Irkçılığı–Linguizismus–Linguicism. Sprache (n) und Diskrim-
inierung in (Hoch-) Schule und Gesellschaft.
Horwitz, E. K., 2001, Language anxiety and achievement. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics(21), 112–126.
Sevinç, Y. and Dewaele, J.-M., 2018, Heritage language anxiety and majority language anxiety among Turkish
immigrants in the Netherlands. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(2), 159–179.
Wagner, W., 2012, Uni-Angst und Uni-Bluff heute. Wie studieren und sich nicht verlieren. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag.
Wiese, H., Sennema, A. and Tracy, R., 2020, Deutschpflicht auf dem Schulhof? Warum wir Mehrsprachigkiet
brauchen. Berlin: Dudenverlag.

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Multimodal and multisensory interactions in the orientation


and mobility training sessions as the intersection of the
visual-sensory and mobility impairment: With focus on
instructors’ use of existence verbs and verbs of perception

Panel contribution

Prof. Rui Sakaida 1 , Prof. Hiro Yuki Nisisawa 2 , Prof. Mitsuhiro Okada 3 , Prof. Yasusuke Minami 3
1. Future University Hakodate, 2. Tokiwa University, 3. Seijo University

This paper observes, analyses and describes the interaction between an instructor and a student in the orien-
tation and mobility (O&M) training sessions for the visually impaired using the EMCA methodology.
The O&M session is where sensory and mobility impairments intersect.
In the interaction between the visually impaired and the O&M specialist there is an asymmetrical and atypical
interaction in a multimodal and multisensory sense.
This paper investigates the interaction, focusing on the use of existence verbs and verbs of perception by the
specialist.
The original data are in Japanese.
There are four existential verb constructions: 1) (A) is X., 2) There/Here is X or X exists. and, although not
strictly an existential verb, 3) (When) X comes out. In Japanese, sentences without a subject such as (A) is X. are
frequently used.
The construction with perceptual verbs is 4) X can be seen. This is also a sentence without a subject as the agent
in the original Japanese.
1) differs from the others in that it mostly appears as SPP of the adjacency pair.
3) is used when a visually impaired contacts an object in the environment by means of a white cane, hand, sole,
etc., and is an expression close to the senses of the visually impaired. This is an expression of the instructor’s
orientation towards asymmetry and atypicality in a multimodality and multisensoriality between instructor
and the visually impaired.
The two expressions 2) and 4) are basically interchangeable in the grammar of action of sighted persons. How-
ever, in interaction in the O&M training situation e.g. talk between a student who is visually impaired and an
instructor who is sighted, they are different actions.
2) is a possible instruction as well as providing useful information for the student. That is, when this expression
is used, the student can and should explore objects in the environment by tactile and auditory.
In contrast, 4) is neither information nor instruction that student can use directly. It gives information about the
environment that is not directly available to the student, such as ‘where are we now’, i.e. how far the training
has now progressed. It appears to provide a context (geographical information) that is clearly distinct from the
activity of real-time teaching.
Further analysis of the linguistic forms described above reveals a distinctive feature of talk in the orientation
and mobility training sessions. It is that the ‘topicality’ of talk changes with the course of training, i.e. with
mobility.
This also implies that the similarity between the two activities in a workplace such as air traffic control, i.e.
the fact that the reference to events outside the talk is an important purpose of the talk, and the fact that the
events themselves, the objects of reference, change over time in a time flow different from that of the talk. On
the other hand, however, it differs from air traffic control, which does not require confirmation about physical
geographical information, in that the latter’s degree of coincidence is extremely high in the O&M training.

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Racialized and minoritized voices in critical academic writing


in Canadian higher education

Panel contribution

Dr. John McGaughey 1 , Dr. Heejin Song 2


1. University of Toronto, 2. York University

The paper reports on the findings of a critical action research (Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, 2014) project in an
academic reading and writing course at a Canadian university English for academic purposes (EAP) program.
The project takes place as part of a content and language integrated learning (CLIL)-based course for interna-
tional students. In an attempt to restructure and advance the teaching to be more inclusive and critical, and at
the same time coherent with the increased institutional demands of incorporating equity, diversity and inclu-
sion (EDI)-related topics for the construction of teaching content, a new instructional design was proposed and
practiced with EDI-focused teaching materials and learning tasks. Critical multiculturalism (Grant & Sleeter,
2010; Nieto & Bode, 2011) was adopted as a pedagogical lens to shine light on discussions of discrimination
surrounding race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexual orientation (Dei, 1999; Kubota, 2015). Through in-depth
course readings and a multi-stepped research project, students researched how equity/human-rights seeking
groups (e.g., Indigenous peoples, BIPOC, and 2SLGBTQ+) were included in their university in comparison to
other local and international universities. Through a discussion of student written samples, the study reveals
how the new instructional design contributed to students gaining an increased critical intercultural awareness
and capacity to discuss contentious topics surrounding systemic racism, marginalization and the intersectional-
ity of oppression faced by students of equity/human rights seeking groups, including the international students
themselves. Yet, the findings also reflect instances where a minority of students’ writing appears reluctant to cri-
tique their institution, echoing the need to create a space where all students feel comfortable to express critical
and atypical viewpoints. The talk concludes by discussing the need to create further opportunities for students
to critically engage and resist dominant discourses that reflect settler/colonial ideologies.
Dei, G. J. (1999). The denial of difference: Refraining anti�racist praxis. Race Ethnicity and Education, 2(1),
17-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332990020103
Grant, C. A., & Sleeter, C. E. (2010). Race, class, gender and disability in the classroom. In J. A. Banks & C. A. M.
Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (7th ed., pp. 59-80). John Wiley & Sons.
Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner. Springer: Singapore.
Kubota, R. (2015). Race and language learning in multicultural Canada: Towards critical antiracism. Journal of
Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 36(1), 3-12, https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2014.892497
Nieto, S., & Bode, P. (2011). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (6th ed.).
Pearson Publication

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Social sustainability and inclusion in higher education:


Analysis of the (changing) institutional discourse of
counsellors, lecturers, and students on Belgian and German
university websites

Panel contribution

Prof. Magdalene Lévy-Tödter 1


1. FOM University of Applied Sciences

In recent years, there has been increasing expectation that higher education institutions (HEIs) take on a central
role in the transformation process towards a sustainable society. This includes a whole- institution approach
of sustainable development at HEIs (Kohl et al. 2021). While the identification of challenges in the implementa-
tion of participation (Arnstein 1969, Bock 2018) in higher education has been investigated in numerous studies
(Barkas et al. 2020), it is surprising that the role of students with impairments as drivers of the transforma-
tion process has rarely been highlighted in discourse analysis and higher education communication against the
background of the questioning of “normality” (‘cultural turn’ Waldschmidt 2017) and the increasing focus on
competences in disability/diversity studies.
Studies from various disciplines explore the perception of students, counsellors, or lecturers regarding the chal-
lenges in implementing inclusion in higher education at institutional level. While some website analyses of
HEIs revolve primarily around (digital) barriers in addressing students with impairment or other specific needs
(Gabel et al. 2016), there is still a lack of discourse-linguistic or (functional-)pragmatic analyses on the position-
ing of adviser and other change agents in context of inclusion or “equal opportunities” in HEIs. Drawing on
the corpus of websites from German and Belgian universities in German and French, I investigate the agent
layer (roles, discourse positions, mediality) (Spitzmüller & Warnke 2011, Pauwels 2012) of counsellors or the
ratified recipients in this multimodal form of institutional communication. Changes in communication due to
the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the positioning of students as counsellors in podcasts or the increasing inter-
sectionality in websites, will be also examined.
Arnstein, S.R. (1969): A ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Planning Association, 35(4),
216-224.
Barkas, L.A., Armstrong, P.-A., Bishop, G. (2020): Is inclusion still an illusion in higher education? Ex-
ploring the Curriculum through the student voice. International Journal of Inclusive Education, DOI:
10.1080/13603116.2020.1776777
Bock, B.M. (2018): Sprache und Partizipation: Barriere und Teilhabe. In: Liedke, F., Tuchen, A. (eds.): Handbuch
Pragmatik, Metzler, 345-357.
Gabel, S.L., Reid, D., Pearson, H., Ruiz, L., Hume-Dawson, R. (2016): Disability and Diversity on CSU Websites: A
Critical Discourse Study. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 9(1), 64-80.
Kohl, K., Hopkins, C., Barth, M., Michelsen, G., Dlouhá, J., Razak, D.A., Bin Sanusi, Z.A., Toman, I. (2021): A whole-
institution approach towards sustainability: a crucial aspect of higher education’s individual and collective
engagement with the SDGs and beyond. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 23(2), 218-
236.
Pauwels, L. (2012). A Multimodal Framework for Analyzing Websites as Cultural Expressions. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication, 7, 247-265.
Spitzmüller, J., Warnke, I.H. (2011) Discourse as a ‘linguistic object’: methodical and methodological delimita-
tions, Critical Discourse Studies, 8(2), 75-94.
Waldschmidt, A. (2017): Disability Goes Cultural. The Cultural Model of Disability as an Analytical Tool. In:
Waldschmidt, A., Berressem, H., Ingwersen, M. (eds.): Culture – Theory – Disability. Encounters between Dis-

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ability Studies and Cultural Studies. Transkript. 19-27.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social-haptic communication: an additional - (a)typical -


resource for communication with and amongst deafblind
individuals

Panel contribution

Dr. Laura Volpato 1 , Prof. Johanna Mesch 2


1. “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice, 2. Stockholm University

A severe combined sensory loss of sight and hearing is defined as deafblindness. Deafblind individuals can
experience difficulties in mobility, access to information and participation in social life.
Communication with/amongst deafblind people is possible through several methods of communication, for in-
stance: tactile sign language, spoken language (supported by aids), alphabet letters typed on the hand, and
braille.
Due to time restraints, such communication methods are mostly used to convey the linguistic messages occur-
ring in a conversation, this resulting in a loss of contextual information for the deafblind person. What happens
in the surroundings often represents crucial information for the deafblind person to take control and act con-
sequently.
Social-haptic communication (SHC) consists of touch signals (haptices) performed on the body (arm, back, knee,
hand, foot) providing brief messages revealing key happenings in the context (e.g., someone is leaving the room,
the audience is laughing). SHC also allows to integrate tactile/spoken communication with relevant descriptions
of the environment (e.g., how the room is furnished, how people are dressed). In Scandinavia SHC is extensively
used by the deafblind communities and is part of the training for guide-interpreters.
The Italian deafblind community is now contributing to the development of its own SHC system. Research has
been conducted within the Erasmus+ project “Social Haptic Signs for Deaf and Blind in Education”, involving Ca’
Foscari University of Venice and deafblind individuals from the Foundation Lega del Filo d’Oro Onlus, aiming
at collecting and negotiating new haptices to build a free online SHC dictionary.
Approximately 80 haptices have been collected and co-created so far within the Italian team. A selection of these
has been tested with 32 deafblind individuals and 34 volunteers during three weeks of holiday. Participants
were provided with a brief introduction to SHC and a demonstration of the haptices. They were monitored
throughout the whole holiday. Data collection was based on video recordings, observations, and interviews.
Early findings show how SHC has been used as a resource for contextual information in combination with other
communication methods, or when the preferred communication method was not accessible (e.g., when hands
are busy handling something; when the environment is too noisy to rely on residual hearing). Sometimes SHC
was more economical than the preferred method of communication (e.g., body positions make hands inacces-
sible; or in sport situation when it is useful to share the same perspective over the visual field). All informants
gave positive feedback about SHC, this representing an additional - (a)typical - resource for communication.
Lahtinen, R. M. (2008). Haptices and haptemes: A case study of developmental process in social-haptic communi-
cation of acquired deafblind people (1st ed). A1 Management UK.
Mesch, J. (2001). Tactile sign language: Turn taking and question in signed conversations of deaf-blind people.
Signum.
Raanes, E., & Berge, S. S. (2017). Sign language interpreters’ use of haptic signs in interpreted meetings with
deafblind persons. Journal of Pragmatics, 107, 91–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2016.09.013
Volpato, L., Cardinaletti, A., & Ceccarani, P. (2021). A European online dictionary for social haptic communica-
tion. DbI Review, 65, 29–32.

979
Responses to news:
Cross-linguistic
perspectives (organized
by Michal Marmorstein,
Beatrice Szczepek Reed,
Xiaoting Li)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Dis)affiliative uptake of new information: Requests for


reconfirmation in German and English conversation

Panel contribution

Ms. Marit Aldrup 1


1. University of Potsdam

Responding to deliveries of new information is a recurrent task in ordinary conversation. As previous research
shows, recipients of news, informings, or new information more generally have different response types at their
disposal, including change-of-state tokens (e.g., oh), ‘newsmarks’ (e.g., really), evaluative appreciations (e.g.,
wow), and assessments (Heritage 1984; Jefferson 1981; Maynard 1997, 2003; Terasaki 2004 [1976]; Thompson et
al. 2015).
In contrast to other responses to new information, ‘newsmarks’ routinely engender sequence expansion, in
that they invite the prior speaker to, at a minimum, reconfirm their previous statement. However, such
reconfirmation-seeking responses do not invariably index news- or noteworthiness. In fact, they are also regu-
larly used to treat the new information as problematic. Since the label ‘newsmark’ does not adequately capture
such rather repair-implicated uses, it is substituted with the more neutral term ‘request for reconfirmation’
(RfRC) in this interactional-linguistic study. Through detailed sequential and multimodal analyses of reconfir-
mation sequences in video recordings of informal German and English face-to-face conversations, it reveals
a continuum between newsmark-like and problem-indicating RfRC uses and highlights how turn design con-
tributes to action disambiguation and displaying (dis)affiliation. The following purely verbal transcript gives a
sense of why co-participants might find it difficult to make out the implications of an RfRC without any additional
prosodic-phonetic and bodily-visual cues:
[LoE+_ENG_01, 00:40:12-00:40:13]
01 A: no=i can’ have kids
02 (.)
03 → B: °h real[ly ]
04 A: [yeah]
The extract begins with a counter-informing in line 01, which is responsive to a jocular remark on B’s part
that A should tell her future kids about an absurdity they just joked about. In this context, the RfRC in line
03 can be seen to invite different response components next to the reconfirmation in line 04 depending on
whether it is taken as, e.g., (a) genuinely calling the informing into question or (b) displaying unexpectedness
in connection with empathy or the like. This study shows that especially with RfRCs like these which
principally allow for different readings, participants largely rely on various aspects of turn design for action
ascription. The study also exposes that multimodal marking may be employed to upgrade the (dis)affiliative
force of an RfRC, whereas the absence of noticeable marking serves to downgrade its (dis)affiliative implications.

References
Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In: J. M. Atkinson & J.
Heritage (eds.). Structures of social action. Cambridge: CUP, 299–345.
Jefferson, G. (1981). The abominable ‘ne?’: A working paper exploring the phenomenon of post-response pursuit
of response. Manchester Sociology Occasional Papers 6, 1–82.
Maynard, D. (1997). The news delivery sequence: Bad news and good news in conversational interaction. ROLSI
30(2), 93–130.

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Maynard, D. (2003). Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. Chicago:
UCP.
Thompson, S., B. Fox & E. Couper-Kuhlen (2015). Grammar in everyday talk: Building responsive actions. Cam-
bridge: CUP.
Terasaki, A. (2004). Pre-announcement sequences in conversation. In: G. H. Lerner (ed.). Conversation Analysis:
Studies from the first generation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 171–223. (Original work appeared 1976)

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A cross-linguistic study of newsmarks in Arabic, English, and


Mandarin

Panel contribution

Dr. Michal Marmorstein 1 , Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed 2 , Dr. Xiaoting Li 3


1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2. King’s College London, 3. University of Alberta

In this presentation, we approach the interactional phenomenon of ‘newsmarks’ in three languages (Arabic, En-
glish, Mandarin). We examine the extent to which linguistic forms serving as newsmarks are cross-linguistically
comparable by juxtaposing the two most frequent newsmark forms in each corpus: Arabic wallāhi (lit. ‘by God’)
and bigadd (lit. ‘in-seriousness’); English really and elliptical polar interrogatives, such as ‘did you’; and Man-
darin shi ma (lit. ‘is (it)?’) and zhende(a/ya, ma) (lit. ‘real/really’). Particle responses to news have been described,
for example, in Mandarin (Hsieh 2017), Icelandic (Hilmisdóttir 2016), Finnish (Koivisto 2015), and German (Gu-
bina & Betz 2021). However, the interactional category of newsmark, distinct from news receipts, has only
been explored explicitly for English and German. Newsmarks have been described as indexing prior talk as
new and as opening up opportunities for sequence expansion (Jefferson 1981) and have been claimed to be re-
sources for showing disbelief (Heritage 1984). In addition, confirmation is commonly viewed as a conditionally
relevant next, either as a minimal or initial component of a larger activity (Thompson, Fox & Couper-Kuhlen
2015) or as the dedicated task achieved by these items (Stivers & Enfield 2010). The presentation interrogates
these findings, focusing on participants’ displayed orientations toward the news and on the trajectories that
newsmarks set up for further talk. It is suggested that newsmarks do not simply treat prior talk as new or
questionable information; rather, newsmarks can be used to index prior talk as ‘remarkable’ (Marmorstein &
Szczepek Reed, forthcoming) or ‘topicalizable’ (Gubina & Betz 2021), negotiate divergent epistemic stances, and
display (dis)affiliation. The data are recordings of naturally occurring interactions in the three languages.
Gubina, A., & Betz, E.M. (2021). What do newsmark-type responses invite? The response space after German
echt. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 54(4), 374-396.
Jefferson, G. (1981). The abominable ‘ne?’ An exploration of post-response pursuit of response. In P. Shroder
(Eds.), Sprache der Gegenwart (pp.53-88). Düsseldorf: Schwann.
Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J.M. Atkinson & J. Heritage
(Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp.299–345). CUP.
Hilmisdóttir, H. (2016). Responding to informings in Icelandic talk-in-interaction: A comparison of nú and er
það, Journal of Pragmatics, 104, 133–147.
Hsieh, C.-Y.C. (2017). From receipt of information to management of interaction: The use of Zheyangzi as a
response token in Chinese conversation, Concentric, 43(2), 87-118.
Koivisto, A. (2015). Dealing with ambiguities in informings: Finnish ‘aijaa’ as a ‘Neutral’ news receipt, Research
on Language and Social Interaction, 48(4), 365–387.
Marmorstein, M., & Szczepek Reed, B. (forthcoming). Newsmarks as an interactional resource for indexing
remarkability: a qualitative analysis of Arabic wallāhi and English really. Contrastive Pragmatics.
Stivers, T., & Enfield, N.J. (2010). A coding scheme for question–response sequences in conversation, Journal of
Pragmatics, 42(10) 2620–2626.
Thompson, S.A., Fox, B.A., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions.
CUP.

983
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Alternate newsmark response designs in Korean

Panel contribution

Prof. Mary Kim 1 , Prof. Stephanie Hyeri Kim 2


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2. California State University, Northridge

This study examines two nearly identical responses equivalent to the English newsmark really in Korean: cincca
and cincca-ya (really-COP), which are some of the most prevalent ways of responding to news in Korean con-
versational data. The only structural distinction between the two forms is the attachment of copula -ya ‘be’ to
the noun cincca ‘real’. At a glance they appear interchangeable (and both are translated into ‘really’). However,
a closer investigation of the sequential and interactional environments in which they emerge shows that they
implement separate action formats that pursue different responses, thereby resulting in divergent interactional
trajectories. Cincca-ya questions the validity of an informing thereby mobilizing confirmation and elaboration
(Thompson et al., 2015), whereas cincca does the work of simply receipting news.
Extracts 1 and 2 from the same telephone call between two friends show how one recipient (Ara) responds to
the news deliverer’s (Mia) informing or telling as news with different response designs, cincca or cincca-ya.
Extract (1) A friend’s troubles I
01 Mia: ‘I have to go to (Korea).’
02 Ara: cincca?
03 Mia: ‘Because of Dong Ho. And I will go crazy if I stay here. I think I am a little crazy.’
04 Ara: cin[cca?]
05 Mia: ‘[And], I have aged so much. Because I had so many upsetting incidents- so many upsetting incidents, I
noticed myself aging so much.’
06 Ara: cin[cca?
07 Mia: ‘[I was shocked when I looked myself in the mirror.’
With cincca the news recipient Ara displays that she finds the prior speaker’s information to be new or surprising
but does not necessarily mobilize confirmation (Extract 1: lines, 2, 4, 6). This is evidenced by Mia’s continuation
of her telling without confirmation (Extract 1: lines 3, 5).
On the other hand, with cincca-ya (Extract 2: lines 3, 7) the recipient does not simply take the information as
news but treats it as a matter that requires further verification or elaboration from the news deliverer (Extract
2: lines 4, 8).
Extract (2) A friend’s troubles II
01 Mia: ‘He dumped me.’
02 (0.2)
03 Ara: cincca-ya[:?]
04 Mia: ‘[Yes] I am so embarrassed.’
05 Ara: ‘(That’s) nonsense.’
06 Ara: ‘But I decided to forget him. Recently I have been crying every, every day.’
07 Ara: cincca-ya?
08 Mia: ‘Yes, I’m not kidding.’
Here, cincca-ya? displays trouble with acknowledging the news and questions its validity. The news deliverer
Mia puts her telling on hold and provides a confirmation beginning with a response token ‘yes’ (lines 4 and
8). In summary, the addition of the copula -ya ‘be’ transforms cinnca, a particle response (Thompson et al.,
2015), into a minimal clausal response (Thompson et al., 2015), which serves as a pseudo-question. Overall, this
study contributes to our understanding of how news responses are constructed across languages with data from
Korean.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

References
Thompson, S. A., Fox, B. A., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

985
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Finnish [verb-repeat + vai ‘or’]: from understanding checks to


newsmarks

Panel contribution

Dr. Aino Koivisto 1


1. University of Helsinki

As a ”particle-rich language”, Finnish embodies a large set of particles that are specialized in receipting new
and newsworthy information (at least aijaa, ahaa, jaa, ja(a)ha, ai, vai nii(n), mhy). These particles may vary with
respect to whether they, for example, orient to the newsworthiness of the informing (aijaa) or whether they
suggest that the information is something that redirects the anticipated course of interaction (aha(a))) (Koivisto
2016). In addition to the particles, Finnish has a construction that consists of a verb repeat and the question
particle vai (‘or’), e.g., on vai, tuut vai (‘be-3SG or’, ‘come-2SG or’). It is thus formally a question but used as a
response to news (see Hakulinen et al. § 1701). I will show that while turn-final vai is also used in “genuine”
understanding checks, the format [verb repeat + vai] is specialized in treating the prior turn as new, possibly
surprising/noteworthy and thus potentially expandable information. This use is to some extent comparable to
the use of English “minimal clausal responses” (you are? are you? Thompson et al. 2015), also termed “displays
of ritualized disbelief” and “newsmarks” (Heritage 1984). [Verb repeat + vai] is typically followed by a minimal
(re)confirmation; however, is it not uncommon that no confirmation is offered. This shows that the use of the
format is partly detached from the “original” question function, now merely treating the prior talk as having
offered surprising or noteworthy information that could, in principle, be contested in terms of its truthfulness.
In this paper, I will outline the typical uses of [verb repeat + vai] that extend from 1) requesting verification to the
information received (suggesting that the speaker is concerned with the truth of the informing) (cf. Thompson
et al 2015: 94), 2) to treating the prior information as surprising/unexpected and to 3) a “ritualized” way of
receipting new information. Furthermore, I will discuss the division of labor between the [verb repeat + vai]
and the most frequent new particles in Finnish (aijaa and aha(a)). I will consider whether the division between
particles as news receipts and question-formatted turns as newsmarks holds for Finnish or whether the issue
is more complex (cf. Thompson et al. 2015: 52–53). The data are Finnish everyday conversations.
References
Koivisto, Aino 2016: Receipting information as newsworthy vs. responding to redirection: Finnish news parti-
cles aijaa and aha(a). Journal of Pragmatics 104, 163–179.
Heritage, John. 1984. A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. – J. Maxwell Atkinson
& John Heritage (toim.), Structures of social action. Studies in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 299–345
Hakulinen, Auli, Maria Vilkuna, Riitta Korhonen, Vesa Koivisto, Tarja Riitta Heinonen & Irja Alho 2004: Iso
suomen kielioppi [Comprehensive Finnish Grammar]. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Thompson, Sandra, Fox, Barbara & Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2015: Grammar in Everyday Talk. Building Re-
sponsive Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Jo? Fakt? ‘Yeah?’ ‘Really?’ - registering and confirming


(surprising) news in spoken Czech

Panel contribution

Prof. Florence Oloff 1


1. Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim

This presentation will focus on news receipts and newsmarks in spoken Czech and the social actions they im-
plement in everyday face-to-face interaction. While newsmarks have been explored in various languages (most
prominently in English, cf. Heritage 1984, Local 1996, but also in typologically different languages such as
Finnish, Koivisto 2015, 2017, and Mandarin, Liu & Yao 2021) or, cross-linguistically, regarding specific lexical
items (such as ‘okay’, see Betz et al. 2021), receipting news in Czech has not yet been studied, at least not from
a conversation analytic point of view. Spoken Czech has been previously investigated regarding particles and
discourse markers, but from a more traditional sociolinguistic and general communicational or stylistic per-
spective (e.g., Adamovičová 2017, 2021, Jílková 2017, Hoffmanová 2018), or with a contrastive focus, frequently
regarding English or German (e.g., Nekula 1996, Rinas 2013, Válková 2020, cf. also Oloff 2022).
Based on a corpus of more than 15 hours of video recordings of everyday conversations in Czech (with two or
more participants), this presentation will therefore provide a first description of how newsmarkers and news
receipts distribute in this West Slavic language. In spoken Czech, the main lexical item used for this interactional
task in second position, i.e., responding to an informing, is jo ‘yes’/’yeah’, usually with a clearly rising intonation
(jo?). The item fakt‘really’ typically occurs in third position, usually receipting a response to a previous question
of the same speaker. While jo seems to register new information in a rather neutral way (typically followed by a
minimal response and a sequence closing), fakt emphasizes the news recipient’s surprise and a need to elaborate
or to provide further comments. The change-of-state-token aha (cf. also the use of a similar token in Polish,
Weidner 2016), however, always closes an informing sequence. Finally, this presentation will also consider the
practice of (partial) repeats of previous turns (in various sequential positions) that confirm and register new
information. These repeats can either aim at a simple reconfirmation or present the receipted news as in need
of elaboration (cf. Robinson 2013). In order to describe the various ways news can be handled and receipted in
Czech, I will look both at the larger sequential trajectories of these tokens and at possibly concurrent embodied
conduct.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Navigating degrees of informativity in responses to news:


Trajectories of request for reconfirmation sequences in
Yurakaré

Panel contribution

Dr. Sonja Gipper 1


1. University of Cologne

News in interaction vary with respect to their informational import: While being new, they can be more or less
predictable to the news recipient, and thus possess different degrees of informativity. The degree of informa-
tivity, defined as the relative predictability of a meaning in a context (Myslín & Levy 2015: 877–878), has been
argued to affect many aspects of words’ and utterances’ forms in language use, such as the robustness of pho-
netic contrasts (Sano 2018), article (Lemke, Horch & Reich 2017) and complementizer omission (Jaeger 2010),
word order (Komagata 2003), and language chosen in bilingual code-switching settings (Myslín & Levy 2015). In
this paper, I propose that these observations scale up to the level of sequence trajectories in interaction, show-
ing that degrees of informativity play an important role in shaping trajectories of request for reconfirmation
sequences in Yurakaré, a language isolate spoken by around 1,600 people in central Bolivia. In this language, re-
quests for reconfirmation—polar questions that react to news by asking the interlocutor to reconfirm something
they just said— are ubiquitous in interaction and constitute an important resource for responding to news. They
can have regularised one-word formats such as achama ‘is it so?’, the most frequent format, however, being that
of a repeat.
Combining a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a collection of around 160 requests for reconfirmation
sequences extracted from conversational corpora, I demonstrate that a range of features tend to cluster to col-
laboratively contextualise news as representing higher and lower degrees of informativity: Prosodic features
of the initial turn presenting the news, overlap of the request for reconfirmation with the initial turn presenting
the news, and format of the reconfirming response (repeat vs. response particle). The results suggest that de-
grees of informativity have consequences for linguistic form at the level of the interactional sequence, thereby
demonstrating that concepts from information theory (Shannon 1948) can fruitfully be applied to sequence
trajectories dealing with news in interaction.
References
Jaeger, T. Florian. 2010. Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density. Cognitive
Psychology 61(1). 23–62.
Komagata, Nobo. 2003. Contextual effects on word order: Information structure and Information Theory. In
Patrick Blackburn, Chiara Ghidini, Roy M. Turner & Fausto Giunchiglia (eds.), Modeling and Using Context (Lec-
ture Notes in Computer Science), vol. 2680, 190–203. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Lemke, Robin, Eva Horch & Ingo Reich. 2017. Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omis-
sion in newspaper headlines. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association
for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, 131–135. Valencia, Spain: Association for Computational
Linguistics.
Myslín, Mark & Roger Levy. 2015. Code-switching and predictability of meaning in discourse. Language 91(4).
871–905.
Sano, Shin-Ichiro. 2018. Durational contrast in gemination and informativity. Linguistics Vanguard 4(s2).
20170011.
Shannon, Claude. E. 1948. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27(3). 379–
423.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ne? (‘yes?’): Between surprise and challenge in Greek


telephone calls

Panel contribution

Prof. Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou 1


1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Like ‘yes’ in other languages, the Greek adverb ναι ([ne] ‘yes’, henceforth ne) is multifunctional, its overarching
function being the affirmation of polar interrogatives across contexts. It is also widely used as an answer to a
summons in general and, in particular, to the ringing of the telephone. Such functions are unequivocally deter-
mined by the different sequential positions in which ne occurs, i.e. as a second pair-part to polar interrogatives
vs. summonses, and its distinctive prosodic design in these environments. In the present paper, I would like to
point to another use of ne, namely in second or third position after volunteered or question-elicited informings
respectively (cf. Thompson et al. 2015).
The data for this study are drawn from 145 telephone calls among familiars (a subset of the Corpus of Spoken
Greek, cf. Pavlidou 2016). In the calls under examination, we find some 45 relevant occurrences of ne, most of
which are stand-alone (80%), in other words ne makes up the whole turn by itself. In about 1/3 of the cases ne
is preceded by the interjection a ‘ah’ (the closest Greek equivalent to English oh), while in very few instances
ne is followed by e (a confirmation seeking interjection). The intonation contour of ne in this environment is
interrogative (hence depicted as ne?), and modified accordingly, if in combination with a or e.
In this context, ne? seems to be accomplishing a kind of hybrid action as it combines both an expressive aspect
(indexing unexpectedness, surprise, doubt, etc.) and a directive one (requesting confirmation), i.e. it functions
as a newsmark. According to Thompson et al. (2015: 52), newsmarks make relevant “at least one more turn at
talk”. Being a polar interrogative that indexically refers to the proposition put forward by the informing, ne?
invites an answer that at least affirms (or disaffirms) that proposition. Indeed, in almost all of its occurrences
ne? receives an answer. The question is of what type this answer is and what it does.
The stand-alone instances of ne? (mostly occurring after volunteered informings in the data) are commonly
responded to by the repetition of ne (with falling intonation). This raises an interesting problem, since the re-
sponse can be regarded both as an ‘interjection-type’ and a ‘repetition-type’ polar answer (Enfield et al. 2019).
Interjection-type answers are considered to be pragmatically unmarked while repetitional answers count as
pragmatically marked (ibid.). In our case, analysis suggests that the answer to ne? is more likely to be of the
repetition-type. Taking into account among others (a) what happens when ne? is followed by more TCUs in a
multi-unit response to the informing, (b) how the (original) informer handles ne? and (c) the way other news-
marks, like σοβαρά? (‘seriously?’) and αλήθεια? (lit. truth, ‘is it true?’), are responded to in the data, I argue that
the repetitional response to ne? indexes upgraded epistemic rights on the informer’ side, thus retrospectively
characterizing ne? as an expression of ungrounded surprise, doubt, etc.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Newsmarks from a multimodal perspective: The case of


be’emet ‘really’ in spoken Hebrew

Panel contribution

Dr. Leon Shor 1 , Dr. Michal Marmorstein 2


1. Achva Academic College, 2. Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The category of ‘newsmarks’ pertains to items that treat prior informings and tellings as being unusual, unex-
pected, or remarkable, thereby negotiating divergent epistemic stances and managing problems of acceptability
(Marmorstein & Szczepek Reed, 2022; Gubina & Betz, 2021). This paper focuses on a lexical item that is typically
associated with newsmarking in spoken Hebrew: be’emet ‘really’ (lit. ‘in truth’). In previous research be’emet
is described as a discourse marker that constructs a stance of amazement and disbelief with regard to a prior
informing (Maschler & Estlein, 2008). However, the sequential unfolding and the multimodal patterns which
accompany be’emet have not been studied yet. Based on a collection of video recordings of ordinary informal
conversations, we examine the following questions: (1) Which types of informings occasion the use of be’emet?
(2) How is be’emet treated subsequently? (3) What is the prosodic-embodied design of be’emet?
The following excerpt illustrates our analysis. Sharon and Tamir are discussing the rent that Sharon pays to
his father for an apartment located in the city of Tel Aviv. Sharon indicates that his cost of living is unusual
(lines 1-6), which prompts Tamir to inquire about the exact rental amount that Sharon pays (lines 7-8). Sharon’s
answer is not straightforward. Displaying initial hesitation (lines 9), Sharon first describes his father’s willing-
ness to negotiate the rent (line 10), and only then mentions the actual number which he qualifies as lower than
expected (line 12). Tamir’s response to this informing is initiated immediately after the report on the markedly
low rental cost (‘two thousand’) through eyebrows’ raising. This facial display is maintained throughout the
subsequent verbal response that is initiated by a token of be’emet, delivered with a sharp pitch jump on the
second syllable, followed by a vocalization of amazement (‘wow’, line 14). Rather than doubt or disbelief, we
propose that, be’emet displays an orientation toward the prior talk as being remarkable due to its contrast with
the speaker’s own experience. This interpretation is corroborated by two observations: First, be’emet elicits a
minimal affirmation from Sharon, which acknowledges the remarkability attributed to the previous inform-
ing without providing any justification (lines 15-16). Second, be’emet is preceded by, and co-occurs with, the
raising of both eyebrows, which can be interpreted as visually conveying a change of state (Dix & Gross 2021).
Rather than questioning the prior talk, and thus indexing an “intermediary stage on a path between K- and K+”
(Thompson et al. 2015: 77), the use of be’emet involves an already completed change of epistemic state which
gives rise to the construction of previous contents as remarkable.
(DZ_YRC_23:50-24:07)
1 Sharon: The living here (is),
2-5 ((omitted))
6 unusual.
7 Tamir: Why,
8 How much are you paying here?
9 Sharon: (-) uh,
10 They are willing to negotiate (the rent price),
11 like th-
12 two thousand (shekels) # instead of three thousand.
Tamir #raises both eyebrows—>
13 → Tamir: really?
——

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14 wow.
—–
15 Sharon: yes.
Tamir ——
16 yes.
Tamir —–

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prosody as a Stance Marker in Responsive so-Prefaced Yes-No


Questions

Panel contribution

Mr. Nadav Matalon 1


1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Stance taking is intrinsic to questioning. Most basically, asking a question involves positioning oneself in a
lower epistemic stance with respect to the addressee. However, via question design, questioners display more
nuanced stance-related aspects. For example, questioners may choose one of several syntactic question formats
to adjust the degree of their epistemic inferiority (Heritage, 2012). In this study, I focus on prosodic variation
in question design and explore the range of stance-related meanings that it could convey. To this end, I focus
on a specific syntactic question format – so-prefaced yes-no questions (so-YNQs) – and examine instances in
comparable sequential positions, that is, in response to informing sequences.
One way to respond to an informing in interaction is to offer “an inference that goes beyond the substance of
the informing as a candidate understanding” (Thompson et al., 2015: 134). Such responsive moves function
as yes-no questions, making relevant next an affirmation or disaffirmation of the inference by the other more
knowledgeable participant. They are typically clausal and non-repetitive (ibid: 128), and in English they are
often prefaced by the discourse marker so, which further displays the inferential or causal connection to the
preceding turn/s (Drew, 2018; Schiffrin, 1987).
I conduct an interactional linguistic analysis of recorded everyday telephone conversations in American En-
glish, and find that the prosodic design of so-YNQs is a methodical resource for the expression of various stances,
both epistemic and affective. Epistemically, producers of so-YNQs use prosody to display the level of congru-
ency between the inference they present for affirmation and their prior knowledge, and, not unrelatedly, their
degree of certainty to receive an affirming response (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012). At the same time, specific prosodic
modifications allow questioners to ‘laminate’ so-YNQs with affective aspects as well, such as the expression of
a highly positive evaluation of the inferred detail, on one hand, or an intended display of lack of enthusiasm,
on the other. These expressions of stance are consequential for the continuation of talk, as reflected, first and
foremost, in the different types of answers they consistently receive.
In conclusion, this study demonstrates the benefits in examining prosodic variation while controlling for syn-
tactic design and sequential position. The findings reveal additional depths of meaning that prosody can convey
in interaction, and point to the scalar and multi-layered manner in which it is used.
References
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). Some truths and untruths about final intonation in conversational questions. In J. P.
de Ruiter (Ed.), Questions: Formal, functional and interactional perspectives (pp. 123–145). Cambridge University
Press.
Drew, P. (2018). Inferences and Indirectness in Interaction. Open Linguistics, 4(1), 241–259.
https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0013
Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language
and Social Interaction, 45(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646684
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, S. A., Fox, B. A., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in everyday talk: Building responsive actions.
In Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions. Cambridge University Press.

992
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Responding to informings in German and Low German – On


the fuzzy boundaries of newsmarks in cross-linguistic
research

Panel contribution

Dr. Kathrin Weber 1 , Dr. Katharina König 2


1. Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 2. University of Münster

In mundane conversation, the delivery of news creates a sequential slot in which responses are due. In this
‘possibility space’ (Stivers 2019, Couper-Kuhlen 2021) speakers can choose from different response types with
which they can receipt, assess or challenge the news. Often, conversation-analytic studies focus on one of the
many possibilities respondents have at their disposal, i.e. they usually describe particular forms which can
be found in this slot in a given language (see e.g., Gubina/Betz (2021) on German echt). Moreover, studies dis-
tinguish between change-of-state tokens as a class of sequence-curtailing particles, which display a transfer of
knowledge (such as English oh (Heritage 1984) or German ach (so) (Golato/Betz 2008)), and newsmarks, which –
as “assertions of ritualized disbelief” (Heritage 1984: 339) – minimally make re-confirmation relevant and thus
expand the delivery of news (such as English really? (Thompson et al. 2015)). Some studies assume a clear-cut
distinction between these resource types (Imo 2009).
In our talk, we would like to take an action-based approach that compares newsmarks in German and Low Ger-
man talk-in-interaction. We argue that such a cross-linguistic endeavour should be rooted in the newsmarks’ in-
teractional treatment rather than their form, in order to better understand what invites re-confirming responses
in different languages. Based on a sequential analysis of newsmark sequences in both languages, we hope to
show that languages differ in the specialisation of formats routinely used for marking a prior as news. Whereas
newsmarks are lexically quite distinct from change-of-state tokens in German talk-in-interaction, speakers of
Low German routinely deploy resources such as ach so as a display of newsworthiness in interaction, which
invites re-confirmation. By conducting in-depth sequential and prosodic analyses we would like to show that
there are gradient transitions between newsmarks and change-of-state tokens which have to be taken into ac-
count in comparative conversation-analytic research.
References
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (2021): ”Language over time. Some old and new uses of OKAY in American English”.
Interactional Linguistics 1/1: 33–63.
Golato, Andrea/Betz, Emma (2008): ”German ach and achso in repair uptake: Resources to sustain or remove
epistemic asymmetry”. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 27: 7–37.
Gubina, Alexandra; Betz, Emma (2021): “What do newsmark-type responses invite? The response space after
German echt.” In Research on Language & Social Interaction 54 (4), 374–396.
Heritage, John (1984): “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement”. In: Atkinson, J.
Maxwell/Heritage, John (eds.): Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press: 299–345.
Imo, Wolfgang (2009): ”Konstruktion oder Funktion? Erkenntnisprozessmarker (change-of-state-token) im
Deutschen”. In: Günthner, Susanne/Bücker, Jörg (eds.): Grammatik im Gespräch. Konstruktionen der Selbst-
und Fremdpositionierung. Berlin: de Gruyter: 57–86.
Stivers, Tanya (2019): “How we manage social relationships through answers to questions: The case of interjec-
tions”. Discourse Processes 3/56: 191–209.
Thompson, Sandra A./Fox, Barbara A./Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (2015): Grammar in Everyday Talk. Building
Responsive Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

993
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Teachers’ responses to child-initiated informings in a


bilingual preschool

Panel contribution

Dr. Olga Anatoli 1


1. Linköping University

This talk discusses child-initiated informings and teacher’s responses to those in a bilingual Swedish-English
preschool. Videorecordings of naturally occurring interactions are analyzed with the method of conversation
analysis with particular attention to the multimodal aspects of interactions. The analysis reveals that child-
initiated informings can be considered as an important display of children’s bilingual interactional competence.
Children pursue conversational engagement with teachers through particular turn-taking and recipient design,
as well as nominate a topic that is relevant and coherent within the local material and conversational context.
In so doing, children navigate institutional constraints on participation, establish themselves as knowledgeable
speakers, and secure the teacher’s recipiency. When teachers recognize informings as such, they regularly
demonstrate their alignment with the child’s course of action, while situating it in the institutional practice. In
doing so, teachers support a learning environment that confirms children’s participation rights. Child-initiated
participation in the multiparty institutional setting proves to be a co-operative, transformative social process
that constitutes an essential affordance for child pragmatic development amid bilingualism.

994
Revisiting ideologies of
English in the Nordic
countries (organized by
Dorte Lønsmann,
Marianne Haugaard Skov,
Janus Mortensen)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Eastern European perspective on the study of English


language ideologies

Panel contribution

Dr. Loreta Vaicekauskiene 1


1. Vilnius University

The presentation focuses on the development of Eastern European ideologies of the English language over the
three post-1990 decades since the collapse of the Soviet empire. The question is raised how the growing ac-
ceptance of and the tensions surrounding the spread of English have been tied to the broader processes of
democratisation and globalisation in the revived nation states of this post-Soviet region. In contrast to Northern
Europe, where English was gradually integrated into the everyday lives and self-awareness of the population
during the period after WW2, English language-related ideological processes in Eastern Europe shifted from a
frozen state to a sudden acceleration at the end of the 80s. This relatively late exposure to English along with
simultaneous re-evaluation of Russian, that took place at a time of a dramatic socio-political change, makes
Eastern Europe a unique laboratory for the study of language ideologies.
The presented investigation is based on, but not limited to, Lithuanian data on social value attribution, learn-
ing, self-reported proficiency and use of English for communicative and identification purposes. The data set
consists of original and secondary data sources such as representative surveys, qualitative interviews, met-
alinguistic comments and observations of interactions on social media, covering different aspects of the study
throughout the three decades. In addition to the universal findings on the socio-demographic stratification of
‘non-native’ speakers of English and on the indexicality of English reported in other studies as well, the in-
vestigation highlighted a specific Eastern dimension and additional axes of conflict. It will be shown that in
Eastern Europe, English language ideologies are embedded in socio-political discourses on Eastern and West-
ern civilizational zones. English is seen as indicative of democratic progress and contrasted with Russian which
is associated with the Soviet- or Russian-influenced mentality. At the same time, because of the specific form
of nationalism and anti-Western ideology fostered during the Soviet period, positivity towards English has be-
come an arena for cultural confrontation particularly targeting young consumers of the contemporary global
culture, for whom English has become an integral part of their everyday social practices. The presentation will
conclude with a discussion on the growing role of new media in the younger generations’ ideology of English,
which seems to be erasing regional differences.

996
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring conflicting ideologies: the relationship of


exceptionalism and English in Finland

Panel contribution

Dr. Elizabeth Peterson 1 , Ms. Katariina Pyykkö 1


1. University of Helsinki

The Nordic countries have been described as struggling to acknowledge their participation in global colonial
histories (Hoegaerts et al 2022), an ideology which has been characterized as “exceptionalism” or being an “in-
nocent outsider” (ibid; see also Keskinen 2019). A sense of Finnishness, in particular, often espouses ideologies
of being “the oppressed in exclusion to being an oppressor” (Hoegaerts et al 2022: 5), drawing on Finland’s his-
torical status as a part of the Swedish kingdom and later a Grand Duchy of the Russian empire, before gaining
independence in 1917. Another ideology in Finland is a sense of equality and lack of social class distinctions
(Keskinen, Skaptadóttir and Toivanen 2019). Against this backdrop, Finland can today be defined as a global
“winner” (ibid) according to various global measures.
One of these measures is overall per capita proficiency in English. Current statistics inform that the vast major-
ity of Finns are proficient in English. This leads to questions about ideologies concerning English in the Finnish
context. Globally, ideologies about English range from exclusionary practices based on racial, class and other
social distinctions to neoliberal ideals of equality and inclusion. This range of ideologies presents a multitude
of possible outcomes in Finland. For example, does the Finnish population of English speakers adopt ideologies
about English that gravitate toward a localized sense of equality, or toward externally propagated ideologies
which uphold, for example, class and racially-based distinctions of English? This presentation makes examples
from three studies addressing ideologies about English in Finland: 1) an overview of English language require-
ments for international students at universities (Peterson and Hall forthcoming); 2) a study of the reception
and evaluation of the English spoken by migrants in public health settings (Iikkanen 2020); 3) an ongoing study
of educated migrant women who have moved to Finland (Pyykkö forthcoming). The examples point toward a
linguistic reality in which ideologies external to the Finnish notion of equality are favored, gravitating toward
exclusionary practices rooted in English language elitism and ethnic and class-based distinctions.
Hoegaerts, J., Liimatainen, T., Hekanaho, L. and Peterson, E. 2022. Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality.
Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.
Iikkanen, P. 2019. ELF and migrant categorization at family clinics in Finland. Journal of English as a Lingua
Franca, 8 (1), 97-123.
Keskinen, S. 2019. Intra-Nordic Differences, Colonial/Racial Histories, and National Narratives: Rewriting
Finnish History. Scandinavian Studies 91, 163.
Keskinen, S., Skaptadóttir, U.D., Toivanen, M. (Eds.). 2019. Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region: Migration,
Difference, and the Politics of Solidarity, 1st ed. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019.
Peterson, E. and Hall, M. In press. English prescriptivism in higher education settings: focus on Nordic Countries.
In Beal, J., Lukač, M. and Straaijer, R. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism. Routledge.
Pyykkö, K. Forthcoming. The role of English in the integration, employment, and social engagement of academi-
cally trained migrant women in Finland. PhD dissertation, University of Helsinki.

997
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ideologies of English among Danish high school students

Panel contribution

Ms. Marianne Haugaard Skov 1


1. University of Copenhagen

In this paper, I present results from my ongoing PhD project English as a Relationship-Building Resource among
Danish Youth where I investigate the use of English as a linguistic resource among a group of Danish high school
students with an emphasis on the social functions the use of English serves for them. Signaling that you are
young and part of a shared youth community (both online and offline) seems to be relevant for them. But English
also appears useful as a stance-taking device for managing socially sensitive situations by creating distance to
what is said.
I hypothesize that mediatization influences the use of English among Danish high school students, which is
why I have chosen a multi-sited online and offline ethnographic study (Androutsopoulos & Stæhr 2018) as my
methodological foundation. This allows me to investigate the adolescents’ communicative practices across on-
and offline contexts and allows me to see where and how English plays a role in these different contexts. My
study is based in a high school in Copenhagen and the data consists of field notes, interviews, audio recordings
from school situations, and social media data collected over a period of five months. In this paper, I will focus
on ideologies of English and how these ideologies are articulated among my participants across different data
types.
My preliminary findings suggest that English is considered a natural and unremarkable linguistic resource by
the students, but also that English has the potential to be used for different social meaning-making purposes e.g.,
as part of the students’ identity work or as mentioned for dealing with awkward or socially sensitive situations.
My participants also express a connection between their use of English and their use of social media, which
supports the hypothesis that mediatization does influence their use of English.
References:
Androutsopoulos, Jannis & Stæhr, Andreas (2018). Moving methods online: Researching digital language prac-
tices. In Angela Creese & Adrian Blackledge (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity, (p.
118-132). London: Routledge.

998
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Revisiting ideologies of English in the Nordic countries


– setting the scene

Panel contribution

Dr. Janus Mortensen 1 , Dr. Dorte Lønsmann 1


1. University of Copenhagen

In this paper – and the panel it introduces – we set out to explore how language ideologies related to English
have changed over the past 25 years in the Nordic region. From the middle of the 20th century onwards, English
has increasingly come to be seen as an indispensable language in the Nordic countries, for the individual as
well as for society. English is the dominant foreign language in primary and secondary school, it is increasingly
adopted as a medium of instruction in higher education, it plays a prominent role in popular culture, and it is
considered the default language of international business. In short, as in many other parts of the world, English
is a language associated with great promise – a powerful semiotic resource in practical as well as language
ideological terms. Yet, the increased importance of English in the Nordic region has also caused concern. This
came most clearly to the fore as part of the domain loss debate in the early 2000s where English was regularly
framed as a threat to local Nordic languages. While these language ideological stances undoubtedly linger, the
domain loss debate is much less prominent today. Taking our starting point in an overview of key themes in
the literature on English in the Nordic countries and drawing on ongoing research in the ENIDA project at the
University of Copenhagen, we explore how recent processes of social change, including increased transnational
mobility and new forms of mediatization, have helped shape – and potentially change – language ideologies
related to English in the Nordic countries. Our argument is that ideologies of English in the Nordic countries
– now more than ever – need to be approached as complex, multidimensional phenomena that cannot, and
should not, be reduced to a simple dichotomy of ‘opportunity vs threat’ which has been a common trope in the
discussions around English since the domain loss debate at the beginning of the century.

999
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of English for young Norwegians

Panel contribution

Dr. Ulrikke Rindal 1


1. University of Oslo

This contribution reports a study that explores ideologies of English among children and adolescents in Norway.
The paper presents data from qualitative interviews with 12 participants aged 6, 11 and 15 who have English
as an additional language (L2), investigating how their English language practices relate to identity work and
experiences of ownership of English.
English does not have any official status in Norway, but formal instruction begins year 1, and English is a manda-
tory school subject for 11 years with its own curriculum separate from other foreign languages. Children and
adolescents are daily exposed to considerable amounts of English outside of school, particularly through pop-
ular and social media. Although traditionally categorised as a ‘foreign’ language in Norway, English is today
“simply a fact of 21st-century life” for young Norwegians (Linn, 2016, p. 201).
The interview study is part of the research project STAGE – STarting AGe and Extramural English, which in-
vestigates the relative influence of extramural English (self-initiated English use outside of school) on English
language proficiency (Sundqvist, 2023). STAGE is a multiple-method study with participants from grades 1, 6
and 10 from Norway and Flanders, Belgium (N=900), including data from language logs, questionnaires and var-
ious proficiency tests. The interview participants (N=12) are selected from the larger STAGE sample based on
the quantitative data sources, aiming to include participants with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The participants are interviewed in pairs in a room at their school. In addition, I visit the youngest participants
in their home to conduct additional informal interviews with artefacts in combination with observations. In-
terviews across all levels are semi-structured, with age-appropriate operationalisations of concepts related to
language ideologies.
Based on informal conversations with a selection of the participants, the data is expected to show how English
is related to media and the internet, and different from the English taught in school. Participants at all levels
are expected to consider English a language that they acquire naturally. The older participants are expected to
engage on interactive digital platforms outside of school that are closely related to their interests and identities,
thus involving English in their identity work.
Increased extramural English adds to an already multifaceted sociolinguistic climate in Norway, leading to
complex ideologies related to English. The role of English for young Norwegians challenges traditional cate-
gorisations where the status of English is defined by national borders (e.g., Kachru, 1985), and has considerable
implications for how English is taught in school and in higher education.
References
Kachru, B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle.
In R. Quirk & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp.
11-30). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Linn, A. (2016). Investigating English in Europe: Contexts and Agendas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sundqvist, P. (2023, 30 January). Starting age and extramural English: Learning English in and outside of school
in Norway and Flanders (STAGE). https://www.uv.uio.no/ils/english/research/projects/stage/

1000
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of English in Nordic multilingual families: help or


hindrance to the national language?

Panel contribution

Dr. Kaisa Pietikäinen 1 , Ms. Louisa Gühr 2


1. NHH Norwegian School of Economics, 2. University of Jyväskylä

The Nordic countries represent an interesting case in globalisation because of their high English competence
without having English as an official language. Among other contexts explored in the panel, this has affected
where and how romantic relationships are sought for and how families are established in the region. On the
one hand, Nordic citizens’ English skills expand their opportunities to find a desirable partner from abroad, but
on the other hand, not knowing the local language(s) represents a barrier for the foreign spouses to settle in and
become fully-fledged members of the Nordic society. Having English as a lingua franca between the parents also
poses both threats and opportunities for their children’s multilingual development, and the parents may find
themselves in a situation where they need to adjust their language practices in order to cope with challenges
brought about by their multilingual realities.
This paper explores interviews of four Nordic-international families residing in Finland and Norway where one
parent is a highly skilled migrant who has relocated to the country either before or after meeting their Nordic
spouse. All four couples began their relationships using English as their lingua franca, and none of them had
English as their first language (L1).
Combining qualitative content analysis with phenomenography, we first seek to investigate the role of English
in the couples’ reported language practices, particularly from the perspective of the non-Nordic partner. Our
findings reveal a contradicting relationship to English as both a support and a hindrance – even an obstruction
– to learning the local language. In three of the four families we investigate, English had, however, remained as
the main private language between the parents, and had the emotional attachment of having been the language
through which the relationship had been built and sustained (see also Pietikäinen 2018).
We then explore the role of English as a part of the families’ multilingual familylects (Van Mensel, 2018). While in
one family, English had an almost equal, uncontested role with the two parental L1s as a part of the familylect,
the other families described more negative stances toward English, having planned to or already restricted its
use when children were around. For these three families, English had less of an ideological importance than
the parental L1s, and the parents were certain that the children would learn English through the school system
anyway, so they did not see the need to further support it within the family.
Our findings illustrate the complex ideological stances educated Nordic-international families hold toward En-
glish: On the one hand, English is almost self-evident, a necessary currency learned through the education
system, used for personal purposes and sculpted to suit individual needs. On the other hand, English may im-
pede the non-Nordic partners from learning the necessary “local currency”: the local language; or it excludes
the children from the interactions between the parents, which is why some of the families had implemented
strategies to limit the use of English at home. We conclude the paper with suggestions for further inquiry.

1001
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“ ‘In Denmark we speak Danish’. No, we speak English in


Denmark”: Ideologies about English in Denmark

Panel contribution

Dr. Jacob Thögersen 1 , Dr. Dorte Lønsmann 1 , Dr. Kamilla Kraft 1


1. University of Copenhagen

In this presentation, we investigate current attitudes to and ideologies about English in Denmark using results
obtained through two different methods: A large-scale survey and a focus group study. As a consequence of
globalization, migration and mediatization, English has come to play a larger role in Denmark in the last few
decades. No longer just a foreign language, English has a wide range of uses and meanings in Denmark, often
positioned in relation to Danish culture and language.
In order to draw up a language ideological landscape, we combine data from two studies of English and global-
ization in Denmark that we are currently working on: a diachronic comparison of two surveys with 850 partic-
ipants each and a qualitative study using ethnographic focus group interviews. Using both types of data allows
us to compare and contrast the results from direct and more indirect methods of studying language attitudes.
To study the current lay of the land as well as its changes, we compare our 2022 survey to a similar study
conducted more than 25 years ago (Preisler 1999). In comparing the results from these two large-scale surveys
conducted in 1995 and 2022 respectively, we are particularly interested in how assumptions of Danes’ English
competences have changed, and how attitudes towards English, e.g. ‘English as an opportunity’ vs. ‘English as
a threat’, have changed as well as remained the same.
In the qualitative study, we analyse what attitudes and ideologies about English emerge in different social
groups. The groups have been selected based on (1) their degree of local vs. global orientation, (2) their use
of online media, and (3) their age, based on the hypothesis that these background criteria will generate a repre-
sentation of groups with very different relationships to and uses of English, and subsequently a rich variety of
ideologies about English and globalization. For example, we find that a group of role-playing gamers with ties
to an international subculture subscribe to ideologies of both linguistic fluidity and monolingualism, and that
they associate each position with specific political values. In contrast, a group of retired farmers place great
value on Danish and their local community, while English is seen as an (inevitable) intrusion in their everyday
lives.
Taken together, the results indicate that the role of English in Denmark is informed by a range of ideologies,
pressuring established sociolinguistic orders and making way for new ones.

Preisler, Bent. 1999. Danskerne og det engelsk sprog. [The Danes and the English language] Frederiksberg:
Roskilde Universitetsforlag.

1002
Robust and flexible
interactive language
technology for human
empowerment (organized
by Andreas Liesenfeld,
Hendrik Buschmeier)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conversational AI Platform for Digital Robot-Assisted Autism


Therapy

Panel contribution

Dr. Sviatlana Höhn 1


1. LuxAI

Large general-purpose language models such as GPT3 (OpenAI), GPT-NeoX (EleutherAI) and LaMDA (Google)
have achieved highly notable performance in simulating fluent conversations. At the same time, the field of
digital therapeutic is developing into an important area of medicine with vast areas of applications. With the
ever-increasing application of digital therapeutics to be embedded in our natural environments, there is a high
need to empower these systems with more natural interaction and conversational capabilities. An example is
the QTrobot (LuxAI) with applications for therapy of persons with neurodevelopmental disorders. Currently,
the interaction capabilities of the QTrobot are tailored for persons with developmental age of 1-5 years. To
support therapy of persons of higher developmental ages, QTrobot needs more advanced conversational capa-
bilities. However, the application of large language models such as GPT3 and GPT-Neo in digital therapeutics is
limited because they lack important requirements such as trustworthiness, quality assurance, governance, ex-
plainability, auditability, etc which are needed for digital therapeutics. Moreover, language models of this size
are currently only available for English. However, digital therapeutics in the European context must be offered
in different European languages. To empower the QTrobot with the right level of conversational functionality,
we design a conversational platform that covers multiple European languages in addition to English, allows
for full control of the conversation while offering powerful language understanding capabilities, implement
methodology and tools for non-technical people, such as therapists and parents, to easily use and extend the
conversational functionality for their patients and children. We explore how external dialogue management
and knowledge bases can be integrated on top of the large, general-purpose language models, to enable fully
controlled therapeutic conversations. We pay attention to intellectual property rights in the training data to
make the QTrobot more interactive while ensuring its ethics, trustworthiness, and therapeutic dialogue design.
This talk will outline the design of the system, the technical and scientific challenges as well as the opportuni-
ties that will become available for researchers working in non-technical disciplines, due to the new platform
availability.

1004
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Culturally-aware educational language technologies

Panel contribution

Prof. Justine Cassell 1


1. Inria

Children seamlessly shift their ways of speaking, adopting and adapting language they hear spoken by adults
around them, as well as constructing their own variants. These speaking styles play an important role as chil-
dren experiment with who they want to be, and how they want to be perceived. They also allow children grow-
ing up in situations where different dialects or languages are in contact to mark their affiliation to dominant
and minority ethnic, racial, and gender identities (Rampton 1995).
Young people who move between marginalized and mainstream communities often report code-switching as
a way to maintain affiliation with their home community, while also making their way in a world where the
standard dialect is associated with various kinds of success (Kallmeyer & Keim, 2003). However, moving back
and forth may lead to what Ogbu (2008) has called “oppositional culture” to describe how school systems may
inadvertently set up a situation where the student feels the need to define her identity contra the expectations
of the school, and for that reason to refuse the dialect that the school insists on.
Unfortunately, language technologies, including and very persistently, educational technologies, may inadver-
tently carry negative stereotypes about ethnicity and how it is carried in language, leading to stress and lack of
a sense of agency as children try to navigate a path that allows them to benefit both from the support of their
community and the opportunities offered by mainstream education.
My students and I have examined this issue by building “culturally-aware” educational language technologies,
and specifically “virtual peers” that either speak only the child’s own dialect, or that model a code-switching
strategy between what linguists call low-prestige and high-prestige dialects. Results using a variety of method-
ological approaches, in both one-shot and longitudinal studies, demonstrate the positive impact of technologies
such as these that take issues of culture, and of power, into account on children’s school performance. On the
other hand, careful assessments of the children’s reactions to the technologies shows that they will need further
development to improve the children’s own internalized biases against low-prestige dialect speakers.
References
Cassell, J. (2022). Socially Interactive Agents as Peers. In The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents. Lugrin,
Pelachaud, Traum (eds.). ACM Press, New York.
Finkelstein, S., Yarzebinski, E., Vaughn, C., Ogan, A., & Cassell, J. (2013) “The effects of culturally-congruent edu-
cational technologies on student achievement”. in Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED).
Finkelstein, S., Yarzebinski, E., Vaughn, C., & Cassell, J. (2013) “Modeling ethnicity in/with technology: Using
virtual agents to understand sociolinguistic variation.” in Proceedings of NWAV 42,, Oct 17- 20, 2013.
W. Kallmeyer & I. Keim. 2003. Linguistic variation and the construction of social identity in a German-Turkish
setting. In: J. Androutsopoulos and A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. John
Benjamins , Amsterdam, 29–46.
U. Ogbu. 1992. Understanding cultural diversity and learning. Educ. Res. 21, 8, 5–24.
Rampton. 1995. Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialisation. Pragmatics 5, 4,
485–513.

1005
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Explainable Embodied Intelligence for Collaborative Robots:


An Interactive Approach

Panel contribution

Dr. Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos 1 , Prof. David Schlangen 1


1. University of Potsdam

Over the past century, we have encountered a historical transition from an economy established throughout
the manufacturing industry to an economy characterised by information technology. Technological artefacts
shape how we live, work, learn, and communicate. With the rapid advancement of machine-learning
methods, the last decade has seen substantial progress in collaborative robotics, promising to bring together
manufacturing and information technology, and enable that technology to work in the physical world.

One of the main barriers is that AI systems are inherently opaque, unable to explain how decisions are taken
through prediction algorithms. In the field of explainable AI, some researchers argue that systems do not al-
ways need to be transparent, as humans are also not always able to explain how they take decisions [1]. Others
believe that model transparency does not only have scientific value, but also societal implications in expos-
ing biases [2], either in decision-making or in the data utilised [3]. The interactive approach of explainability
places explanations at the same level as other communicative actions, which differs from the interpretability
perspective of making statistical causality more transparent. Explanations also portray a significant factor in
the development of trust in AI systems [4]. Human-centred explanations should be generated along with algo-
rithmic transparency; explanation interfaces should be able to determine how to convey decisions in human
terms.
We propose that explanations should be examined from the perspective of common ground, with XAI inter-
faces generating explanations utilising language models, along with their classification predictions [5]. There is
a lack of explainability work tailored to interactions with users not knowledgeable of how these systems work,
and in particular, how to best convey explanations to a diverse set of users with different expectations. Exist-
ing approaches conceive explanations as autonomous processes decoupled from dynamic user environments,
without knowing whether an explanation is needed, or how to best convey it.
Data-driven generation of explanations promises great potential for HCI, where traditionally explanations have
been limited to system failures and miscommunication [6]. In pragmatics, utterance production is known to
be a collaborative process; natural-language explanations should as well be adapted to the user’s needs and
concurrent to changes in the environment. We discuss how knowledge gets transferred from one agent to
another through language, embodied actions, and explanations, both in moments of successful communication
and in miscommunication.
References
[1] Gunning, Stefik, Choi, Miller, Stumpf, Yang. “XAI—Explainable artificial intelligence”. Science robotics
(2019).
[2] Hendricks, Burns, Saenko, Darrell, Rohrbach. “Women also snowboard: Overcoming bias in captioning
models”. ECCV (2018).
[3] Goodman, Flaxman. “European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a “right to explana-
tion””. AI magazine (2017).
[4] Ribeiro, Singh, Guestrin. “”Why should I trust you?” Explaining the predictions of any classifier”. SIGKDD
(2016).
[5] Attari, Heckmann, Schlangen. “From explainability to explanation: Using a dialogue setting to elicit annota-
tions with justifications”. SIGdial (2019).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

[6] Kontogiorgos, Tran, Gustafson, Soleymani. “A systematic cross-corpus analysis of human reactions to robot
conversational failures”. ICMI (2021).

Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) project 423217434 (Recolage).

1007
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Field testing an interactive language technology in an elderly


care facility

Panel contribution

Ms. Rosalyn Langedijk 1 , Prof. Kerstin Fischer 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

This study focuses on the lessons learned from a one-week long case study in which we deployed a drink-serving
robot in a German elderly care facility.
In our study, a drink-serving robot served orange juice, apple juice and water to the residents who were sitting
in the common area of the care facility. The robot facilitated interactions with the residents by using speech. For
safety reasons, the navigation and the speech of the robot were controlled by wizards, i.e. by human operators
who controlled the robot manually.
Our results show challenges with respect to speech synthesis, speech recognition and situation understanding.
Regarding speech synthesis, our observations show that the synthesized speech by the robot was often not heard
by residents with hearing aids. In our study, the experimenter (or a caregiver) was forced to repeat the robot
utterances to 22.3% of the residents because they could not understand what it was saying. The problem may
not only due to the (not adaptable) loudness of the robot’s voice, but also due to the specific voice the robot was
using or due to the fact that the voice was synthesized and thus not recognized as relevant; in many cases, the
robot utterances were just ignored.
Furthermore, the robot itself made sounds that caused problems for some residents who were using hearing
aids; one resident did not come to the common room when the robot was there because of feedback in her
hearing device.
Regarding speech recognition, the older persons we observed tended to speak quietly, and their low voices make
it hard for an automatic speech processing system to recognize their speech.
Regarding natural language understanding and situation awareness, we observed several instances in which
the robot interrupted interactions between residents; here, more advanced natural language processing would
have been beneficial.
In our field studies, we furthermore observed that residents in care facilities have very different needs; for
instance, some residents suffer from dementia, some from diabetes (and hence should not have all drinks),
some suffer from hearing or vision loss; and some residents use a wheelchair, while others use a walker, and
many are restricted in mobility (which makes it difficult for them to use a touch screen, for instance). Therefore,
a care facility is a place with great diversity, which requires adaptable and flexible technology that can smoothly
adjust to its individual users.
To sum up, building robust interactive language technologies for the use in elderly care facilities requires an
understanding of not just basic interactional principles but also the challenges posed by the diversity of the
residents.

1008
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How do users with mild cognitive impairment deal with


Conversational User Interfaces? Investigating situations of
signaling trouble

Panel contribution

Prof. Karola Pitsch 1


1. University of Duisburg-Essen

While Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are mainly designed for and targeted at ‘typcial’ users who dispose
of adult standard communicational abilities, they could eventually provide an extra benefit for so-called ‘atypi-
cal’ users. For example, persons with mild cognitive impairment or elderly participants might be able to extend
their autonomy in the routine activities of daily life, if a technical system was able to assist e.g. in managing a
stable daily structure and rhythm. In order to develop assistive systems for such so-called ‘atypical’ user groups,
empirically-grounded insights into their ways of communicational dealing with a CUI are required.
Against this background, we will explore how a person with mild cognitive impairment uses a CUI (research
prototype involving speech, a virtual agent with head and arm gestures, a calendar display) over a period of
several weeks in their home (see Kopp et al. 2018). The system is set up to be used for entering appointments
in a calendar application, to suggest potential activities and events to the user and to remind him/her of the
activities which are planned for the corresponding day. Analysis is based on a corpus of video-taped record-
ings which stem from an interdisciplinary project which has focused on the development of socially cooperative
dialogue for technical agents (e.g. Kopp et al. 2018). In particular, the system is equipped with facilities for man-
aging dialogue in an incremental way, to signal understanding and to initiate repair sequences (Yaghoubzadeh
& Kopp 2017). While the investigations so far have mainly centered around the design of the multimodal CUI
and its evaluation (e.g. Opfermann & Pitsch 2017, Cyra & Pitsch 2017), in this presentation, the focus will shift
on exploring the ways in which the user attempts to deal with the CUI and how this evolves over time. Con-
sidering in particular sequences involving repair, we will also discuss in which way the user’s conduct and
communicational practices might be considered as specific for an ‘a-typical’ user or rather reflect more general
communicational practices in situations with a CUI.
Cyra, K., & Pitsch, K. (2017). Dealing with ‘Long Turns’ Produced by Users of an Assistive System. How Missing
Uptake and Recipiency Lead to Turn Increments. In: Ro-Man 2017, Lisbon.
Kopp, S., Brandt, M., Buschmeier, H., Cyra, K., Freigang, F., Krämer, N., . . . Yaghoubzadeh, R. (2018). Con-
versational Assistants for Elderly Users. The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue. Paper presented
at the AAMAS 2018 Workshop on Intelligent Converstional Agents in Home and Geriatric Care Applications,
Stockholm, Sweden.
Opfermann, C., & Pitsch, K. (2017). Reprompts as Error Handling Strategy in Human-Agent-Dialog? User Re-
sponses to a System’s Display of Non-Understanding. In: Ro-Man 2017, Lisbon.
Yaghoubzadeh, R., & Kopp, S. (2017). Enabling robust and fluid spoken dialogue with cognitively impaired
users. SIGDIAL 2017, Saarbrücken.

1009
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The machine/deep learning perspective for conversational AI


and the modeling of language specifics

Panel contribution

Prof. Chloe Clavel 1


1. Telecom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris

In this panel, I will discuss the potential of machine learning for the development of interactive language
technologies, particularly in the context of conversational AI. I will illustrate the problem of modelling lan-
guage specifics through machine learning using studies we have conducted. For example, I will present mod-
els trained to predict a user’s self-confidence and analyse their ability to incorporate information about filled
pauses (Dinkar et al., 2020). I will also present the method we are developing to improve the explainability of
Machine/Deep Learning models by highlighting the linguistic phenomena that play a role in different prediction
tasks (the hedging strategies of the tutor (Raphalen et al., 2022), the quality of a particular speech (Hemamou et
al., 2021)). Finally, I will discuss how the paradigm behind the social science discipline of conversation analysis
can support machine learning research for the development of a human-robot interaction that better takes into
account the specifics of each interaction (Rollet & Clavel, 2020).
Références
Nicolas Rollet, Chloé Clavel. (2020) “Talk to you later” Doing social robotics with conversation analysis. Towards
the development of an automatic system for the prediction of disengagement, Article in : Interaction Studies
Vol. 21:2 pp. 269–293
Dinkar, Tanvi, Pierre Colombo, Matthieu Labeau, and Chloé Clavel. (2020).« The importance of fillers for text
representations of speech transcripts. » In Proceedings of EMNLP
Leo Hemamou;Arthur Guillon;Jean-Claude Martin;Chloe Clavel. (2021) Multimodal Hierarchical Attention Neu-
ral Network: Looking for Candidates Behaviour which Impact Recruiter’s Decision, IEEE Trans. of Affective
Computing
Raphalen, Y., Clavel, C. & Cassell, J. (2022). « You might think about slightly revising the title »: identifying hedges
in peer-tutoring interactions. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL), Long Papers.

1010
Shaping humour in
interaction (organized by
Esther Linares-Bernabéu,
Leonor Ruiz Gurillo)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Contextualized Laughter and Joint Construction of Humor in


Dementia Interaction: A Discourse-analytic Case Study

Panel contribution

Ms. Carolin Schneider 1


1. Utrecht University

Keywords: dementia, conversational humor, discourse analysis, joint joking, humor support, co-constructed
humor
In social interaction, people living with dementia and their conversational partners can encounter many com-
municational challenges (Hamilton 2019) due to the high dependence on contextual knowledge, cognitive re-
sources, and emotional demands (cf. Wray 2020). It is well documented that pragmatic abilities, including the
comprehension and production of humor, are among the first communicational abilities affected by neurode-
generative disorders such as dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT) (cf. Bayles & Tomoeda 2007). Humor,
nevertheless, may still be valued by people living with DAT to foster interpersonal relationships and as a means
to present themselves as worthy, funny, and capable communicational partners (Davis et al 2016; Schneider &
Qalaj forthc.). At the intersection of humor and dementia, thus far, retained pragmatic abilities are still under-
researched.
Thus, this study investigates data from three narrative interviews held with people living with DAT and their
primary care partners speaking English and Spanish in informal settings. The analysis focusses on the humor-
ous moves employed by the people living with DAT and their conversational partners, their co-constructions
and respective humor support. Drawing on the ethnomethodological approach to discourse analysis of humor
(cf. Davies 1984), this study sheds light on the complex construction of joint humor and laughter as well as their
functions in discourse.
Results indicate that, in line with prior findings, laughter is not always indicative of humor (cf. Priego-Valverde
2003), especially so within the context of dementia (cf. Lindholm 2008), when laughter might be a sign of com-
municational trouble spots or nervousness. However, in particular, contextually situated laughter can be a
form of shared humor and joint joking when the person living with dementia is otherwise not talking much.
Further, people living with dementia demonstrate their trust in ‘common ground’ (Clark 1996) by competently
formulated puns and humorous utterances.
References
Bayles, Kathryn; Kimberly McCullough; Cheryl K Tomoeda. (2020). Cognitive- communication Disorders of MCI
and Dementia: Definition, Assessment, and Clinical Management. San Diego: Plural Publishing.
Clark, Herbert H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620539
Davies, Catherine. (1984). “Joint joking: Improvisational humorous episodes in conversation.” In Annual Meet-
ing of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 10, 360-371.
Davis, Boyd H.; Margaret Maclagan; Dena Shenk. (2016).”The silent violence of marginalization and teasing in
dementia care residences”. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 4(1). 35-61.
Hamilton, Heidi. (2019). Language, Dementia, and Meaning Making, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lindholm, Camilla. (2008). “Laughter, communication problems and dementia”. Communication & medicine,
5(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.1558/cam.v5i1.3
Prieogo-Valverde, Béatrice. (2003). “L’humour dans la conversation familière: description et analyse linguis-
tiques.” L’humour dans la conversation familière. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Schneider, Carolin; Besa Qalaj. (forthcoming). “ ‘Cómo te sientes?- With my butt!’ Code-choice Related Humor
in Bilingual Speakers Living with Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type”.

1012
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Wray, Allison. (2020). The dynamics of dementia communication. New York: Oxford University Press.

1013
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Fictional interaction in humorous children’s narratives: a


pragmatic analysis of the corpus CHILDHUM

Panel contribution

Dr. Larissa Timofeeva-Timofeev 1


1. University of Alicante

This presentation aims to analyse the construction of fictional interaction in humorous narratives written by
8-, 10- and 12-year-old children, which belong to the corpus CHILDHUM (under construction). This corpus is in-
tended to contain samples of humorous stories written by primary schoolchildren from different areas of Spain,
processed and tagged according to the pragmatic tagging system of humour markers (Timofeeva-Timofeev &
Ruiz-Gurillo, 2021) developed by the GRIALE research group (https://griale.dfelg.ua.es/).
Our informants were asked to write their humorous stories following some basic guides pursuing certain the-
matic homogeneity of all the samples. Thus, in this paper, stories about an imaginary school exchange program
with Mars are presented. More precisely, we will analyse how children shape the fiction of their conversational
interaction with Martians and how these data may be correlated with their psychosocial and metalinguistic
maturation.
The young writers of our study compose their written stories assuming a range of features that they intuitively
associate with literary narratives. Therefore, they go into a special type of interaction, that is, literary com-
munication, where they should be able to adequately manage different components of a literary fact, that is,
the speaker, the imaginary addressee, and the context in a broad sense (cfr. Chico-Rico 2021). It is clear that
this competent manage implies high levels of metalinguistic maturity, and more specifically, of the metatextual
and the metapragmatic sub-competences (Gombert 1992, 1997; Doherty and Perner 1998; Myhill 2012; Timo-
feeva Timofeev 2017; Timofeeva Timofeev and Ruiz Gurillo 2021). In this sense, the (scarce) previous body of
research points at the metatextual sub-competence as one of the latest to be acquired (cfr. Myhill 2012), which
is why children aged 8 and 10 still demonstrate a high level of ‘orality’ in their written narratives (Crespo et al.
2010). Moreover, at these ages, a clear lack of confidence in inferential abilities of the addressee is observed
(cfr. Timofeeva Timofeev 2016; 2017; 2021).
Our preliminary approach to the topic reveals that informants aged 8 basically write as they speak. Further-
more, at the age of 10 it seems to be a turning point towards a higher awareness about typographical conventions
of written representation of the orality. In regard to the psychosocial aspects, children aged 8 demonstrate cer-
tain aggressiveness towards Martians’ image, whereas, again, this seems to descend in 10-year-olds’ narratives.

1014
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender and Humor in Lebanon

Panel contribution

Ms. Sasha Ghazal Louis-Karam 1


1. Université Paris Nanterre

What strongly distinguishes a person’s conversational style from another’s is (among other features) their use
of humor which appears to be sex-linked (Tannen, 2005). Conversational humor helps in mutual construction
of identities and is strongly determined by the gender of participants (Boxer and Cortés-Conde, 1997, as cited
in Norrick, 2010). Research conducted on humor have identified power and solidarity as some of its main func-
tions (Coates; 2014; Hay, 2000), and these have equally proved to be some of the major themes of gender and
discourse studies (Kendall & Tannen, 2015; Tannen, 1994). Cultural miscommunication may occur between men
and women even when both parties attempt to treat each other as equals because they belong to two different
sociolinguistic subcultures and have learned to converse differently (Maltz & Borker, 1982). Since gendered
patterns of interaction as well as humor are culturally grounded (Hay, 2000), it would be interesting to investi-
gate the applicability of this theoretical framework in different cultures outside the US and Europe (Bell, 2015;
Scollon & Scollon, 2001); in this case, Middle East’s Lebanon as its unique culture presents an interesting case
to look into due to the complexity of the “hybrid” Lebanese identity that is at once Arab and Western (Louis
& Khoudary, 2021). Thus, thispaper employs an interactional sociolinguistic (IS) approach to examine gender
differences in using humor in spontaneous, everyday conversations of Lebanese men and women and the oc-
currence of miscommunication patterns and stereotyping as a result of humor usage as well as failed humor. In
this respect, the main corpus of this study consists of two live, naturally-occurring dinner conversations among
10 Lebanese friends of equal gender distribution and subjecting them to careful analysis using IS methodology
(taking into account context, playback, markers of humor, miscommunication and misinterpretation, and con-
trasting gender differences and identities).
References
Bell, N. (2015). We are not amused: Failed humor in interaction. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton.
Coates, J. (2014). Gender and humor in everyday conversation. In D. Chiaro, & R. Baccolini (Eds.), Gender and
humor: Interdisciplinary and international perspectives (pp. 147-164). New York, USA: Routledge.
Hay, J. (2000). Functions of humor in the conversations of men and women. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(6), 709-
742.
Kendall, S., & Tannen, D. (2015). Discourse and gender. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The
handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 639-660).
Louis, S. & Khoudary, R. (2021). Lebanese conversational style and cultural values. Intercultural Pragmatics,
18(5), 571-604.
Maltz, D. N., & Borker, R. A. (1982). A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication. In J. J. Gumperz
(Ed.), Language and social identity (pp. 196-216). New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Norrick, N. R. (2010). Humor in interaction. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(4), 232-244.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2001). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Malden, Mass: Black-
well Publishers.
Tannen, D. (1994). Gender and discourse. New York, USA: Oxford University Press, Inc.
Tannen, D. (2005). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.

1015
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Humorous styles in a conversational radio show

Panel contribution

Ms. Natàlia Server Benetó 1


1. The Ohio State University

Using the paradigm stablished by research on conversational humor (Coates 2007; Norrick & Chiari 2009; Mul-
lan & Béal 2018) and interactive humor (Chovanec & Tsakona 2018; Ruiz Gurillo 2021a), I expand on the label
‘humorous conversation’ (Server Benetó, 2020), used previously to classify dialogic interactions whose main
goal is to create humor. In this investigation, I analyze the humorous styles used in one interactional context
of this type. The unit of analysis are 39 humorous sequences (Schegloff 2007; Ruiz Gurillo 2021b), taken from 3
episodes of the Spanish, humorous, conversational radio show ‘Nadie sabe nada’.
Given the constant framing of the program through a ‘humorous mode’ (Raskin 1985; Boxer & Cortés Conde,
1997; Shilikhina 2017), the humorous sequences are first delimited, indicating the initiation strategies or con-
textualization cues (Kotthoff 2006) used when possible. The analysis then focuses on the humorous style(s)
present on each sequence, divided into affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating (Martin et al.,
2003). These styles have been successfully located in colloquial conversations (Lampert & Erving Tripp, 2006;
Ruiz Gurillo, 2021b) and humorous monologues (Linares-Bernabéu 2021). However, the intersection of these
two loci has not been explored. Therefore, the present investigation fills the gap in the literature by focusing on
a form of atypical conversations, particularly, in that conceptualized to be humorous.
The results show that initiation strategies for the humorous sequences can be located, demonstrating that even
within a broad humorous mode, speakers design and orient their interaction in particular ways. The predom-
inant humorous style is affiliative (46%), closely followed by aggressive (37%), self-defeating (13%) and self-
enhancing (4%). Thus, there is a combative, humorous style in the show, leading to a discussion on the limits
of interpersonal offense, as it seems apparent that confrontative humor is not rejected by the interlocutors, but
encouraged, as it serves their overarching goal of being funny to a third-party.
This investigation applies core concepts on conversational humor and interactive humor to a scarcely re-
searched context which combines a conversational structure with a humorous goal with a constant humorous
key. The results lead to considerations on the framing of humorous sequences, on the acceptability of using
aggressive and self-defeating humorous styles, as well as on the strategies employed in making an audience
laugh. This expands on previous research within the field of interactional humor, poses new questions, and
contributes to the understanding of how humor takes shape in interaction(s).

1016
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interactional humour strategies in improvised theatre:


Co-constructing humour in performed fiction

Panel contribution

Prof. Daniela Landert 1


1. Heidelberg University

In this paper, I investigate humour strategies in one specific type of performed fiction, improvised theatre. In
improvised theatre, performers create fictional scenes spontaneously in front of a live audience. Humour is one
central aspect of such performances. Due to the spontaneous and collaborative nature of the performance, hu-
mour in such settings is often co-constructed by the performers (Landert 2021). In addition, audience responses
– laughter, emotional sounds, verbal contributions – can contribute to the identification and development of hu-
mour in the course of the performance. The aim of this paper is to study such collaborative humour strategies
both quantitatively and qualitatively.
This study helps bridge the gap between humour research in spontaneous conversation (e.g. Attardo 2015;
Norrick 2003) and in scripted fiction (e.g. Brock 2016; Dynel 2011; Messerli 2016; Simpson and Bousfield 2017).
Humour in improvised theatre shares similarities with both these settings. As a consequence, the study of
humour in improvised theatre can identify continuities across spontaneous conversation and scripted fiction.
The data for this study come from a corpus of video recordings of improvised theatre performances and cor-
responding transcriptions. They include performances of four duos of improvisers: Ella & Stacey, Katy & Rach,
Middleditch & Schwartz and TJ & Dave. All performances share strong similarities with respect to form: They
consist of coherent narratives of around 35 to 60 minutes. At the same time they differ from each other with re-
spect to the size of the audience, gender of the performers and style of performance. Taking audience-laughter
as the starting point, the realisation of humour is analysed through a multimodal analysis of the video material.
This is followed by a classification of the instances and subsequent quantification. The results show that the
main communicative strategies for creating humour are similar across the four sets of data, but that the way
and the frequency with which they are used differ depending on the performance style of the improvisers.
References
Attardo, Salvatore. 2015. Humor and laughter. In Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin
(eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 168–188. Second Edition. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Brock, Alexander. 2016. The borders of humorous intent – The case of TV comedies. Journal of Pragmatics 95.
58–66.
Dynel, Marta. 2011. “I’ll be there for you!”. On participation-based sitcom humour. In Marta Dynel (ed.),
The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 210), 311–333. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Landert, Daniela. 2021. The spontaneous co-creation of comedy: Humour in improvised theatrical fiction.
Journal of Pragmatics 173. 68–87
Messerli, Thomas C. 2016. Extradiegetic and character laughter as markers of humorous intentions in the sitcom
2 Broke Girls. Journal of Pragmatics 95. 79–92.
Norrick, Neal R. 2003. Issues in conversational joking. Journal of Pragmatics 35. 1333–1359.
Simpson, Paul & Derek Bousfield. 2017. Humor and stylistics. In Salvatore Attardo (ed.), The Routledge Hand-
book of Language and Humor, 158–173. New York / Oxon: Routledge.
Sinkeviciute, Valeria. 2019. Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness. A pragmatic analysis of social interac-
tion. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

1017
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Making fun without words: the use of WhatsApp stickers in


group interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. María Belén Alvarado Ortega 1 , Dr. Esther Linares-Bernabéu 2


1. University of Alicante, 2. University of Valencia

The aim of this study is to show how humour is negotiated in the course of interactions through the use of stickers
in Whatsapp. Indeed, users choose to use stickers for humorous purposes, as they are potentially perceived as
more ‘expressive’ (Tang & Hew, 2019, p. 2459) than emoji. We should also take into accoint that this process of
co-constructing humour in WhatsApp groups is shaped by the affordances and constraints of the virtual spaces
in which these interactions take place (Tagg & Lyons, 2021). As the focus of this research is the co-construction of
humour, the analysis has also been inspired by research on the pragmatics of humour (Linares Bernabéu, 2021;
Yus, 2022). Thus, the corpus material selected for the purposes of this study gathers 523 stickers collected from
8 different WhatsApp groups. Regarding ethical concerns, participants’ consent was granted and references to
all participants are fully anonymised.
Our results reveal that stickers can be seen as fulfilling not only a comic purpose but also a pragmatic function
of mitigation (Herring & Dainas, 2017), and might be experienced as non-face-threatening, thus enhancing com-
municative fluidity (Lim, 2015). Likewise, we have identified that 67% of the conversations contain a stream
of stickers. This is not surprising, since repetition has long been recognised as an important interpersonal re-
source which structures everyday conversation and enables the (re)forming of patterns, while the development
of ingroup resources is an established humour strategy.

1018
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Non-impolite evaluations in the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus. The


case of mock impoliteness in Spanish

Panel contribution

Prof. Leonor Ruiz Gurillo 1


1. University of Alicante

Mock impoliteness can be defined as a specific instance of evaluated politeness, one in which interlocutors per-
ceive an impolite act, such as jocular mockery, insult, banter, etc. as non-impolite (Haugh & Bousfield 2012).
Following the model of the third wave of politeness and Sinkeviciute (2019), the aim of this paper is twofold.
First, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of mock impoliteness in multi-party, colloquial conversa-
tion. Second, it illustrates this phenomenon in a language other than English, looking at informal interactions
in Peninsular Spanish.
The database is composed of 148 humorous sequences from the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus
(http://www.observahumor.com/corpus_valesco) which were extracted from 67 real colloquial conversa-
tions in Peninsular Spanish from the Val.Es.Co. research group (www.valesco.es). Although these sequences
mostly show an affiliative style in endogroup sequences (Ruiz-Gurillo in press), mock impoliteness could be
identified in 25.67% of these ones.
A variety of aspects of the phenomenon were assessed using the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus. These included the
issue of which linguistic and paralinguistic elements are used by participants, and the interpretation of the
initial aggressive style focused on the target, be it the direct recipient in a discourse, another participant, an
absent third party, or something funny in the conversation. Finally, we also considered the question of whether
or not the humor introduced by mock impoliteness was sustained throughout a sequence. Results showed how
colloquial features function in these authentic conversations, especially in terms of how participants share
social equality and mutual knowledge in an unmarked space where a non-specialized topic is discussed (Briz et
al. 2002). Although in-group solidarity is sought (Dynel 2021), other collateral effects were also observed, such
as the promotion of social distance and the sense of feeling offended by the speaker (Culpeper 2011).
References:
Briz, Antonio & grupo Val.Es.Co.2002.Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales.Arco.
Culpeper, Jonathan.2011.Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence.CUP.
Dynel, Marta.2021.Humour and (mock) aggression: Distinguishing cyberbullying from roasting.Language &
Communication 81.17-36.
Haugh, Michael & Derek Bousfield. 2012. Mock impoliteness in interactions amongst Australian and British
speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 44.1099–1114.
Ruiz-Gurillo,Leonor.in press. Humor negotiation in interactional sequences in Spanish. In Linares-Bernabéu,
Esther (ed.),The pragmatics of humour in interactive contexts.John Benjamins.

1019
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic differences between left- and right-wing online


satirical news

Panel contribution

Dr. Shelby Miller 1 , Mr. Joshua Loomis 2 , Dr. Stephen Skalicky 3 , Prof. Salvatore Attardo 4
1. University of North Texas at Dallas, 2. Victoria College, 3. Victoria University of Wellington, 4. Texas A&M
University-Commerce

There is a broad consensus that there are significant differences in how left-wing (progressive) and right-wing
(conservative) satirical news websites (e.g., The Onion and Babylon Bee) employ linguistic resources for the
purpose of creating satire (Young, 2020; Sienkiewicz & Marx, 2022). While research has found that left and
right satirical news appropriate linguistic features of their parent genre in similar ways (i.e., news; Brugman
et al. In press), no studies have compared these two sources using fine-grained linguistic features which have
been shown to distinguish satirical from non-satirical texts (e.g., Skalicky and Crossley, 2015).
In this paper we use several text analytic techniques to determine whether left and right satire news websites
differ on a range of linguistic features. Specifically, we analyze the linguistic make-up of two small corpora of
satirical news, collected for this purpose, as well as a larger corpus of online satirical news, consists of the entire
set of stories from The Onion, Babylon Bee, and other web sites. The smaller corpus is balanced around themes
(e.g., targeting Biden vs Trump), to account for possible topic-related bias, whereas the larger corpus is intended
to capture broader linguistic trends from the different satirical news websites. We use a variety of text analysis
tools, such as LIWC (Boyd et al. 2022, SEANCE (Crossley et al. 2017), etc. to analyze the “sentiment” (affect,
subjectivity) or stance (Dubois, 2007) toward the subjects in the satirical news (both the targets of the satire and
those merely part of the situation). As is well-known, satire involves a critical stance vis-à-vis its target. We wish
to determine if this stance is modulated by other aspects of sentiment or other linguistic choices.
This analysis will shed light on how the genre of online news satire is organized, particularly on how the humor-
ous mode is signaled and/or construed. This is particularly significant due to the common confusion between
satirical (fake) news and real non-satirical news, evidenced by the fact that many publications and users “fall”
for the fake satirical news, i.e., consider them to be serious.

1020
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic study of affiliative style of humour in colloquial


conversation

Panel contribution

Ms. Anastasia Khaylina 1


1. University of Alicante

In recent years, scholars have studied humour styles primarily in the context of humorous genres (Greengross,
Martin, & Miller, 2012; Linares Bernabéu, 2021; Ruiz Gurillo, 2015; Russell, 2002). The focus of this paper, how-
ever, will be on how humour styles perform in colloquial conversations, a genre that is not humorous per se. To
do so, we will build on previous research carried out within the GRIALE group, such as that of Alvarado Ortega
(2016a, 2016b, 2021, 2022) and Ruiz Gurillo (2021, 2022). In this sense, the aim of this study is to observe the oc-
currence of the affiliative humour style proposed in the Humor Styles Questionnaire by Martin et al. (2003) in the
ironic-humorous sequences of the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus (http://www.observahumor.com/corpus_valesco)
through the pragmatic labelling developed within the GRIALE group (Ruiz Gurillo, 2012; Timofeeva Timofeev
& Ruiz Gurillo, 2021; Alvarado Ortega & Khaylina, in press).
Following Ruiz Gurillo’s (2012) elaboration of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo, 2001), we un-
derstand humour markers and indicators to be those linguistic choices speakers employ to generate humour
in conversation. These help the listener in the process of resolving incongruity by activating the inferences
required to extract the humorous meaning. Humour markers are paralinguistic, kinesic and typographic ele-
ments that accompany humour and help in the humorous interpretation, while humour indicators are linguistic
elements that are humorous procedures in a particular context (Ruiz Gurillo, 2012, pp. 78-86). In this way, an
attempt is made to investigate the existence of specific recurrent patterns of humour markers and indicators
that may be characteristic of the affiliative style of humour used in the corpus of colloquial conversations, and
consequently, how this style manifests in linguistic terms.

1021
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Relational connection and separation in a football team:


Conversational humour as relational practice

Panel contribution

Mr. Nicholas Hugman 1


1. The University of Queensland

Conversational humour is one of the most pervasive interpersonal practices. It is frequently employed to man-
age and negotiate our relationships with others, carrying out relational work among interlocutors and bringing
them together harmoniously. Conversely, scholars have noted the paradoxical nature of conversational hu-
mour, with regard to its concurrent construction of relational distance through possible out-group indexicalities
and subversive elements (Holmes & Marra, 2002).
The contradictory relational functions of humour have been investigated in a variety of different contexts, such
as the workplace (Chang, 2015), on social media (Zhao, 2020) and in initial interactions (Haugh, 2010). The
sporting context, however, has been largely neglected. This is a notable lacuna, given the prevalence of sport
in contemporary society, particularly team sport, which is a core site of human sociality. Addressing this gap,
in this paper I investigate how humour is used to accomplish relational work in one male amateur sports team.
The sport I have elected to focus on is football, given its status as the most widespread team sport on the planet
and significant sociocultural institution.
In analysing the participants’ relational work, I utilise Arundale’s (2020) Face-Constituting Theory (FCT) to ex-
amine the genesis and ongoing maintenance of relationships in the team. FCT views face as the participants’
interpretings of relational connection and separation, which exist in a dialectical interplay. I combine this un-
derstanding of face with Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of double-voicing, which considers discursive phenomena to
be the dialogic result of conflicting, sometimes contradictory voices. These voices are particularly manifest in
conversational humour, given its dichotomous, multilayered nature.
In the analysis, I examine naturally occurring sequences of humour before and after matches, collected using
ethnographic methods. I pay particular attention to the micro-level detail of these sequences, especially
the sequential organisation of social actions, as relational practices rest directly on this interactional detail.
From the analysis, it transpires that the participants engender both connection and separation through
their humorous practices. They construct the former through the affiliative practice of mode adoption,
orienting to the humorous tone of utterances and thereby indexing camaraderie. Against this backdrop, they
simultaneously engender separation by underscoring asymmetrical differences in different domains. Based on
these paradoxical relational orientations, I propose that a rapprochement of FCT and double-voicing is fruitful
when examining certain humorous practices.

Arundale, R. B. (2020). Communicating & relating: Constituting face in everyday interacting. Oxford University
Press.

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. M. Holquist (Ed.), translated by C.
Emerson and M.l Holquist. University of Texas Press.
Chang, W-L. M. (2015). Face and face practices in Chinese talk-in-interaction: A study in interactional
pragmatics. Equinox.

Haugh, M. (2010). Jocular mockery, (dis)affiliation, and face. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8), 2106-2119.
Holmes, J., & Marra, M. (2002). Over the edge? Subversive humor between colleagues and friends. Humor,
15(1), 65-87.

1022
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Zhao, L. (2020). Mock impoliteness and co-construction of hudui rituals in Chinese online interaction. Chinese
Journal of Applied Linguistics, 43(1), 45-63.

1023
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of GPT-3, an Artificial Intelligence creating


humor: exploring interaction with the audience in Jerry
Seinfeld’s routine

Panel contribution

Mr. Jose Antonio Ortega Gilabert 1


1. University of Alicante

One of the most important computer advances in recent years is the arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Specifically, the most notorious AIs are based on creative results, starting with graphic artistic creation
generated from basic inputs provided by the user -as in Midjourney (https://www.midjourney.com/home/),
Dall· E 2 (https://openai.com/dall-e-2/) or Stable Diffusion (https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-
diffusion)-, or the writing of texts of all sorts. In this last section of AIs, we should highlight GPT-3
(https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/), presented by OpenAI, which focuses on text generation. Consequently,
GPT-3 uses “deep learning” to replicate written human language quite satisfactorily (Dale, 2021).
The group GRIALE, from the University of Alicante (Spain), is studying humor from different aspects
of linguistics and, especially, pragmatics. Based on the scientific production presented by GRIALE
(https://griale.dfelg.ua.es/), the present work will focus on discovering what are the pragmatic strategies used
by Seinfeld in a specific humorous sequence of his speech to interact with the public (Ruiz Gurillo, 2019). After
that, the next step will be to do the same with the production of GPT-3 imitating the style of Jerry Seinfeld rou-
tine. The comparative analysis based on the use of humor markers and indicators (Timofeeva Timofeev and
Ruiz Gurillo, 2021) of both fragments will help us understand which are the humorist’s own characteristics, and
whether AI has been able to reproduce them.
Additionally, for a long time, the production of human language by a computer was thought to be a science fiction
concept. In fact, some aspects that belong to linguistics, such as humor, were believed to be unique to human
beings. Apparently, GPT-3 is able to create a piece of humorous monologue just like any other comedian would,
and it is surprisingly funny to humans. But how effective is, in a humorous sense, this monologue created by
an AI? What are the pragmatic foundations that GPT-3 employs to maintain contact with its “audience”? What
are the typical interaction markers that we can find in humorous monologues produced by an AI, and how are
they similar to those of humans? This study aims to answer all these questions.
To do so, we will analyze a fragment of a Jerry Seinfeld routine created by GPT-3 with the humorous style of this
specific monologist, as subject of study. Therefore, we will compare this fragment created by GPT-3, presented
in the video “AI Wrote and Performed a Jerry Seinfeld Routine!” (https://youtu.be/1onxri0duN0) by the content
creator Speaking of AI, with one of Jerry Seinfeld’s own production for the Netflix streaming platform (Demaio,
Jensen and Miller). Therefore, the main purpose of this work will be to analyze the Seinfeld’s kairos (Mock, 2012;
Bernabéu, 2022) and how an AI uses its “point of view” in a dialogic way as an interactive strategy to maintain
the audience attention. To achieve this, the markers and indicators of humor found in Seinfeld’s monologues
must be examined, in order to collect all of them and then compare them with what was produced by the AI.

1024
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Uhm, Bean.” – Interactional humour in films using


dephonemicised language

Panel contribution

Dr. Cornelia Gerhardt 1 , Dr. Maximiliane Frobenius 2


1. Saarland University, 2. WWU Münster

This contribution investigates interactional humour in comedy films where language is turned into incompre-
hensible sound. In classic comedy like Mr. Bean or M. Hulot, spoken language is deliberately dephonemicised
into a merely prosodic stream of suprasegmental verbal emission. This paper investigates the humorous func-
tion of willfully making language incomprehensible.
This deviation from naturally occurring language use creates humour in two ways: first, it creates an incon-
gruity; secondly, it serves to exaggerate characters and indicate their absurdity. Faced with incomprehensible
sound (albeit with regular intonation patterns), the audience needs to fall back on their knowledge of embodied,
multimodal resources, such as the characters’ movement in space or use of artifacts. Importantly, the audience
relies on cognitive schemata, their general world knowledge, to follow the activities on screen and make the
doings of the characters meaningful. When at this point something unexpected happens in the sequence of un-
folding actions, against the backdrop of the ‘normal’ or ‘usual’, it is made even more incongruent, absurd and
funny.
Mr. Bean, for example, is known to use very few words, a seemingly unnatural tone of voice, and a low and
mumbly voice. Often gestures and facial expressions carry the semantic load while the words turn into an
unintelligible stream of sounds. In the example below, Mr. Bean is approached by the parking valet at a hotel
reception:
1 Valet: °(inaudible) your car,
2 Sir,°
3 Bean: ((puts suitcase on reception desk, opens it, hands the valet a steering wheel))
4 ((audience laughter))
Here, the audience is not meant to fully understand the valet’s words. Instead, they need to ask themselves what
usually happens in such a situation. When Mr. Bean produces a steering wheel rather than the expectable keys,
the incongruity of the scene and the absurdity of his behavior is reinforced through this use of incomprehensible
speech. This use of language in film sets up the humorous situation by making the audience fall back on known
patterns, accessible through the characters’ embodiments, props, and general context for the production of
meaning.
Based on a corpus of 180 minutes of Mr Bean sketches and complementary material by other comics, this con-
tribution investigates this use of multimodal, embodied interactional patterns in humorous films and TV pro-
ductions. It uses an EMCA approach, employing the models of multimodal gestalt (Mondada 2014) and multi-
modal activity (Reber and Gerhardt 2019), adding to our understanding of coherence (Bublitz 2011). Besides
the theoretical implications for the study of the timing of multiple semiotic resources in interaction and filmic
interaction more specifically, we hope to contribute to the development of the field of humor theories from the
EMCA perspective.
Bublitz, Wolfram. (2011). “Cohesion and coherence.” In Discursive Pragmatics, ed. by Jan Zienkowski, Jan-
Ola Östman, Jef Verschueren, 37-49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mondada, Lorenza. (2014). “The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction”.
Journal of Pragmatics 65: 137–156.
Reber, Elisabeth, and Cornelia Gerhardt. (2019). Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings:
Social Encounters in Time and Space. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

1025
Social meaning and its
place in pragmatics and
sociolinguistics
(organized by Marina
Terkourafi, William
Salmon)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Change in social meaning to project celebrity persona: use of


the Japanese causative-benefactive construction in a TV
talk-show

Panel contribution

Ms. Kimiyo Matsui 1


1. University of Sydney

This study empirically examines the following question: How do semantics and pragmatics interact in the pro-
cess of grammaticalization to generate social meaning? In many contexts in Japanese society, attitudes of mod-
esty and humility are emphasized as pragmatically appropriate in communication. The study examines syn-
chronic contextual variation in one construction in the process of its grammaticalization (Heine, 2002) that
reflects these social expectations.
The presentation focuses on the use of the causative-benefactive construction in Japanese by celebrities on a
TV talk-show, in which two aspects of grammaticalization are observed: semantic generalization and semantic
persistence. Semantic generalization contributes to decreasing the referentiality of the causative benefactor,
while semantic persistence maintains the sense of benefit to the speaker. In the context of the talk-show, this
allows speakers to create an ostensible connection with their audience and build their personas as celebrities
with humility and gratitude.
The causative-benefactive construction, -(s)ase-te itadak-u, consists of two main components:1. the causative
suffix -(s)ase- (here expressing permissive meaning) and 2. a benefactive auxiliary verb, itadak-u (grammatical-
ized from the verb ‘to receive’ and functioning as a humble honorific expression). The original meaning of the
construction is that one receives permission from a respected party (= a benefactor) to do something beneficial
to oneself (e.g., Sensei ni hon o tsukaw-asete itadaki-mashi-ta for ‘Thankfully I was allowed to use the book by
my teacher.’).
In the dataset for this study, a total of 122 examples of the construction were identified in 13 hours of the talk-
show. Qualitative analysis revealed that 110 examples involve further grammaticalization of the construction,
yielding the meaning: speakers do something good for themselves which is/becomes possible through the con-
text they are in (e.g., Tsuyoi josei o enji.s-asete itadak-u koto ga ōku-te for ‘I have had many opportunities to play
strong women’). The original notion of ‘benefactor’ is metaphorically generalized to ‘everyone/everything that
“allows” the possibility of the speakers’ actions – their fans and supporters, good fortune, opportunities, etc.’
The benefactive meaning of itadak-u enhances nuances that the speakers are grateful for these circumstances.
In the process of grammaticalization, the referential meaning of the concept of ‘benefactor’ is decreasing
through semantic generalization, even though the sense of gratitude persists. In the original meaning, the
speaker shows humility to a referent (a human benefactor) who is conceptualized as superior in a real-world
event (Humble form 1). In the grammaticalized meaning, however, there is no specific referent to whom the
speaker expresses this humble attitude. In the context of a talk-show, the humility is, instead, understood as
directed toward the addressee(s) (Humble form 2), including the audience and beyond. Thus, the semantics of
the grammaticalization process interacts with the pragmatic context to convey an increasing sense of intersub-
jectivity.
This study claims that, through the acquired social meaning of the construction, the speakers on the talk-show
project a positive image as celebrities who are humble and grateful.
Heine, B. (2002). On the role of context in grammaticalization. In I.Wischer & G. Diewald (Eds.), New reflections
on grammaticalization (pp. 83–101). John Benjamins.

1027
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expanding social meaning to its most general: considering


underlying cognitive processes

Panel contribution

Ms. Inbal Kuperwasser 1 , Prof. Einat Shetreet 1


1. Tel Aviv University

Social meaning has long been treated as an element of an utterance that allows listeners to infer information
about a speaker’s social identity (Salmon, 2022). Recent works have expanded this notion to highlight its com-
plement, i.e., information about the speaker’s identity that leads to differential meanings attributed to the same
utterance (Beltrama & Schwarz, 2022). This direction still focuses on specific knowledge or stereotypes concern-
ing the speaker’s social group that pertains to the utterance content (e.g., ‘nerdy’ individuals are precise).
We argue that social meaning could also be expanded to neutral content under different social contexts. In
a recent study, we examined how intergroup interactions in both high-threat groups (US political affiliations)
and random minimal groups affected pragmatic inferencing of highly-regularized scalar implicatures (with the
quantifier ‘some’). Importantly, the content of the sentences did not concern the group. We found that when
interacting with outgroup members, participants responded less pragmatically (high-threat groups) or reacted
more slowly when responding pragmatically (minimal groups). We theorize this might be due to the negative
impact intergroup interaction is known to have on cognitive abilities (Hackel et al., 2014; Richeson & Trawalter,
2005) that facilitate pragmatic inference, like Theory of Mind and Executive Functions (Fairchild & Papafragou,
2021).
This work proposes a possible cognitive process that mediates some aspects of social meaning. This process is
neutral to specific world knowledge or stereotypes about the speaker’s social identity. Instead, it occurs because
pragmatic processing depends on mechanisms that are affected by social context. This does not negate other
definitions of social meaning, but rather expands it to its most general cases. As such, it might be considered a
background effect underlying other linguistic inferences from social identity.
This conceptualization emphasizes the need to consult similar ideas in social psychology, concerned with the
evaluation of others based on social identity. Beyond group membership, works on the role of stereotypes
in social meaning (general and specific) can be enriched by the vast theoretical and experimental literature
social psychology has produced on the subject. In addition, our findings also emphasize the importance of
considering cognitive aspects of the bidirectional facets of social meaning, which encourages the use of psycho-
and neurolinguistic tools.
References:
Salmon, W. (2022). Social markers and dimensions of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics, 192, .98-115
Beltrama, A., & Schwarz, F. (2022). From social identity to meaning interpretation: when looser speakers are
treated more strictly. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44, No. 44)
Hackel, L. M., Looser, C. E., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). Group membership alters the threshold for mind percep-
tion: The role of social identity, collective identification, and intergroup threat. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 52, .15-23
Richeson, J. A., & Trawalter, S. (2005). Why do interracial interactions impair executive function? A resource
depletion account. Journal of personality and social psychology, 88(6), .934
Fairchild, S., & Papafragou, A. (2021). The role of executive function and theory of mind in pragmatic computa-
tions. Cognitive Science, 45(2), e12938.

1028
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Incorporating social meaning into a broader account of


meaning in communication. How can a theory of Hearer’s
Meaning help?

Panel contribution

Prof. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen 1


1. University of Manchester

Recent work has demonstrated that social meanings, i.e. assumptions that hearers make about the social char-
acteristics of speakers on the basis of those speakers’ manner of speaking (including, for instance, accent, voice
quality, and the realization of sociolinguistic variables), are of importance to the processing and/or the inter-
pretation of what speakers say.
Arguably closely adjacent to such meanings are (a) knowledge about speakers’ identities that hearers have ob-
tained by other means, and (b) aspects of the social relationship between speaker and hearer. The experimental
pragmatics literature has shown that these latter knowledge sources may inform interpretations in very similar
ways. It is thus unclear that it is helpful to make a sharp distinction between these adjacent sources and social
meaning in the strict sense.
Saliently, it has been shown that social meanings and adjacent sources of knowledge may impact on (i) lexical
access (Tesink et al. 2008; Kim 2016), (ii) ambiguity resolution (Casasanto 2008), (iii) presupposition projection
(Mahler 2020), (iv) implicature derivation (Bonnefon & Villejoubert 2006; Mazzarella et al. 2018; Sikos et al.
2019; Bazzi et al. 2022), (v) assessment of the truth values (Beltrama & Schwarz 2021), and (vi) the hearer’s
expectations regarding future interaction with the speaker (Fairchild et al. 2018).
Eckert (2019) rightly calls for the incorporation of social meaning into a more general theory of meaning in
communication. A chief obstacle to achieving that goal, however, is the fact that dominant Anglo-American
pragmatic theories rely more or less strongly on speaker intentions as a basis for deriving meaning, both “what
is said” and “what is meant” (e.g. Searle 1969, Grice 1975, Sperber & Wilson 1986, Levinson 2000). This is
problematic with respect to the incorporation of social meaning, in as much as social meanings often cannot
easily be regarded as intentionally communicated (Acton 2022). Moreover, even if some social meanings may
arguably acquire a degree of conventionality over time (Salmon 2022), such meanings are fundamentally in-
dexical, rather than symbolic, in nature. Purely indexical meanings are also not straightforwardly incorporated
into dominant pragmatic theories of meaning.
This paper proposes a move away from the dominant theories’ focus on the speaker and their intentions towards
an alternative theory specifically designed to account for hearers’ interpretations and the sources of those in-
terpretations, the desirability of which is suggested by Campbell-Kibler (2008). Hansen & Terkourafi (subm.)
propose precisely such an alternative theory of Hearer’s Meaning. In my talk, I will outline our theory with a
focus on how, among other parameters, it explicitly incorporates hearers’ assumptions about the identities of
speakers, as well as assumptions about the social relationship between speaker and hearer, as important bases
for interpreting what is being communicated. Insofar as our theory takes its point of departure in Peircean
semiotics (Peirce 1958-66), where the distinction between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs originates, I will
show that it has the added advantage of being able to accommodate the indexical nature of social (and adjacent)
meanings.

1029
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Off-the-shelf features and pragmatic trajectories: The years of


cioè in Italian

Panel contribution

Dr. Chiara Ghezzi 1


1. University of Bergamo

The development of discourse markers, “trivial” linguistic phenomena (Trudgill 2014) or “off-the-shelf” features
(Eckert 2003), offers a priviledged point of observation on the role of social meaning and on its place within prag-
matics and sociolinguistics. Discourse markers contribute to creating discourse styles and can easily develop
into catchphrases, but as easily be abandoned. Their social meaning indexes “naturalness and friendliness” and
project a friendly sociability (Beeching 2016). The pragmatic trajectory of Italian cioè ‘that is’ is exemplar in this
regard.
The 1970s are known in Italy as ‘the years of cioè’. Among teenagers cioè is a polyfunctional ‘verbal tic’ to
the point that it is considered “emblematic” of young speech (Silverstein 2003) and the form is “enregistered”
within the community as an emblem of the teenage register (Agha 2006). Its social meaning is dependent on
linguistic practices widespread within the community: for instance its use is stylised to create young-sounding
social personae, e.g. by comedians, or openly discussed, and often criticized, within the community.
Moving from these premises, this study focuses on how, between 1976 and 2010, the social meaning of cioè in-
teracted with (1) sociolinguistic variation, based on the age of speakers, and (2) its pragmatic trajectory. Basing
the analysis on two corpora of listeners’ phone-ins to a radio station, stratified by age and gathered in 1976
and in 2010, the study shows that in 1976 cioè is a socially indexical, ‘meaningless’ filler word, highly versatile,
frequent and polyfunctional, especially among teenagers. In 2010 it is less frequent, not only among younger
speakers, but also among other age cohorts, less polyfunctional, and less socially salient, even though speakers
still connect its use with impoliteness, ignorance, lack of education (status dimension) or unpopularity, infor-
mality (solidarity dimension).
The trajectory of cioè shows how social meaning is based on specific linguistic practices within the pragmatic
domain, which entail structural contexts of use, position and scope of a variable. These practices find their
humus in sociolinguistic variation in the use of the variable which is exploited by speakers as a performative
resource to mark in-groupness (Eckert 2019). Secondly, if the social meaning of cioè as in-group identity marker
had initially a role in accelerating its spread among young speakers, later stigmatization promoted its abandon-
ment. Cioè became stigmatized, because it was used by young speakers in the way they used it. Increase in
social meaning not only had a role in the diffusion of the form, but also in its progressive loss of semantic and
pragmatic meaning, and the reverse.
Selected references
Agha, Asif. 2006. Language and Social Relations. CUP.
Beeching, Kate, 2016. Pragmatic Markers in Bristish English. CUP.
Eckert, Penelope. 2003. Elephants in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/3, 2003: 392-397.
Eckert, Penelope. 2019. The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority. Lan-
guage 95: 4, 751-776.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communica-
tion 23: 193–229.
Trudgill, Peter. 2014. Diffusion, drift, and the irrelevance of media influence. Journal of Sociolingustics 18/2,
213-222.

1030
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic alternatives and social meaning

Panel contribution

Prof. Eric Acton 1 , Dr. Matthew Hunt 2


1. Eastern Michigan University, 2. University of Southampton

Pragmatic research has shown that enrichments to an utterance’s semantic meaning are often derived from
comparing the utterance to alternative utterances that could have been said instead (Grice 1975, Horn 1984,
etc.). In this talk, we show that alternatives play a crucial role in understanding not only utterances’ descriptive
meaning (as in some +> ‘not all’), but their social meaning as well.
First, we show that ideas about pragmatic inference developed in Gricean and related frameworks can be gener-
alized to account for a wide range of social meanings. The general dynamic is this. Utterances are interpreted in
part via how they compare to alternatives in terms of their (i) desirable informativity (i.e., apparent benefits): the
entailments and socioindexical associations they bear that the speaker might wish to invoke in the context; and
(ii) markedness (i.e., apparent costs): how complex, infrequent, and socially incongruous (see Levinson, 2000)
they are in context. Whenever it seems that a speaker of an utterance u had access to an alternative utterance a
with a relatively attractive combination of desirable informativity and markedness, it may raise the question
of why the speaker said u instead. Answers to that question, are in essence, implicata. Thus, where a speaker
says, ‘some X,’ one may ask, ‘Why not the more informative and no-more-marked, “all X”?’ (one possible answer:
‘all X’ would’ve come at the hidden cost of lying). We show that this dynamic—comparing utterances to appar-
ently attractive alternatives—accounts for a multitude of social meanings, involving phenomena ranging from
expressives (Hunt, 2022) to demonstratives (Acton & Potts, 2014) to phonetic variation (Campbell-Kibler, 2008).
E.g., referring to one’s own spouse ‘the wife’ may sound distancing given its contrast with the more presupposi-
tionally informative and no-more-marked my wife (Hunt & Acton, 2021). Thus, while some social meanings are
entailed or arise via socioindexicality, social meaning can also be pragmatically derived (see also Acton, 2014;
Salmon, 2020, among others).
Second, we show that alternatives help determine whether a given social meaning was intended. As Campbell-
Kibler (2008, 2009) points out, not all social meanings are intended—indeed, some depend on seeming unin-
tended in order to obtain. Building on Acton (2022), we show that whether a social meaning seems intended
depends partly on whether it appears that the speaker had access to an attractive alternative less likely to sug-
gest that social meaning. E.g., the social meaning of a speaker’s use of a nonstandard linguistic variant depends
on whether the interpreter believes the speaker also has a more standard variant in their repertoire. If not,
the speaker may come off, unintentionally, as, e.g., less educated. If the speaker makes selective use of the
nonstandard variant, however, knowledge of the speaker’s forgoing of a standard variant may suggest that the
speaker intends to signal, e.g., subversiveness or solidarity.
Altogether, the picture we develop is that alternatives are crucial to the dynamics of social meaning, shaping
our understanding of not only what social meanings an utterance conveys but also whether those meanings
were intended to be conveyed at all.

1031
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic and knowledge lenience towards foreigners

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna Lorenzoni 1 , Prof. Eduardo Navarrete 1


1. University of Padua

Sentences uttered by foreign-accented speakers are often judged differently compared to those produced by
native speakers. For instance, true statements that are not widely known (Ants don’t sleep) tend to be judged
as less credible when produced by foreign-accented speakers. This phenomenon has been explained based on
different intelligibility whereby foreign accent involves more processing load in the listeners, influencing the
judgment of the statement. Critically, foreign-accented speech may also lead to an implicit categorization of
the speaker as an outgroup individual (foreign) in terms of cultural and social heritage. Our main aim here
was to explore whether the identification of an individual as a native or foreign speaker has an impact per se
on unknown statement judgments. To avoid any influence of the auditory signal, we used a written modality
presentation of the statements. In the two studies we present here, we first aim to replicate the Fairchild and
Papafragou study on scalar implicature (Study 1); then we used the similar procedure to test unknown state-
ments (Study 2). In study 1, 244 native Italian speakers participated. The experimental set was composed of 20
under-informative sentences. Furthermore, three filler conditions were added. Participants first saw short-bio
description of two speakers. Each short-bio either gave a description of a native Italian speaker with a strong
Roman accent (Native speaker condition) or a native speaker of Moldovan with a strong Moldovan accent (For-
eign speaker condition). The participants were then instructed that they would be reading 40 sentences that
were originally uttered by the speaker they had just read. Participants had to rate how each sentence made
sense on a five-point Likert scale. Analyses were performed on the rating responses of the critical sentence con-
dition. Results showed a main effect of the Speaker due to the fact that ratings for Under-Informative sentences
were higher in the Foreign speaker condition (M=2.55, SD=1.48) than in the Native speaker condition (M=2.49,
SD=1.47). In study 2, 239 native Italian speakers participated. The experimental set was composed of 20 un-
known sentences (‘The capital of Botswana is Gaborone’). Furthermore, true and false filler conditions were
added. The same task, presentation modality, and analyses as for Study 1 were used. Results revealed a main
effect of the Speaker with ratings for Unknown sentences were higher in the Foreign Speaker (M=2.99, SD=0.86)
condition than in the Native Speaker (M=2.95, SD=0.88) condition. Together, our results showed that the cat-
egorization of speakers as foreign or native per se modulates the acceptability of statements independently
from differences of processing linked to fluency. The results showed more acceptable judgments when under-
informative (Study 1) and unknown (Study 2) sentences were associated with the foreign speaker as compared
to native speakers. Together, our results suggest that native speakers do not only tend to forgive lack of linguis-
tic competence of foreign speakers, by accepting as more sensible under-informative statements, but they also
tend to trust more foreign speakers in situations of lack of knowledge.

1032
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Predictions and uptake of social meaning in others’


utterances: Gender-neutral vs. gender-marked role nouns

Panel contribution

Dr. Benjamin Weissman 1


1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

It has been proposed that role nouns in English can reflect speaker ideology; choosing an optional gender-
neutral form over a gender-marked alternative (e.g., congressperson over congressman/congresswoman) can
signal a socially progressive gender ideology (Papineau, Podesva, & Degen, 2022). In that study, more progres-
sive individuals were more likely to select the gender-neutral form than the gender-marked form in a forced-
choice production task, though progressiveness did not correlate with self-paced reading times (ibid.). The
present study extends this line of inquiry to investigate whether the perceived progressiveness of others affects
our predictions of their gender-neutral/gender-marked productions. If this social meaning is robust, and speak-
ers utilize it to index their own ideology, we should expect uptake and predictions of that signaling to follow
(Beltrama & Schwarz, 2021).
This study presents the results of two experiments: a forced-choice production task and a self-paced reading
task. Stimuli have been adapted from Papineau et al. and consist of sentences like “Sally is a congressper-
son/congresswoman from Kansas.” In the production task, participants are asked to select between the gender-
neutral and gender-marked options; in the self-paced reading task, reading times to the two sentence versions
are measured. In these experiments, however, fictitious characters are introduced as the speakers of these
sentences. These characters are presented as having ideologies on opposite sides of a conservative/progressive
continuum. The production task now asks participants to select the term {congressperson/congresswoman}
they believe this fictitious character (e.g., MAGA Mary, Progressive Pam) would say; the self-paced reading task
now presents the sentences as lines of dialogue spoken by these characters.
172 English-speaking participants (84m, 85f, 3nb, average age=37.4 (sd=13.3); 87 Dem., 79 Rep., 6 Ind.) completed
the forced-choice production task. Per a logistic mixed effects analysis, there was a significant main effect of
speaker progressiveness (z=9.72, p<.001); the progressive speakers were selected as using the gender-neutral
form significantly more often than the conservative speakers. There was also a significant interaction between
speaker progressiveness and participants’ own beliefs about gender; participants with more progressive gender
ideologies projected a larger difference between progressive and conservative speakers than did participants
with more conservative ideologies. Data collection for the self-paced reading study is currently underway.
Additional analyses will explore the relationships between the relevant dependent variables (i.e., reading time,
production selection), the participants’ own ideology, and the fictitious speaker’s presented ideology. That
higher rates of gender-neutral role noun production are attributed to the progressive characters suggests this
social meaning is indeed robust. Self-paced reading results will reveal whether there is a corresponding slow-
down when encountering the conservative characters producing the gender-neutral form, though there were
no reading time effects in the Papineau study. It may also be the case that attributions differ based on the par-
ticipants’ own ideologies, so interactions between speaker ideology and participant ideology will be analyzed
as well. This work complements existing accounts of social meaning, many of which focus on how linguistic
choices signal elements of identity (Burnett, 2017; Eckert, 2019), by assessing the extent to which these signals
are predictively attributed to others.

1033
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social Meaning and Pragmatic Implicatures

Panel contribution

Prof. William Salmon 1


1. University of North Texas

Sociolinguists have for decades discussed social meanings associated with given linguistic forms. This is mean-
ing related to social or demographic qualities of the speaker, ideologies, interpersonal relationships, and more.
It is primarily in the last several years, however, that researchers in linguistic semantics and pragmatics have
begun to ponder these questions and to rely upon the tools of semantics and pragmatics to shed light upon this
kind of meaning.
In this present paper, I consider two syntactic constructions associated with rural Southern US speech, i.e. Neg-
ative Inversion (Salmon, 2020) and the Personal Dative (Horn, 2013), as in (1) and (2), respectively. Both forms
carry multiple dimensions of social meaning, such that they are understood to be informal and familiar in some
contexts, though are viewed as stigmatized and uneducated in others.
(1) Can’t nobody lift that rock.
‘Nobody can lift that rock’
(2) John got him some candy yesterday.
‘John got some candy yesterday for himself’
In the present paper, the social meanings of informality and lack of education are shown to be conventionally
associated with the syntactic forms, viewed here as idiomatic constructions (Fillmore et al., 1988). The con-
ventionality of the social meaning is shown via a wide range of meaning diagnostics from the semantics and
pragmatics literature, including: projection, defeasibility, calculability, detachability, backgroundedness, and
more, which are commonly used in distinguishing differing dimensions of meaning such as conversational and
conventional implicature (Grice, 1975), truth conditional meaning, and presupposition (Stalnaker, 1974). The
result for (1) and (2) is that the social meaning is seen as conventional but non-truth conditional, qualities most
associated with Gricean conventional implicature.
Once the social meanings of (1) and (2) are established as conventional, we then have a basis for explaining other
meanings often associated with these forms in terms of conversational implicature. Thus, NI is often claimed
to be conventionally emphatic; however, this property does not appear in every usage, which is an argument
against conventionality. But, with the understood conventionality of the social meaning mentioned above, we
have a means of deriving the emphatic properties pragmatically via Gricean reasoning with speaker choice
inviting hearer inferences.
Similarly, Horn (2013) considers that Personal Datives carry a component of subject affect: “[…] the speaker
assumes that the action expressed has or would have a positive effect on the subject.” However, this property
of the PD can also be shown to be absent in some instances, aligning it as well more closely with a pragmatic
implicature, similar to the NI. With the conventional social meaning of the PD established above, we likewise
have a means of deriving the speaker affect pragmatically as a product of speaker choice of a marked versus
unmarked form.
These results allow us to minimize the lexical content that needs to be associated with these idiomatic forms
and also provide an intuitive explanation for the variability of both the emphatic and affective meanings that
have been previously posited in the literature. [490 words]

1034
Sociopragmatics of
conflict talk and dispute
resolution: Mitigation,
reparation, and
mediation practices
(organized by Carolina
Figueras, Inés Olza,
Marta Albelda)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Address terms in conflictive interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Virginia González 1


1. Universitat de València

Address terms have values traditionally associated with politeness that go beyond their mere appellative or
identifying use (Alonso-Cortés 1999), but they are also frequent in impolite contexts, where disaffiliation and
conflict predominate, such as in conflictual conversations between close people.
The aim of this paper is, first of all, to find out the communicative context in which the vocative adress appears
in conversation between close people, in order to determine specifically its combination in discourse, alone or
together with interjections (e.g. ay, uy, jo, jolín, etc), as well as its position (at the end or at the beginning of
the turn) . In this sense, it is also essential to determine with which type of speech acts it is mostly associated
(expressive of disagreement, directive, etc.).
Finally, this work establishes multiple pragmatic values in the use of the vocative related to this discursive genre
(interpersonal conversation) and the conflict/non-conflict variable. The purpose of this analysis is to determine
whether the address terms can be considered markers of disalignment or disagreement as happens in other
genres such as news interviews (Clayman 2010), telephone counseling (Butler, Danby and Emmison 2011) or
political interview (Cuenca 2013).
To carry out the analysis it have been used two different corpora. On the one hand, the spontaneous conver-
sations from the ESPRINT corpus (Albelda and Estellés, coords.). This corpus consists of everyday conflictive
interactions between couples who reported having relationship and marital difficulties. The second corpus is a
non-conflictive oral corpora involving the same couples that had been analysed in the ESPRINT corpus.
The first results of this work reveal that the use of address terms in both corpora is more frequent in contexts
of conflict, and that it can in itself constitute disaffiliative speech acts such as complaining or expressing dis-
agreement. For this reason, the address terms can be considered, also in conversation between close people, as
a carrier of disaffiliative values. It can be affirmed, as Cuenca (2013) states when analysing the political inter-
view, that vocative adress can be considered as a marker of disaffiliation even in contexts where its affiliative
value is expected to be more frequent.
REFERENCES
Alonso-Cortés, Á. 1999. Las expresiones exclamativas. La interjección y las expresiones vocativas. (Exclama-
tory expressions. Interjections and vocative expressions.) In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Nueva gramática
descriptiva de la lengua espanyola. (New descriptive grammar of the Spanish language). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
3, 3993-4213.
Butler, C. W., Danby, S., Emmison, M. 2011. Address terms in turn beginnings: managing disalignment and
disaffiliation in telephone counseling. Research on Language and Social Interaction 44, 338–358.
Clayman, S. E. 2010. Address terms in the service of other actions: the case of news interview discourse. Dis-
course and Communication 4 (2), 161–183.
Cuenca, M. J. 2013. Uso del vocativo en la entrevista política: género discursivo y (des)cortesía. (Use of the
vocative in the political interview: discursive genre and [im]politeness). Discurso y sociedad, 7(3) 522-552.

1036
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Between conflict and cooperation: The role of gestural


(mis)alignment in spontaneous interaction

Panel contribution

Mr. Javier Yániz 1 , Dr. Inés Olza 1


1. University of Navarra

Background and research questions

The various resources with which speakers align with their interlocutors in interaction (i.e. repetition and/or
resonance of other’s behavior) are topical objects of research in Cognitive Science, Psycholinguistics, Pragmatics
and Behavioral Studies, where alignment is taken under the scope of high-scale cognitive mechanisms (priming
and grounding) that regulate human interaction (see Stivers 2008; Fusaroli & Tylén 2016; Rasenberg, Özyürek
& Dingemanse 2020, among others). Until now, this body of research has focused mainly on verbal forms of
aligned behavior (phonetic, syntactic and lexical level), with still limited attention paid to the multimodal chan-
nelings of alignment in gestures and prosody (Kimbara 2006; Bergmann & Kopp 2012; Olza 2022).
In parallel, the interplay between conflict and mediation strategies has been scarcely studied in spontaneous,
non-institutionalized settings like everyday conversation. Yet mediation naturally emerges in such contexts
when conflict arises, as certain speakers tend to mitigate and re-conduct disputes that take place between other
participants in the interaction.
Objectives, methods and expected results
Against this background, this paper aims to offer empirical evidence on the role and multimodal display of cog-
nitive alignment in spontaneous interaction, with a special focus on how (mis)alignment contributes to conflict
development and management, and to informal mediation in such contexts.
The article presents a qualitative data-driven analysis of two 30-minute multimodal recordings of spontaneous
interaction between 3-4 participants, with the aim to provide answers to the following research questions.
(a) Do speakers gesturally align with their interlocutors? If so, how does this (mis)alignment relate with the
arousal and management of conflict and informal mediation?
(b) What does all this tell us about the cognitive processes involved in conversation?
Our results preliminarily show that alignment -either in its verbal or gestural manifestation- is a core category
of interaction that is present both in cooperative and non-cooperative contexts. In the latter, gestural alignment
has a two-folded function: while it often feeds the conflict between participants, it also helps the ‘informal
mediator’ to re-conduct the conversation and mitigate the negative impact of confrontation (e.g. through irony
and humor).
References
Bergmann, K. & Kopp, S. (2012). Gestural alignment in natural dialogue. In N. Mayake, D. Peebles & R. P. Cooper
(Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1326-1331). Austin: Cogni-
tive Science Society.
Fusaroli, R. & Tylén, K. (2016). Investigating conversational dynamics: Interactive alignment, interpersonal
synergy, and collective task performance. Cognitive Science, 40 (1), 145-171.
Kimbara, I. (2006). On gestural mimicry. Gesture, 6, 36-61.
Olza, I. (2022). Patrones multimodales de (des)alineación conversacional. In V. Pérez Béjar & M. Méndez Orense
(Eds.), Perspectivas integradas para el análisis de la oralidad (pp. 131-155). Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla.
Rasenberg, M., Özyürek, A. & Dingemanse, M. (2020). Alignment in multimodal interaction: An integrative
framework. Cognitive Science, 44, e12911.

1037
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment and affiliation during story telling: When nodding is a token of preliminary
affiliation. Research on Language in Social Interaction, 41 (1), 29-55.

1038
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Doctor’s animating practices as responses to third-party


complaints in familial conflict mediation

Panel contribution

Ms. Zhenzhen Zhu 1 , Prof. Yongping Ran 1


1. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

This study investigates animating as an important relational practice in familial conflict mediation. Previous
studies have examined the various forms of “doing voices”, such as reported speech/thought, ventriloquism,
and animation etc., and their functions of marking indirectness and constructing identities (Haakana, 2007;
Tannen 2010; Gunthner 1997). However, less is known about how these practices contribute to the negotiation
and (re)building of relationships (Stallone & Haugh 2017).
Animating, defined as the process where different voices are introduced and actions are brought about through
a number of verbal and non-verbal resources (Cantarutti 2020), entails the enacting of characteristics of the
animated targets and the values or perspectives they hold. In conflict-implicative social activities such as third-
party complaints against a co-present complainee where different views are at issue, a recipient needs to negoti-
ate the oppositional stances (Laforest 2009). This is particularly salient in our data of accompanied psychiatric
consultations in China, where parents commonly complain of the co-present children, thus implicating rela-
tional conflict. The doctor, acting as a witness and mediator, is obliged to intervene into such familial discord
while attending to the medical agenda.
Based on third-party complaints made by parent-children dyads in accompanied consultations, this analysis
focuses specifically on how the doctor deploys animating practices to resolve the familial conflict and what
culturally specific interpersonal concerns are shaping this mediation process.

Preliminary findings indicate that the doctor primarily uses three categories of animating practices to resolve
the parent-children conflict, including 1) animating the child-patient via Hypothetical Active Voicing (HAV); 2)
animating the parent-accompany via reported speech/thought (RS/RT); and 3) animating the doctor him/herself
via Hypothetic Act Reports (HAR). By deploying these animating practices, the doctor manages to display the
divergent perspectives on the relational issues and hypothetically act out the potential conflict to avoid actual
rapport damage. At the same time, with the frequent invocation of kinship affection (mutual care and toler-
ance) and relational indebtedness and obligations in these animating practices, the doctor attempts to invite
the conflicting parties to revisit the importance of traditional Chinese family values and thus helping them to
re-align.
This study adds understandings to how animating may serve as rapport-repairing act and how it is influenced
by socio-pragmatic factors.

1039
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Formulations in Triadic Interactions: Insights from Couples


Therapy and Criminal Case Mediation

Panel contribution

Dr. Carolina Figueras 1 , Dr. Katariina Harjunpää 2


1. University of Barcelona, 2. Tampere University

In Conversation Analysis, (re)formulations of what a prior speaker has said or implicitly conveyed have been
examined as transformational means by which institutional agents rework and reshape laypersons’ claims and
accounts of events (Antaki 2008; Heritage 1985). In psychotherapy, formulation sequences constitute institution-
ally specific means for achieving transformation of the client’s experience (Peräkylä 2019). A central element
in the transformative process is that delivering a formulation invites the recipient to confirm or disconfirm
the formulated version, and sometimes to elaborate it. The recipient thereby has an opportunity to accept and
incorporate the formulated view as their own. In the context of mediation in disputes and criminal cases, medi-
ators use formulations to shift the topic, to highlight common ground between the parties and to reduce aspects
of blame in their talk, which can serve the goal of conflict transformation (Garcia 2016; Glenn 2016; Stokoe &
Sikveland 2016).
In this presentation, our aim is to examine the particularities of formulations when used in triadic participant
constellations. We examine formulations in two types of triadic institutional interactions: couples therapy ses-
sions and mediation sessions in criminal and civil cases. Both therapists and mediators use formulations to
propose selective and altered versions of what the parties have previously conveyed, which can serve shaping
the communicative behavior of the two parties in conflict. Our presentation has two complementary focuses.
First, we discuss how formulations produced by the third party can be used in couples counselling for promot-
ing interpersonal understanding; that is, relational empathy (cf. Della Noce 1999), which entails expressing
recognition of the other’s perspective and emotions and interactional negotiation of shared meanings trans-
forming the terms of the relationship; and second, how participants use verbal and embodied resources during
formulation sequences to coordinate the multiparty participation framework in mediation sessions (e.g., Good-
win 2007). The analyses shed light on how the formulations produced by the third party become incorporated
in the interaction between the two main parties. Data consist of video-recordings of authentic couples therapy
sessions in Spanish and mediation sessions in Finnish.
References
Antaki, C. (2008). Formulations in psychotherapy. In: Peräkylä, A., Antaki, C., Vehviläinen, S., Leudar, I. (Eds.),
Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy (pp. 26-42). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Della Noce, D. (1999). Seeing theory in practice: An analysis of empathy in mediation. Negotiation Journal,
271-301.
Garcia, A. C. (2019). How Mediation Works. Resolving Conflict Through Talk. Cambridge: CUP.
Glenn, P. (2016). Formulation Sequences in Mediation: One Locus of Conflict Transformation. In P. M. Kellett & T.
G. Matyok (Eds.), Transforming Conflict through Communication in Personal, Family, and Working Relationships
(pp. 169-188). Lanham: Lexinton Books.
Heritage, J. (1985). Analyzing news interviews: aspects of the production of talk for an overhearing audience.
In: van Dijk, T.A. (Ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 95-117). Academic Press, London.
Peräkylä, A. (2019). Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy. Identifying Transformative Sequences, ROLSI,
52(3), 257-280
Stokoe, E. & Sikveland, R. (2016). Formulating solutions in mediation. Journal of Pragmatics, 105, 101-113.

1040
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Functions of no sé (‘I don´t know’) in couple therapy corpus

Panel contribution

Dr. Dorota Kotwica 1


1. University of Valencia

This paper focuses on the discursive and pragmatic functions of first-person negative construction no sé (‘I
don´t know’) in a couple therapy corpus. As previous studies show, in colloquial Spanish, no sé can be used
literally to express the lack of knowledge (real or pretended) or as a discourse particle with several pragmatic,
interactive and textual functions (López & González 2018; González 2018; Llopis 2002). The strategic potential
of epistemic structures equivalent to I don´t know has also been described in the interdisciplinary research.
For example, in medical contexts, I don’t know displays epistemic positioning, and the asymmetry between
expert knowledge and personal experience (Heritage 2012; and Heritage & Raymond 2012; Lindström &
Karlsson 2016). Moreover, studies focusing on the context of therapy and mental-health interviews have
shown the therapeutic importance of distinguishing cognitive from non-cognitive uses of don’t know (Hutchby
2002; Pichler & Hesson 2016).

To account for different functions that no sé accomplishes in the context of couple therapy, our corpus analysis
considers both formal parameters and contextual features specific to this genre. This includes the speakers’
roles, the topic discussed, etc. Preliminary results show that no sé is often used as a mitigating device, more pre-
cisely, as a mechanism deployed in contexts where speakers describe their own feelings and problems, criticize
the behavior of their partner, or position themselves in conflict situations. The factors related to face-protection
seem especially relevant in this discourse genre where the couple must confront their past/ongoing conflicts and
disagreements in presence of the therapist.
References
González, M. (2018). ‘No sé’. Epistemic stance, evidential grounding and scope in unplanned oral genres. In
C. Figueras Bates & A. Cabedo Nebot (Eds.), Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish (147–172). John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on
Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 30–52.
Heritage, J., & Raymond, G. (2012). Navigating epistemic landscapes: acquiescence, agency and resistance in
responses to polar questions. In J. P. de Ruiter (Ed.), Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives
(179–192). Cambridge University Press.
Hutchby, I. (2002). Resisting the incitement to talk in child counselling aspects of the utterance I don’t know.
Discourse Studies, 4(2), 147–168.
Lindström, J., & Karlsson, S. (2016). Tensions in the epistemic domain and claims of no-knowledge: A study of
Swedish medical interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 106: 129–147.
Llopis, A. (2020). Funciones, posición y unidades discursivas en no sé y yo qué sé. In A. Messias Nogueira, C.
Fuentes Rodríguez, & M. Martí Sánchez (Eds.), Aportaciones desde el español y el portugués a los marcadores
discursivos (249–271). Editorial Universidad de Sevilla.
López, A., & González, S. (2018). La construcción no sé en español coloquial. Valores pragmáticos y posición
discursiva. Normas, 8, 80–115.
Pichler, H., & Hesson, A. (2016). Discourse-pragmatic variation across situations, varieties, ages: I don’t know in
sociolinguistic and medical interviews. Language and Communication, 49, 1–18.

1041
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How to keep on fighting. Enumerative narrations as a device


to promote conflict

Panel contribution

Dr. Gloria Uclés 1


1. University of Helsinki

In this presentation we analyse the use of narration and its interactive effects in conflictive sequences between
couples. We will focus on a specific narrative structure, namely, the schematic recapitulation of a shared ex-
perience between the speaker and their interlocutor in the form of enumeration. To do so, we perform both a
quantitative and qualitative corpus-based study using two Spanish corpora in which conflict between couples
is present in two different environments: a corpus of couples counselling, where interaction is mediated by a
counsellor, as well as the Casa corpus, where couples record themselves interacting at home. The results show
that the enumerative narration is a relatively frequent element in conflictive sequences. In fact, this device
appears to be specialised in conflict, since nearly all the instances found in both corpora are found in conflic-
tive sequences. Regarding its distribution in the two corpora, the frequency rate between couples counselling
and Casa corpora appears to be quite similar. The qualitative analysis has focused on the different types of
responses that enumerative narration triggers in interlocutors. When enumerative narration is used in con-
flict, interlocutors can challenge the events narrated, explain their side, or ignore it altogether in the following
interventions. In all cases analysed the conflictive sequence continues after an enumerative narration, which
seems to indicate that this device ultimately contributes to the development or the enhancement of conflictive
sequences.

1042
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intercultural Conflict Management: A Preliminary Study


Based on Chinese and Spanish Narrative Analysis

Panel contribution

Ms. Lin Shao 1


1. Universitat de Barcelona

Intercultural conflict generally refers to the experience of emotional frustration together with the perceived in-
compatibility of values, norms, face orientations, goals, scarce resources, processes, and/or outcomes between
a minimum of two parties from two different cultural communities in an interactive situation (Ting-Toomey
& Oetzel, 2001). The greater the disparity between two cultures´ realities, the wider the misunderstanding
and conflict gap between their members. Even though during the interaction, both parties are typically “well-
meaning” (Brislin, 1993), attempting to eliminate the conflict and achieve a “harmonious outcome” (Mayer,
2020; Ting-Toomey, 2010), in most cases, they end up escalating the initial disagreement into an intractable dis-
pute or even a stalemate in the conflict negotiation (Wilmot & Hocker, 2007), thus bringing about the mediation
process.
During intercultural mediation, both conflict parties and mediators frequently view narration as a fundamental
strategy for de-escalating the conflict and resolving the dispute (Mayer, 2020; Stewart & Maxwell, 2010). Based
on this premise, the current study presents a comparison and analysis of narratives produced by participants
from different cultures in response to a variety of hypothetically problematic situations, and thus seeks to in-
vestigate how individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds, specifically China and Spain, tend to escalate and
de-escalate the intercultural conflict. To achieve this purpose, this study employs a micro-macro analysis ap-
proach to examine 20 samples of recorded interviews with Chinese and Spanish informants. At the macro level,
it analyzes how Chinese and Spanish cultures influence the cognitive and affective representation of conflict
among its members, giving particular emphasis to their perceptions and attributions of conflict causes. At the
micro level, it analyzes the linguistic features that Chinese and Spanish speakers use to soften or downgrade
the impact of a particular message, such as the third-person attributions of blame, the elision of agent, the
displacement of agent, etc. (Flores-Ferrán, 2020; Garcia, 2019).
References
Brislin, R. (1993). Understanding culture’s influence on behavior. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Cai, D. A., & Fink, E. L. (2010). Conflict style differences between individualists and collectivists. 69(1), 67–87.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03637750216536
Flores-Ferrán, N. (2020). Linguistic mitigation in English and Spanish: how speakers attenuate expressions.
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429505867
Garcia, A. C. (2019). How mediation works. Cambridge University Press.
Mayer, C.-H. (2020). Intercultural mediation and conflict management training: a guide for professionals and
academics (1st ed.) [Book]. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51765-6
Stewart, K. A., & Maxwell, M. M. (2010). Storied conflict talk: narrative construction in mediation. John Benjamins.
Ting-Toomey, S. (2010). Intercultural mediation: Asian and Western conflict lens. In D. Busch, C.-H. Mayer, & C.
Boness (Eds.), International and Regional Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Mediation (pp. 79–98). Peter Lang.
Ting-Toomey, S., & Oetzel, J. G. (2001). Managing intercultural conflict effectively. SAGE Publications.
Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism & collectivism. Westview Press.
Wilmot, W. W., & Hocker, J. L. (2007). Interpersonal conflict (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

1043
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interrogative sentences in conflict talk

Panel contribution

Mrs. Maria Bataller 1


1. Universidad Católica de Valencia

The aim of this paper is to describe the strategic use of interrogative sentences and the act of questioning in the
communicative interaction that takes place during couple therapy sessions. The literature describes the differ-
ent interrogative sentences and their function in some communicative contexts, however, this paper focuses
on describing how the act of questioning may contribute to escalate or descalate the conflict talk that emerges
in this specific type of contexts and what type of interrogative sentences are involved to that end.
To this end, this research is based on the corpus generated by the recording and transcription of therapy sessions
of different Spanish couples. Specifically, four sessions of four different couples were selected for this work,
which represents approximately 16 hours of recording. Once the interrogative sentences were identified in the
corpus, the following aspects were observed and interrelated: (a) the type of interrogative sentences used by
the Spanish participants in those situations, (b) the role of the participants (couple vs. therapist, speaker vs.
listener) in the conflict situation and, finally, (c) the strategic use of the question to escalate or de-escalate the
conflict.
Based on the analysis of the corpus, this paper identifies strategic uses linked to the thematic progression of
discourse, pragmatic strategic uses linked to the modification of the illocutionary force of speech acts, and so-
cial strategic uses linked to the attempt of (dis)alienation and (dis)affiliation with the other participants of the
interaction.

1044
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Management of disagreements in online focus groups: on the


use of mitigation and intensification strategies

Panel contribution

Ms. Laetitia Aulit 1


1. UCLouvain

This contribution aims to investigate the expression of opposite positionings in the context of three online focus
groups on a controversial Spanish tradition, the Moors and Christians festivals. This tradition commemorates
the confrontations of the Reconquest and has been contested for its representation of the Muslim community
and for the limits to the participation of women. Organised on Teams, each focus group brought together six
people involved in the organisation, celebration or promotion of the festivals and lasted between an hour and
an hour and a half.
In this context, this research analyses the expression of disagreement and the development of the argumen-
tative moves it produces, based on the pragma-dialectical theory of critical discussions (van Eemeren, 2018).
Specifically, the analysis focuses on the mitigation and intensification strategies used in these contexts and the
effects they have on the aggravation or resolution of the disagreement. From a rhetorical and pragmatic per-
spective, mitigation is used for reducing or compensating for threatening acts that challenge the speaker’s or
interlocutor’s face whereas intensification is used argumentatively for strengthening the propositional content
or the speaker’s intention (Albelda & Briz, 2020). For this reason, this contribution aims to look at the types of
linguistic strategies used in the formulation and management of disagreements, and this, by taking both the
argumentative and social dimensions into account.
The analysis is based on the methodology developed by Albelda et al. (2014) for the pragmatic analysis of mit-
igation, also adapted to the analysis of intensification, and aims at answering the following questions. Which
mitigation and intensification strategies are used? What are their effects? Do they occur to mitigate or to in-
tensify the disagreement? Preliminary results suggest that mitigation strategies are mainly used to express an
opposite positioning in the initiation stage, i.e. in the formulation of the disagreement, and this, mainly by ex-
pressing a partial agreement with the interlocutor’s stance, which deescalates the conflict and allows to “coexist
in dissensus” (Amossy 2011, 2014). As far as intensification is concerned, the results suggest that the strategies
appear mainly to reaffirm the speaker’s stance in the argumentation or concluding stages, i.e. in argumentative
moves in which the speaker seeks to legitimise his/her opposite or divergent positioning, without producing an
aggravation of the disagreement and the development of a conflict.
Albelda, M. and Briz, A. (2020). Atenuación e intensificación. In M.V., Escandell Vidal, A., Ahern et J., Amenós
Pons (Ed.). Pragmática (pp. 567-590). Madrid: Akal.
Albelda, M., Briz, A., Cestero, A.M., Kotwica, D. and Villalba, C. (2014). Ficha metodológica para el análisis prag-
mático de la atenuación en corpus discursivos del español (ES.POR.ATENUACIÓN). Oralia, 17, 7-62.
Amossy, R. (2011). “La coexistence dans le dissensus. La polémique dans les forums de discussion. » Semen. 31,
25-42.
Amossy, R. (2014). Apologie de la polémique. Paris : Presses universitaires de France.
van Eemeren, F.H. (2018). Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Cham: Springer.

1045
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mitigation and affiliation strategies in couple therapy

Panel contribution

Dr. Josefa Contreras-Fernández 1


1. Universitat Politècnica de València

Among the various types of therapies that have been developed to treat couples in conflict is the Emotionally
Focused Couple Therapy EFT (Wiebe & Johnson, 2016; Power, 2020). In EFT, the importance of emotions is
emphasized; also, therapists are instructed on how they are to proceed in order to enable couples to have new
emotional experiences and thus resolve their difficulties. When visualizing a corpus of therapies, provided by
Dr. Rodriguez Gonzalez from the EFFECTs project, the use of pragmatic strategies can be appreciated in order
to protect the images of the people involved by managing the sensitivity of the issues addressed and the conflict
between the couple.
Among these strategies, worth noting is the use of mitigators, which seems to be an instrument for both social
friction reduction and rhetoric to manage the relationship between the therapist’s work and the couple (Albelda,
Briz, Cestero, Kotwica & Villaba, 2014; Albelda, 2016; Figueras, 2018, Contreras, 2020). Likewise, mitigators also
fulfil an affiliative function, which present characteristics of identification with the other (Hernándes-Flores,
2008; Steensig, 2012; Lindström & Sorjonen, 2013; Bravo, 2015; Peräkylä et al 2015; Figueras, 2018; Uclés, 2020).
The aim of this work is, on the one hand, to analyse which specific strategies therapists use in couple therapy
sessions and, on the other hand, to find out for what purpose they use them. In order to carry out this research,
twenty therapy sessions by different therapists were viewed and the fragments where the therapists used these
strategies were selected, noting the reactions of the interlocutors. It could be observed that the therapists use
different linguistic mechanisms as mitigation strategies and affiliation with the intention of protecting the im-
ages and empathizing with the patients in order to establish a good rapport with them and help them in their
reflections.
Keywords: Mitigation, affiliation, couple therapy, emotions

1046
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negotiating empathy

Panel contribution

Dr. Carme Sanahuges 1


1. E.U.Gimbernat (affiliated to Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

The telling of a trouble commonly involves the production of some kind of response by the recipient. From an
interactional point of view, the expected and preferred response is one that is cooperative, empathic and face-
preserving (Lindström and Sorjonen, 2013; Guntzviller et al., 2020) and that shows alignment and affiliation
(Stivers, 2008). However, sometimes this preferred response is not directly provided —often due to some kind
of disagreement over the trouble, its causes or consequences—and, instead, the conversational actors enter into
a negotiation usually leading to a point of mutual agreement or acceptance.
In an attempt to explain how this disagreement is managed and negotiated, some role-played empathy-eliciting
interactions in which the required empathic response is delayed are analysed within the framework of con-
versation analysis and discursive psychology. The data comes from a comparative research study on dyadic
empathic interactions in Catalan and English where a personal problem is addressed (Sanahuges, 2022).
I will focus on the conversations that present some kind of discord or conflict in both languages. Typically,
in the interactions where the story-recipient shows empathy and agreement with the teller, facework and po-
liteness mechanisms are not necessary. However, in the interactions analysed in this paper, the responses
provided are characterised by the use of different elements that try to mitigate the message’s potential face-
threatening character as well as preserve the collaborative nature of the interactional context. The findings
show a general convergence in both languages in terms of the type and use of strengthening and mitigating
elements employed (e.g. repetitions, terms of address, gestures). There is also a convergence in terms of the
stage in the conversation where these elements tend to occur according to the basic outline of announcement,
receipt, elaboration, and closing, concurring with existing troubles telling and complaint sequences ( Maynard,
1997; Schegloff, 2007).
This paper provides further evidence on how disagreement and ‘suspended’ empathy is interactionally dealt
with. The analysis allows to identify the features that characterise the management of mild conflict during
conversation and to better understand interactional empathy in itself (if only by contravening its expected oc-
currence). The results contribute to research in conversation analysis and cross-cultural pragmatics.
REFERENCES
Guntzviller, L.M. et al. (2020). Extending advice response theory to the advisor: Similarities, differences, and
partner-effects in advisor and recipient advice evaluations. Communication Monographs, 87(1), 114-135.

Lindström, A. & Sorjonen, M.L.. (2013). Affiliation in conversation. In Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers (Eds.), The
handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 350-369). Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell.

Maynard, D.W. (1997). The news delivery sequence: Bad news and good news in conversational interaction.
Research on Language and Social Action, 30(2), 93-130.

Sanahuges, C. (2022). The verbal expression of empathy in Catalan and English. [doctoral thesis. Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona]. TDX (Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa).

Schegloff, E.A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation.

1047
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Research on Language & Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57.

1048
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Questioning media reports on human rights abuses: conflict


talk in discussing conceptualisations of acts of violence.

Panel contribution

Ms. Stéphanie Pécher 1


1. UCLouvain

The discursive analysis of the attribution of responsibility of human rights abuses is particularly interesting
because it contributes to the understanding of wider social themes such as the construction of memory (see
De Cock & Michaud Maturana 2014). However, little attention has been given to the analysis of the attribution
of responsibility in conflict talk about a contemporary context. This presentation intends to fill this gap. More
specifically, it will focus on conflict talk concerning the attribution of responsibility in Twitter interactions aris-
ing from traditional media’s tweets during the 2019 Chilean social protests.
In October 2019, the Chilean population started to protest massively in the streets, and the police repression was
particularly violent, leading to a large number of human rights violations. Furthermore, a conflict between the
press and the protesters arose from this social outburst: journalists were accused of disregarding the abuses
committed by State agents.
The corpus of analysis is made of tweets published by mass media during the Chilean social outburst that have
been the source of conflictual interactions on Twitter about the attribution of responsibility, and their replies.
For instance, on January 29, 2020, a man was run over by a national police truck after a football game in San-
tiago. The television programme Teletrece published the following statement “Camión de Carabineros impacta
a hombre [Carabineros truck hits man]”. This tweet received more than a thousand replies because of the di-
minished responsibility of the perpetrators that the sentence seems to imply by using camión ‘truck’ as subject.
Consequently, people tended to reformulate this statement by emphasizing the agents involved and the inten-
tionality of the action (e.g. use of matar ‘to murder’), and by intensifying the statements (e.g. use of exclamation
marks and capital letters).
The analysis seeks to understand how people react to these tweets and interact in order to defend their point of
view and manage the conflict. We are consequently looking at the attribution of responsibility and the agentiv-
ity (given that both concepts are intrinsically connected (Villalba Ibáñez, 2017)), as well as the linguistic mech-
anisms used in order to mitigate or intensify conflict talk concerning the attribution of responsibility (Albelda
& Briz, 2020; Albelda & Estellés, 2021). We will then annotate the statements as to explicit or implicit mention
of the agents, intentionality of the action and presence of intensifying or mitigating strategies, thus offering a
more comprehensive perspective on how conflictual views are expressed in this context.
Bibliography
Albelda, M. & Briz, A. (2020). Atenuación e intensificación. In: Escandell, M.V., Ahern, A & Amenós; J. (Eds.),
Pragmática. Akal: Madrid, pp. 567-590.
Albelda, M. & Estellés, M. (2021). Mitigation revisited. An operative and integrated definition of the pragmatic
concept, its strategic values, and its linguistic expression. Journal of Pragmatics 183, 71-86.
De Cock, B. & Michaud Maturana, D. (2014). La expresión de la agentividad en el Informe Rettig (Chile, 1991).
RILI , 12(23), 123-140.
Villalba Ibáñez, C. (2017). Actividades de imagen, atenuación e impersonalidad. Un estudio a partir de juicios
orales españoles. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

1049
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Retrospective imperatives, a form of reproach?

Panel contribution

Dr. Cristina Villalba Ibáñez 1 , Dr. Marta Albelda Marco 2


1. Universitat de València, 2. University of Valencia

According to Bosque (1980), the Spanish past infinitive (independent infinitive + participle, i.e. haber estudiado)
usually expresses an imperative value, as can be seen in the following example:
A: a mí no me pagan los medicamentos
B: ¡haber cotizado más!
A: I don’t get paid for my medicines
B: you should have paid more contributions to the State!
These expressions, also known as retrospective imperatives (Bosque 1980), seem to combine aspectual and de-
ontic information. They refer to actions the addressee performed in the past and which the speaker considers
problematic. As regards illocutive force, our analysis of data suggests that this structure may be specialising as
a construction to reproach.
Our contribution in this paper is two-fold. First, we investigate the interactive and pragmatic context of the
Spanish past infinitive and its different formal-functional combinations to measure its potential degree of spe-
cialization as a reproach. Is the past infinitive undergoing a process of becoming constructions (Goldberg 2006)?
Second, based on the study of cases of past infinitive, we aim to go more deeply into the characterization of re-
proaching as a hostile speech act and to try to distinguish its features from other similar speech acts, such as
complaints or accusations (Burguera 2009, Albelda 2022).
The analysis has been carried out using two different corpora. On the one hand, the spontaneous conversations
from the ESPRINT corpus (Albelda and Estellés, coords.). This corpus consists of everyday conflictive inter-
actions between couples who reported having relationship and marital difficulties. On the second hand, we
have searched non-conflictive oral corpora, or at least, without conflict as a criterion for collection, in order to
examine the number of cases and their illocutive value in these contexts.
The first results suggest that utterances with past infinitives can only arise as responses to previous turns which
are addressed to a second person and which are future-oriented, although paradoxically they are formulated in
the past tense. They therefore express counterfactual values. Their resemblance to the value of reproach seems
to be high. These uses appeal to the speaker and display that certain duties are not fulfilled. The speaker posi-
tions themself as morally and deontically superior to the addressee and creates a deontic and socio-functional
asymmetry between them, as is often the case with reproaches (Stevanovic 2018).
References
Albelda, M. 2022. Rhetorical questions as reproaching devices. Journal of Languagge Aggression and Conflict
(10:2).
Bosque, I. 1980. Retrospective Imperatives. Linguistic Inquiry, 11(2), 415.419.
Burguera, J. 2009.Gramática y pragmática de la interrogación retórica en español. Una aplicación al debate
parlamentario (‘Grammar and pragmatics of rhetorical questions in Spanish. An application to parliamentary
debate’). Barcelona: University of Barcelona.
Goldberg, A., 2006. Constructions at Work: the Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press.
Stevanovic, M. 2018. Social Deontics: A Nano�Level Approach to Human Power Play. Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour 48(4), 1-21.

1050
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Second-person reports and epistemic stance: a view from


therapeutic interactions in Spanish

Panel contribution

Dr. Karolina Grzech 1


1. Stockholm University

This talks explores the use of second-person reports in Spanish-medium therapeutic interactions. The analysed
data comes from couples’ therapy sessions conducted across Spain, within the E(f)FECTS project (Emotionally
Focused Couples’ Therapy in Spanish, https://www.effects.es).
The rationale behind studying second-person reports is that they do not introduce new information into dis-
course, but rather serve as an epistemic device. In that sense, they differ from the default third-person reports.
When we say ‘he/she told me that p’, our interlocutors can expect that we aim to add new information to Com-
mon Ground, expanding the pool of shared knowledge. However, when we say ‘you said that p’, this does not
add new to the pool of knowledge we share with our interlocutor: we are reporting their words, with which
they are already familiar, and to which they have primary epistemic rights (cf. Stivers et al. 2011). Therefore,
second-person reports can be analysed as an egophoric resource (cf. Dahl 2001) which can serve to establish the
viewpoint of the participants of a given interaction, or clarify the content of Common Ground (cf. Lambrecht
1994). This talk assumes such an analysis, and builds on it to establish how second-person reports are employed
in the potentially very conflictive context of couples’ therapy.
The findings presented in the talk suggest that, despite previous research showing that second-person reports
are used to escalate conflict (cf. Albelda Marco & Sanmartín 2022), they can also be used as a mitigating device.
The talk will demonstrate that whether second-person reports are perceived as contributing to the escalation
or de-escalation of verbal conflict depends mainly on (1) the identity of the speaker, (2) the discursive stance (cf.
Englebretson 2007) the speaker adopts when uttering such a report, and (3) the form and function of the matrix
clause introducing a report into discourse. Other relevant contextual factors include the identity of the speaker
(whether they are the patient or the therapist) and the position of the report in the interactional sequence.
The interactions comprising the corpus were analysed with methods drawing on conversation analysis and
Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2017).
References:
Abelda Marco, Marta & Sanmartín, Julia. (2022). La interpretación del discurso reproducido como fuente del
conflicto en conversaciones familiares. RILCE: Revista de filología hispánica

Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Margret Selting. 2017. Interactional Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in
Social Interaction. Cambridge: CUP.
Dahl, Östen. 2001. Egophoricity in discourse ans syntax: Functions of Language. John Benjamins 7(1). 37–77.
Englebretson, Robert (ed.). 2007. Stancetaking in discourse: subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (Pragmatics &
beyond New Series v. 164). Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations
of Discourse Referents. Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada & Jakob Steensig. 2011. Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social inter-
action. In Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada & Jakob Steensig (eds.), The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation,
3–24. Cambridge: CUP.

1051
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The perception of conflict in everyday conversation. Human


vs. (semi)automatic detection of conflictive fragments

Panel contribution

Dr. Maria Estelles Arguedas 1


1. University of Valencia

The aim of the present contribution is to study the perception of conflictive verbal interactions in a sample of
spontaneous everyday conversations of peninsular European Spanish. The study specifically focuses on
a. the delimitation of conflictive sequences,and
b. the prosodic behaviour found in such sequences.
The analysis has been carried out using materials from the ESPRINT corpus (Albelda and Estellés, coords.) The
corpus consists of conflictive interactions from two different settings, namely couple therapies and everyday
interactions between families/friends, of which only the latter (recorded secretly) have been contemplated.
The materials have been subjected to a double analysis:
1. the fragments considered as instances of conflict are tagged as such
2. the prosodic phenomena found in those fragments are described.
These two actions are carried out by two different researchers. First, the person recording the conversation
(who was present, but participated minimally in the exchange(s)) conducts a qualitative analysis and is asked
to select the fragments that he/she considered as conflictive, as well as to tag the prosodic phenomena perceived
in those fragments (EMPHASIS, MARKED PRONUNCIATION, etc.). In a second stage, researchers different from
the observer/presented analyse the recordings and tags the conflict sequences according to the definition of
conflict of Schiffrin (1984), Pomerantz (1984) Muntigl and Turnbull (1998), etc., as a sustained disagreement
along several conversational turns. Prosodically, a quantitative analysis is carried out using ORALStats platform
(Cabedo, in press 2021) and the intensity, pitch, speech rate and floor transfer offset are automatically calculated.
The quantitative and qualitative data are analysed, and later the impressionistic results of the observer/recorder
are compared with those obtained in the second stage to observe any correlations between them. Two main
research questions arise
A. Are there any recurrent prosodic patterns associated with the conflict sequences in everyday conversation
in peninsular European Spanish, like there are in other languages (Ang et al 2002, Caraty & Montacié 2015,
Couper-Kuhlen 1996, El Ayadi et al 2011, Kim et al 2012, Roth & Tobin 2010, Szczepek Reed 2010, 2012, etc.)?
B. Does the manual labelling coincide with the automatic labels obtained by applying linguistic parameters?
That is to say
B.1. Do all the fragments labelled as ‘conflict’ by the observer/recorder coincide with the ‘linguistic’ definition
of conflict provided above?
B.2. Phonically speaking, does the prosodic configuration perceived by the observer/ recorder correspond with
the phonic parameters calculated automatically, or are they different (absent or present to a greater/lesser de-
gree) in the actual recording?
The preliminary results show only partial coincidence between the observer’s and the automatic identification
of phenomena. Structurally, some fragments that are conflictive according to their conversational structure
were not labelled as such by the observer (not the other way round). Prosodically, the observer tends to perceive
the fragments as more marked than the acoustic values would allow to do.

1052
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Role of Empathy to De-escalate Conflict in Couples


Therapy

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna López Samaniego 1 , Dr. Carolina Figueras 2


1. Universitat de Barcelona, 2. University of Barcelona

Within psychology, it is well established that empathy, broadly defined as the ability to understand and/or expe-
rience the perspective and emotions of the client, plays an essential role in psychotherapy, not only to create the
necessary therapeutic alliance between patients and therapists, but also to explore and validate patient’s deep
feelings and emotions in order to encourage self-exploration and engagement in therapy (Rogers 1949, Bohart
and Greenberg 1997, Greenberg et al. 2001, Feller and Cottone 2003, Nienhuis et al. 2018). On the specific triadic
interaction that is couples therapy, where the therapist mediates between two parties in dispute, empathy ful-
fills an additional key role: promoting attunement to the other’s perspective and deflecting conflict between the
partners (Livingstone 2004). Both strategies aim at breaking the negative cycle that fuels the underlying con-
flict (Strokoff 2019). Despite the importance of empathy in these psychotherapeutic processes, little attention
has been paid to the linguistic means therapists deploy to promote and facilitate empathic attunement between
the members of the couple during counseling.
This study examines the linguistic expression of empathy during the emergence of conflict in a corpus of cou-
ples therapy sessions from E(f)FECTs corpus (Emotionally FocusEd Couple Therapy in Spanish, Prof. Martiño
Rodríguez González, Universidad de Navarra). We focus on the therapist’s moves in response to moments of
conflict escalation, attending to its sequential context (escalation of conflict, therapist’s response, patients’ re-
action), as well as to the linguistic and discourse strategies she displays to reduce distance between partners’
stances or positionings, to de-escalate conflict. We seek to shed light on the specific role that empathy moves
play in these procedures of creation of mutual understanding between partners, as well as on its effects on
conflict mitigation during couples counselling.
References
BOHART, A. C. & GREENBERG, L. S. (eds.) (1997), Empathy reconsidered: New directions in psychotherapy (pp.
3–31). American Psychological Association.
FELLER, C. & COTTONE, R. (2003). The Importance of Empathy in the Therapeutic Alliance. The Journal of
Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, 42(1), 53–61.
GREENBERG, L. S., ELLIOT, R., WATSON, J. C. & BOHART, A. C. (2001): Empathy. Psychotherapy, 38(4), 380-384.
LIVINGSTON, M. S. (2004). Stay a little longer: Sustaining empathy, vulnerability, and intimacy in couple therapy.
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 24(3), 438-452.
NIENHUIS, J.B., OWEN, J., VALENTINE, J.C., WINKELJOHN BLACK, S., HALFORD, T.C., PARAZAK, S.E., BUDGE, S.,
HILSENROTH, M. (2018). Therapeutic alliance, empathy, and genuineness in individual adult psychotherapy: A
meta-analytic review. Psychotherapy Research, Jul 28(4), 593-605.
ROGERS, C. R. (1949). The attitude and orientation of the counselor in client-centered therapy. Journal of Con-
sulting Psychology, 13(2), 82–94.
STROKOFF, J. (2019). Empathy in Couple and Family Therapy. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C.
(eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham.

1053
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of metapragmatics in conflict mediation:


rhetorical-pragmatic strategies used in the breakfast show
‘Good Morning, Britain’

Panel contribution

Dr. Esther Linares-Bernabéu 1


1. University of Valencia

A number of important pragmatic phenomena are rooted in metapragmatic awareness. In many instances, this
reflexive awareness is not always accessible or highly salient to participants (Verschueren, 2000; Culpeper &
Haugh, 2014). It may be inherent to their use of language, but it is not necessarily something they can articulate.
Occasionally, though, metapragmatic awareness itself may play a significant role in discourse. In this regard,
Bublitz and Hübler (2007) identify a number of functions of metapragmatic commentary, including evaluating
self and others, doing conflict, doing affiliation, constructing identity, reinforcing or challenging communicative
norms, and negotiating meaning.
Accordingly, this study stems from the hypothesis that the mediator’s metapragmatic competence is crucial
to succeeding in restoring the bonds between the participants involved in the dispute, showing impartiality,
establishing a shared space between the parties, and avoiding possible face-threatening acts (Linares Bernabéu,
2022). Our goal is therefore to contribute to mediation studies by examining informal mediation practices, such
as those found in tv debates. In this sense, we have selected 20 heated debates from the breakfast show ‘Good
Morning, Britain’. The data (+160 minutes of recording) was compiled using the programme’s YouTube channel.
Our preliminary results confirm that strategies such as mitigation or intensification are facework strategies,
used by the mediator, in this case, the presenter, to counteract FTA. Additionally, strategies such as paraphrasing,
questioning, summarising, reformulation, footing, and verbal humour contribute to the resignification of the
conflict, seeking new perspectives, and the establishment of common ground. In addition, our findings reveal
that formulation reconstructs parties’ versions of events and mediators make use of it when they attempt to
scaffold parties to come to an agreement about ways to move forward, without giving direct instructions or
advice.
Culpeper, J., & Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bublitz, W., & Hübler, A. (Eds.). (2007). Metapragmatics in use (Vol. 165). John Benjamins Publishing.
Linares Bernabéu, E. (2022). El humor verbal en situaciones comunicativas de mediación informal: un análisis
sociopragmático en la conversación coloquial. Anuari de filologia. Estudis de lingüística, 12.
Verschueren, J. (2000). Notes on the role of metapragmatic awareness in language use. Pragmatics, 10(4), 439-
456.

1054
Solitude speech:
Empirical challenges
(organized by Mitsuko
Izutsu, Katsunobu Izutsu)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

For your mind only: On pragmatics and grammar in fictive


interaction and extended reported speech

Panel contribution

Dr. Stef Spronck 1 , Prof. Esther Pascual 2 , Prof. Arie Verhagen 3


1. Utrecht University, 2. Shanghai International Studies University, 3. Leiden University

At the beginning of the 20th century, speaking to oneself was central to two extra-ordinary studies. Vygotsky
([1934] 1987) took aim with Jean Piaget’s mentalist view of language, in which communication derives from
the supposedly primary linguistic evolutionary purpose of structuring thought. With his ‘inner speech’, Vy-
gotsky’ (1987) argued for the opposite evolutionary and developmental trajectory, from ‘social speech’ (actual
communication) to ‘egocentric speech’ (talking to oneself) to ‘inner speech’ (non-verbalised thought).
Vološinov ([1929] 1973) drew attention to ‘speech about speech, a message about a message’, a linguistic ex-
pression type he labelled ‘reported speech’. Couched within Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue, Vološinov (1973)
suggests that studying how speakers relay and comment on the words of others provides insight in the most
fundamental aspect of human speech and behaviour, the fact that we are continuously shaped both by our pre-
ceding context and our subsequent anticipated responses . While this uninterrupted dialogic flow is integral
to human thought, speech and action, it can rarely be caught in a discrete observation. In reported speech,
however, speakers cast such discrete dialogic events in language (Spronck 2019).
These two insights have recently been reintroduced and updated. The ‘argumentative theory’ of reasoning
suggests that the human ability to reason is a consequence of an imagined dialogue in which we challenge our
statements with possible counter-arguments (Mercier & Sperber 2011, 2017). Ideas that (imagined) reported
speech is constitutive of individual commitment (Geurts 2021) and social cognition more widely (Moore 2021)
are ascendant in language philosophy.
All these proposals take ‘solitude speech’, talking to oneself in non-actual utterances, as a core feature of the
human mind, intrinsically linking social capacities and personal perspectives. In this talk we examine this as-
sumption by exploring various forms of non-uttered ‘utterances’. So-called fictive interaction is the adoption
of the frame of communication for numerous functions other than actual interaction (Pascual 2006, 2014). Oc-
curring at any level of grammar, fictive interaction is thus a construction-agnostic characterisation of instances
in which a speaking entity is evoked without an actual speech event (e.g. ‘This painting speaks to me’). Taking
a corpus-linguistic and typological approach, we show that such structures of non-genuine speech are con-
siderably more varied than commonly asserted and range from pragmatically to grammatically conditioned
examples.
By charting these various forms of fictive interaction we provide further evidence for the aforementioned claims
and add detail and variation to the interpretation of inner dialogue as the foundation of human (social) thought.
Abbreviated references
Geurts. 2021. First saying, then believing. Mind & Language.
Mercier & Sperber. 2011. Why do humans reason?. B&BS.
Mercier & Sperber. 2017. The enigma of reason.
Moore. 2021. The cultural evolution of mind-modelling. Synthese.
Pascual, E. 2006. Fictive interaction within the sentence. Cognitive Linguistics.
Pascual. 2014. Fictive interaction.
Spronck. 2019. Speaking for Bakhtin. RJoL.
Vološinov. [1929] 1973. Toward a history of forms of utterance in language constructions. In Marxism and the
philosophy of language.
Vygotsky. [1934] 1987. Thinking and speech.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reports of solitude speech in self-quotations

Panel contribution

Dr. Denys Teptiuk 1


1. University of Tartu

Thought as an individual process does not require the presence of the addressee other than the cognizant her-
self. Thus, it shares a semantic basis with solitude speech, mostly occurring without any addressee present
(Goffman 1978). According to Vygotsky ([1934] 1986: 30), thoughts appear as either voiced egocentric or sound-
less inner speech, often indistinguishable in reported thought (1). However, the presence of addressees in the
context can differentiate solitude speech (voiced or soundless) from addressed speech (2).
(1) I read it and I was like “This is like my life story!” (enTenTen15)
(2) Hungarian (Hungarian National Corpus)
a. Solitude speech
(Mikor a strandot kerestem, akkor láttam a faluban egy fából készült útjelzőt, hogy aszongya “Robinson 3 km.”)
No, mondok, biztos ez a kemping neve, vagy mi.
PTCL say:PRS.1SG certainly DEM DEF camping name:3SG or what
‘(When I was looking for the beach, in the village I saw a wooden sign saying “Robinson 3 km.”) Well, I say, this
is certainly the name of the camping site, or what.’
b. Addressed speech
(jonnek otthonrol neha, kerdik is: hogy elsz?)
mondok: bekesseg, nyugalom, mint szanatorium
say:PRS.1SG peace tranquility like nursing.home
‘(sometimes relatives come by and ask: how are you?) I say: peace, tranquility, like a nursing home.’
In the real world, the thoughts of others remain covert, unless previously verbalized (Teptiuk forthcoming).
This constraint is removed in self-quotations where Reporter is also Reported Speaker/Cognizant. Not only
does it lead to thoughts more frequently reported in self-quotations than when attributed to others (cf. Teptiuk
forthcoming), but it also enables the reports of speech unwitnessed by others, cf. (1).
The data reflecting solitude speech are difficult to collect in spontaneous oral conversations. In contrast, written
modality may offer a possibility for its investigation. Since self-quotations often manifest solitude speech (1)–
(2a), this study sets off to scrutinize them in computer-mediated communications of Estonian, Finnish, and
Hungarian. The choice of material is motivated by its colloquial style where standard writing combines with oral
speech. In addition, features specific to online communications (e.g. emoticons, unstandardized shortenings)
often appear in recaps of solitude speech.
(3) Estonian (etTenTen19)
(Henri oli kirjutanud, kes tahab Teeviidale minna nendega, autos on veel vaba ruumi,)
ma olin mingi JEEEEE :D
1SG be:PST.1SG something INTERJ EMOT
’(Henri wrote: who wants to go with them to Teeviit, there is still place in the car,) I was like YEEEEE :D’
For this study, a dataset of self-quotations containing 400 speech and 475 thought examples is extracted from
the online corpora. I focus on differences between the reports of solitude and addressed speech, arising in their
content and context, and argue that self-quotations are a suitable domain for researching solitude speech in
written modality and beyond.
References
Goffman, Erving. 1978. Response cries. Language 54(4), 787–815.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Teptiuk, Denys, forthcoming. Self-quotations of speech and thought, and how to distinguish them. In:Casartelli,
Daniela, Silvio Cruschina, Pekka Posio, and Stef Spronck (eds.), Grammar of thinking, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Vygotsky, Lev. 1986 [1934]. Thought and Language. Cambridge & Massachusetts: MIT Press.

1058
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speaker-referential Vocatives in Self-directed Solitude Speech:


Diverse Manifestations of Self-reference among Languages

Panel contribution

Dr. Takeshi Koguma 1 , Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu 2


1. Kanazawa University, 2. Hokkaido University of Education

This study explores “self-directive” utterances cross-linguistically, with special reference to their vocative man-
ifestations for a solitude speaker, revealing that (i) Japanese allows first-person pronouns alone as such voca-
tives; (ii) English, Korean, and Chinese adopt exclusively the speaker’s name; (iii) Thai enjoys various vocatives:
first/second-person pronouns and the speakers’ name.
Koguma et. al. (2020) examine self-referential expressions in two major types of “self-directed” solitude speech:
self-blame and self-encouragement. They show that unlike English and Korean, Japanese allows neither second-
person subjects nor the solitude speaker’s name as vocative to refer to the speaker in absolute solitude, arguing
that Japanese differs from English and Korean in that it disallows a quasi-communicative speech event con-
ception with a split-self (i.e., conceptualized-self). Self-encouragement solitude speech overlaps “self-directive”
speech (cf. Izutsu et. al. 2022) in referring to a future event that the speaker would be engaged in. The latter,
however, differs from the former in verbalizing what to do rather than merely relaxing him/her-self.
Example (1) is an utterance observed in a major Japanese insurance company’s TV commercial portraying a
scene where one of their clients has just bumped into the rear of another car. The imperative form of a self-
directive predicate otituke ‘calm down’ is followed by ore a first-person vocative pronoun representing the
speaker, which can be replaced by neither a second-person pronoun nor the speaker’ name. In contrast, the
functional counterparts of (1) in English, Korean, and Chinese, exemplified in (2)-(4), all employ the speaker’s
name as a vocative, which cannot be replaced by a first-person pronoun.
(1) otituke, ore.
calm.down.imp voc-prn (1 msc.)
(2) Take it easy[calm[chill] down], Jake.
(3) jinjeonghae-ra, Gimjihyeon (진정해라, 김지현)
Calm.down Kimjihyun
(4) Lěngjìng diǎnr Wáng Jiàn (冷静 点⼉， 王健)
Calm.down a little Wang Jian
With self-directive solitude speech in Thai, surprisingly, a wide variety of self-referential vocatives (e.g.,
first/second-pronouns, the speaker’s name) can take place, as shown in (5).
(5) a. chai yen korn guu[chan] (������ ���� ��[���])
Calm.down now I:offensive [I]
b. chai yen korn mueng[?? ter] (������ ���� ���[���])
??
Calm.down now you:offensive [ you]
c. chai yen korn [Bam/Pitcha] (������ ���� ���[�����])
Calm.down now nick name[first name]
As far as this particular kind of self-directive solitude speech is concerned, we can distinguish three types of
languages: a seemingly more common type (A) to which English, Korean, and Chinese belong; a minor type
(B) that includes Thai; another minor type (C), as represented by Japanese. We argue that the relevant type
difference can be partially accounted for on the basis of certain conceptualizations also manifested in other
grammatical and discourse-pragmatic phenomena.
References

1059
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Izutsu, Katsunobu, Mitsuko Narita Izutsu, and Takeshi Koguma. 2022. Speaking, listening, and having some-
thing in mind: self-referential manifestations of a thinking speaker in reflexive speech. The paper presented
online at the 9th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication held on June 22.
Koguma, Takeshi, Katsunobu Izutsu, and Yong-Taek Kim. 2020. Monologic deixis: two distinct conceptions
behind reflexive speech event. Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Pragmatics Society of Japan, 169-176.
The Pragmatics Society of Japan.

1060
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Swîch der rede! [’Silence your speech!’] The polyphonic


structure of soliloquies in Middle High German

Panel contribution

Prof. Sonja Zeman 1


1. Universität Augsburg

Research question. Are literary representations of soliloquies a reliable source for investigations of solitude
speech? And if so – could literary representations of soliloquies give insights in the authentic solitude speech
of historical stages of language? With these questions in mind, the talk analyses medieval soliloquies from
Middle High German (1050 – 1350 AD) in order to investigate how they differ from authentic solitude speech
and how much they are shaped by discourse conventions.

Data and method. The talk presents the results of a qualitative analysis of the soliloquies in the Eneas-Roman
by Heinrich von Veldeke. The investigation is based on (i) an analysis of grammatical devices (such as tense,
personal pronouns, deictics) and argumentative patterns, (ii) a comparison between the medieval and the
Latin tradition of soliloquies (Butzer 2008), and (iii) a comparison between the Middle High German soliloquies
and patterns of modern self-talk.

Results. The analysis shows that the medieval monologues of solitude are “polyphonic” in several respects.

(i) The soliloquies in the Middle High German epic prove to be comparable to modern forms of self talk from
a structural point of view. Both forms of solitude speech display grammatical patterns of dialogicity, although
speaker and adressee referentially coincide in one person, and can thus be modeled as different interactional
roles in tradition of Ducrot’s 1984 ‘theory of enunciation’.

(ii) Medieval soliloquies are based on the rhetorical tradition of ancient soliloquies as described by Butzer 2008.
Their primary function is not the depiction of the protagonists’ ‘inner world’. Rather, they fulfill narrative
functions by discussing complications in the story and giving explanations for the motivation of events.

(iii) The analysis of discourse structure makes obvious that the soliloquies are not representations of individual
inner thoughts, but are fictionalized by the overlying voice of a narrator.

Discussion. In sum, the talk contributes to clarifying the methodical question which aspects of literary solilo-
quies are fictionalized and which aspects are comparable to authentic solitude speech.
References
Ducrot, Oswald. 1984. Le dire et le dit. Paris: Les éditions de minuit.
Butzer, Günter. 2008. Soliloquium. Theorie und Geschichte des Selbstgesprächs in der europäischen Literatur.
Paderborn: Fink.

1061
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What does an adult speaker say when alone? A sequential


multiple-task analysis of Japanese solitude speech

Panel contribution

Dr. Mitsuko Izutsu 1 , Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu 2


1. Fuji Women’s University, 2. Hokkaido University of Education

Solitude speech is one of our everyday uses of language. However, despite the fact that language is a primary
source of investigation, the study of solitude speech has long been outside the scope of linguistic research only
with a few notable exceptions (Du Bois 2009, 2011; Hasegawa 2010; Hirose & Hasegawa 2010). The academic
inquiry has been relegated to the field of psychology (Piaget 1923/2002; Vygotsky 1934/1986), where their main
concern is with the self-regulatory function of solitude (private) speech.
Since it is difficult to obtain sufficient samples of solitude speech in spontaneous discourse, the data have been
collected in task-based experimental settings, in which spatio-visual tasks (puzzles, assembling blocks, etc.) have
often been used (e.g., Kohlberg et al. 1968, Behrend et al. 1989). On the other hand, Frauenglass & Diaz (1985)
conducted two different types of tasks (“perceptual tasks” and “semantic tasks”) and found that the latter type
of task (classification tasks, story-sequencing tasks, etc.) elicited more private speech than the former.
Since Frauenglass & Diaz’s research is conducted with children aged 3.5 to 6, it has remained unclear whether a
similar tendency will be observed for adults. Given the “internalization” of vocal speech (Vygotsky 1934/1986), it
is hypothesized that adults are unlikely to produce solitude speech while doing such experimental tasks. Or even
if they do, it is expected that solitude speech will exhibit “syntactic peculiarities” (simplification, predication,
agglutination, etc.) (Vygotsky 1934/1986) as compared with social speech.
The present study aims to investigate whether adult speakers will speak while engaged in tasks alone, and,
if they do, what kinds of linguistic forms they will produce. Considering our everyday observation that soli-
tude speech appears unexpectedly—even between tasks, we conducted a sequential multiple-task experiment
in which subjects were asked to carry out two different types of tasks in sequence: “complicated intellectual
task” (number-guessing game) and “perceptual task” (puzzle), instructed to stay alone until they finish all the
tasks. Japanese subjects, aged between 18 and 30, participated in the experiment and were video-recorded
during the experimental session with no one else in the room. The data were analyzed with reference to the
categories of private speech adopted by Berk (1986) and Montero & Huertas (1999) with some modifications.
Of the speech samples obtained, task-relevant private speech was classified into “cognitive private speech” and
“affective/reactive private speech.”
The results reveal that the adult speakers did produce solitude speech while doing the tasks. Although they
showed a wide individual variation in the frequency of solitude speech, both types of private speech were
detected: cognitive private speech like “2, 6, 9-toka, 6, 2, 9-toka ‘2, 6, 9 or 6, 2, 9 or”’ and “5-de kangae-te 051 ‘con-
sidering that (it) is 5, (then) 051” and affective/reactive private speech like “Yabai ‘awful.”’ It is also shown that
some of the features of private speech discussed by Vygotsky (e.g., predication, agglutination) did not serve as
marked indicators of Japanese private speech because the language exhibits them as its characteristic features
in social as well as private speech.

1062
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When to prefer split-self conceptions: self-reference in


solitude speech in English, Ainu, Korean, and Japanese

Panel contribution

Dr. Katsunobu Izutsu 1 , Dr. Takeshi Koguma 2 , Dr. Mitsuko Izutsu 3


1. Hokkaido University of Education, 2. Kanazawa University, 3. Fuji Women’s University

Solitude speech manifests diversely in different languages (Izutsu et al. 2022). The conceptualization of self-
referenced direct thought and solitude speech can vary from one language to another, as exemplified in (1). In
direct thought, for example, English conceptualizes solitude speakers as directing vocalized and unvocalized
utterance to their other selves, as in (1a). Conversely, Ainu envisions speakers as hearing or listening to their
other selves, as in (1b), in which the verb yaynu is analyzable into yay- ‘self’ and nu ‘hear/listen to.’ In contrast,
Korean and Japanese conceive of solitude speakers as producing utterances in mind rather than directing it to
themselves, as in (1c-d).
(1) a. I i said to myself i , “I i ’m[youi ’re] a man. I i [youi ] should go there first. I i [youi ]’d
better go to his place,” so….
b. okkayo ei =ne p un eun e=arpa kusune uske hoski ei =arpa
male you=be thing fp there you=go will ’s.place first you=go
sitahoei sekor yaynu=ani kusu….
had.better quot think=I because
‘Ii heard-myselfi , “Youi are a man; youi go there, youi ’d better first go to his place,”
and so….’
c. “nai [neoi ]-neun namja-janha. geujjog-euro ga-ja. meonjeo geu nyeoseog-hante
I[you]-top man-be.not that:side-to go-let’s first that guy-to
ga-neungejoh-jianheu-lgga?” rago saengaghaess-giddaemune….
go-had.better-not-will quot thought-because
‘(Ii ) thought, “Ii ’m[youi ’re] a man. (Ii ) should first go there. (Ii )’d better go to his
d. “orei [? omaei ]-wa otoko-da. atti-ni ik-oo. sakini aitu-no tokoro-ni it-
I[you]-top man-be that:side-to go-will first that.guy-gen place-to go-
tahoogaii”-to omotta-node….
had.better-quot thought-because
‘(Ii ) thought, “Ii ’m[? youi ’re] a man. (Ii ) should go there first. (Ii )’d better go to his
place” so….’
English and Korean more or less allow solitude speakers to make self-reference using not only first-person
but also second-person pronominals, as illustrated in (1a) and (1c). This latter reference can be viewed as an
instantiation of split-self conception. Japanese hardly allows second-person self-reference in both vocalized
and unvocalized solitude speech, as in (1d). In Ainu, second-person self-reference is common in unvocalized
solitude speech, as in (1b), but is not in vocalized solitude speech, as in (2). Note that so is a final particle “used
in solitude speech” and indicates that “the speakers ask themselves for agreement about what they are about
to do” (Tamura 1961: 30).
(2) a ku=kopisi wa kú=inu so.
I=ask and I=listen fp
‘Let’s go ahead and go; Maybe I could ask.’
b. tane k=arpa so.
now I=go fp
‘You don’t want to go in, do you?’

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Tamura 1988)
In Ainu, furthermore, the second-person self-reference is preferred in unvocalized solitude speech with some
directive force on the speakers themselves. Such self-directive speech can be viewed as comparable in function
to what Koguma et al (2020) term “self-encouragement” and “self-blame.” We argue that the self-directive type
of speech can motivate many languages to allow second- as well as first-person self-reference in unvocalized
solitude speech.
Selected references
Tamura [Fukuda], Suzuko. 1961. “Ainugo saru hogen no fukujoshi to shujoshi: ainugo no joshi nitsuite no
hokoku sono 2 .” Gengo Kenkyu 39: 21-38.

Tamura, Suzuko. 1997 [1988]. Ainugo. Takashi Kamei, Rokuro Kono, and Eiichi Chino (eds.), Gengogaku Daijiten
Serekushon, 1-88. Tokyo: Sanseido.

1064
Sound patterns in
interactions between
human and nonhuman
animals (organized by
Beatrice Szczepek Reed,
Katariina Harjunpaa)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Designing Talk for Humans and Horses: Prosody as a Resource


for Parallel Recipient Design

Panel contribution

Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed 1


1. King’s College London

This talk shows how in horse riding lessons, riding instructors use prosody and other sound patterns to design
their talk for human and equine recipients at the same time, while orienting to distinct contributions from each.
This is referred to as parallel recipient design. When giving directives to perform ridden activities, instructors
may design these as mobilizing not only the rider but also the horse, thus ascribing co-participation and co-
agency to the equine participant. Practices for doing so include nonlexical vocalizations, marked prosodic de-
livery, and conventionalised lexical-prosodic bundles in the form of voice commands. Parallel recipient design
is shown to be distinct from alternating recipient design, which addresses one recipient at a time and orients
to different interactional activities and projects. In contrast, parallel recipient design allows turn holders to
engage in a single interactional project, pursuing a single activity to be performed jointly by the recipients
and treating them together as a single recipient pair. Parallel recipient design can be delivered consecutively,
with items mobilizing the rider followed by items mobilizing the horse; or simultaneously, with lexical items
performing one action to the rider and their prosodic delivery performing another to the horse. The data are
recordings of naturally occurring horse riding lessons, mostly in English; some extracts are in German with
English translations.

1066
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intraspecies and interspecies acknowledgements by the dairy


cow

Panel contribution

Prof. Leonie Cornips 1


1. NL-Lab, Humanities Cluster (KNAW) & Maastricht University

In this talk I will make a plea for an animal turn in linguistics (Cornips 2022; De Malsche & Cornips 2021) that may
provide the opportunity to develop a theory of a relational framework focusing on language as local meaning-
making which is not human-centred, not language-centred, not praxis-centred but, as Pennycook (2018) argues,
is distributed among and between species, bodies, materiality, place and time. I will focus on intraspecies and
interspecies acknowledging by the dairy cow in intensive dairy farming context. Basing my observations on
ethnographic research since mid 2018, I analyse the dairy cow as a linguistic actor who opens the interaction
with the human and/or dairy cow who is passing by, by producing a routinized ‘mmmm’ – not as ‘noise’ – but
as acknowledging the other (Cornips 2022). This ‘mmmm’-sound is produced with lips closed, sounds in the
direction of /u/, that is, in human terms the sound is a so-called (semi-)closed central or back vowel, has a low
pitch (F0) and remains more or less flat, at about 80 Hz. In a cow’s mooing sound, the lower overtones, between
200 and 2000 Hz, are maximally strong.
Not all individual dairy cows acknowledge the other vocally which might be related to the different personalities
dairy cows have (Marino & Allen 2017). In addition to vocal acknowledging, I will discuss that dairy cows also
have an elaborate bodily repertoire expressing that they are acknowledging an other dairy cow such as gaze,
flapping ears, nose-nose, nose-chest, head-head contact, and moving towards the other.
The paper will demonstrate that dairy cows, within the power dynamics of industrial farming, make social
meaning in their barns and outside in the pasture by relating to well-known human(s) or passing dairy cows
via a processually emergent quality arising from multiple assemblages of human and nonhumans, including
material things, artefacts and spaces (Cornips & van den Hengel 2021). This finding is important since acknowl-
edging rituals of dairy cows may lead to a new interspecies ethics, i.e. in “respectfully engaging in new rituals
with them can function as a gateway to further political interaction and extended conversations” (Meijer 2019).
References
Cornips, L & L. van den Hengel. 2021. Place-making by cows in an intensive dairy farm: A sociolinguistic
approach to nonhuman animal agency. In Animals in Our Midst: the challenges of co-existing with animals in
the Anthropocene, eds. Bovenkerk, B. & J. Keulartz. Pp. 177-201.
Cornips, L. 2022. The animal turn in postcolonial (socio)linguistics: the interspecies greeting of the dairy cow.
Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics 6: 210-232.
De Malsche, F. & L. Cornips. 2021. Examining interspecies interaction in light of discourse analytic theory: A
case study on the genre of human-goat communication at a petting Farm. Language and Communication 79:
53-70
Marino, L. & K. Allen 2017. The psychology of cows. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 4(4): 474-498.
Meijer, E. 2019. When animals speak. Toward an interspecies democracy. New York University Press.
Pennycook, A. 2018. Posthumanist applied linguistics. London/New York: Routledge.

1067
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Making sense of pet sounds – human responses to non-human


animal vocalizations

Panel contribution

Dr. Stefan Norrthon 1 , Prof. Jenny Nilsson 2


1. Stockholm University, 2. Institute for language and folklore

In contemporary Western society, many humans live with domesticated non-human animals as family members
and treat them as thinking subjects rather than objects (e.g., Haraway 2003). In doing so, humans spend a lot of
time and effort understanding their pets. This presentation focuses on how humans make sense of and respond
to non-human animal vocalizations in everyday interactions.
In a video corpus comprising twelve hours of recordings including 35 humans, 30 horses, six dogs and one cat,
we have investigated how humans treat animal sounds such as whinnies, whines and meows as meaningful
communicative actions. We focus on how humans respond to these sounds (c.f. Cornips 2022) and how the
responses display human orientation to the inner feelings and thoughts of non-human animals. Of course, it is
not only the vocalizations that humans orient to, but also numerous other bodily cues. We, therefore, use multi-
modal interaction analysis (Mondada 2019) to understand how animals and humans engage in communication
and joint actions. We investigate the sequential context of the sound, and examine the participants’ verbal and
bodily actions turn by turn.
In our data, human responses to non-human animals’ sounds can consist of a repetition of the sound (where the
phonetic realization often is quite similar, see also Harjunpää 2022), embodied actions, and/or verbalizations
of the meaning of the sound (e.g., oh are you hungry?). In this presentation, we will show that responses to pet
sounds have several functions: to signal to other humans that a sound was noticed, to respond to a pet (signal
that it was seen and heard), to verbalize the perceived wishes of a pet and to cognitively process sounds perhaps
never heard in that context before.
Apparently, human responses to the vocalizations of pets are an important part of family-making and sense-
making at work in human-animal-communication. Empirically studying the micro-level (e.g., sound patterns)
of naturally occurring inter-species communication contributes to understanding the ongoing convergent evo-
lution that humans and pets are part of (e.g., Hare & Tomasello 2005, Petitt & Brandt-Off 2022). It may also have
implications for how humanity views other living species on the planet (see also Wolfe 2010), which we believe
is necessary for the Anthropocene.
References
Cornips, L. 2022. The Animal Turn in Postcolonial Linguistics: The Interspecies Greeting of the Dairy Cow.
Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics, 6, 209-231.
Haraway, D. J., 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, Prickly
Paradigm Press.
Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. 2005. Human-Like Social Skills in Dogs? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 439-444.
Harjunpää, K. 2022. Repetition and prosodic matching in responding to pets’ vocalizations. Langage et societe,
176(2), 69-102.
Mondada, L. 2019. Conventions for multimodal transcription. https://www.lorenzamondada.net/multimodal-
transcription.
Petitt, A., & Brandt-Off, K. 2022. Zoocialization: Learning Together, Becoming Together in a Multispecies Triad.
Society & animals, 1, 1-18.
Wolfe, C. 2010. What is Posthumanism? (vol. 8). Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press.

1068
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prosodic matching in interspecies interaction: humans’


responses to cats’ vocalizations

Panel contribution

Dr. Katariina Harjunpää 1 , Prof. Beatrice Szczepek Reed 2


1. Tampere University, 2. King’s College London

This presentation investigates the prosodic design of humans’ turns directed at cats in response to the cats’
vocalizations. Animal-directed speech has been investigated primarily for its similarities with infant-directed
speech (e.g. Mitchell 2001; Burnham et al. 2002). Similarities include high pitch register, repetition, short utter-
ance length, and limited syntactic complexity. Jeannin et al. (2017) describe high pitch being used by humans to
express affection, and low pitch to control pets, while MacMartin et al. (2014) describe low pitch, narrow pitch
spans, and reduced loudness in human responses to animals in distress. This presentation discusses how the
prosodic design of humans’ turns can be interactionally responsive to feline vocal actions. The conversation
analytic study draws on video recordings of one Finnish-speaking human interacting with a cat and her kit-
tens growing up over the course of several weeks. The study builds on research by Szczepek Reed (2006; 2020)
on prosodic matching in human-only talk and by Harjunpää (2022) on matching by humans when interacting
with pets. The data show that the human may prosodically match the cats’ vocalizations by approximating cer-
tain aspects of their vocal design, such as the pitch, duration, and voice quality of meows and chirps. Prosodic
matching can occur in onomatopoetic expressions that imitate cat sounds on some level of phonological con-
ventionalization (e.g. miu), as well as in talk that does not imitate cat sounds lexically (mitäs asiaa, ‘what’s up’).
We examine the combination of prosodic matching with lexically imitative and non-imitative expressions, as
well as lexical imitatives without matching. Preliminary findings suggest that humans can use these in different
ways to establish responsive sequential ties with the cats’ vocalizations, affiliate with, quote or otherwise refer
to the cats’ vocalizations, deliver a form of commentary on the cats’ conduct, or attempt to get a cat’s attention.
In these practices, the human displays in subtle ways her understanding of and stance towards what the cats
are doing and experiencing (cf. Mondémé 2018).
Burnham, D., Kitamura, C., & Vollmer-Conna, U. (2002). What’s new, pussycat? On talking to babies and animals.
Science, 296, 1434-35
Harjunpää, K. (2022). Repetition and prosodic matching in responding to pets’ vocalizations. Langage & Société,
176(2), 69-102.
Jeannin, S., Gilbert, C., & Leboucher, G. (2017). Effect of interaction type on the characteristics of pet-directed
speech in female dog owners. Animal Cognition, 20, 499-509.
MacMartin, C., Coe, J. B., & Adams, C. L. (2014). Treating distressed animals as participants: I know responses in
veterinarians’ pet-directed talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(2), 151-174.
Mitchell, R. W. (2001). Americans’ talk to dogs: Similarities and differences with talk to infants. Research on
Language and Social Interaction, 34(2), 183-210.
Mondémé, C. (2018). How do we talk to animals? Modes and pragmatic effects of communication with pets.
Langage et Société, 163(1), 77-99.
Szczepek Reed, B. (2006). Prosodic orientation in English conversation. Palgrave.
Szczepek Reed, B. (2020). Reconceptualizing mirroring: Sound imitation and rapport in naturally occurring
interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 167, 131-151.

1069
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Signs of absence in interspecies play: vocal, verbal, and bodily


manifestations of ‘being out of sight’ and ‘being out of reach’

Panel contribution

Dr. Rea Peltola 1 , Dr. Marine Grandgeorge 2 , Dr. Yaru Wu 1


1. University of Caen-Normandy, 2. University of Rennes 1

This paper investigates sound patterns and meaning-making during interspecies play, in situations where an
object or a playing partner is out of sight or out of reach (hereafter referred to as absence). These include e. g.
searching or hiding games. The analysis is based on a video corpus of French-speaking children (6-12 years)
and pet dogs playing outdoors (approx. 3 h, 3 dog-human pairs) (Grandgeorge et al. 2020). It combines methods
and theoretical approaches from linguistics and ethology.
As a shared activity, playing calls for different degrees of detachment from the physical reality, as it deviates
in a mutually recognizable way from what is considered by both partners as expected outside the play. The
participants are engaged in metacommunicative sign processes where a real-world action (e. g. chasing) is
evoked but its consequences (the pain caused when the prey gets caught) are cancelled (Bateson 2000, Kohn
2013). The action becomes a form that receives a new meaning within the play (Despret 2021). This meaning
is activated in social interaction, where the participant using the play form must be able to anticipate how the
partner is going to interpret the form and count on them for understanding the specific meaning (Bohn et al.
2020, Simonen 2021).
This contribution explores a) how the human and canine participants manifest absence vocally, verbally and
through bodily cues, b) how absence is incorporated in the complex interactional dynamics of play, c) how
children tailor their dog-directed speech, in terms of prosody and complexity.
The study shows that perceived absence is multimodally marked by both partners, although the schematic
meaning-structure of absence underlying human language structures is not necessarily shared. A phonetic
and interactional analysis reveals that the canine partner uses specific sound patterns of barks and growls at
different moments of ball play where the ball is in sight but out of reach. These are treated by the human part-
ner as meaningful turns and can even be reiterated into a complex grammatical construction through imitation
(Mondémé 2018, Harjunpää 2022): nan pas le droit au rrrh ‘no you don’t have the right to rrrh’. The children
lean on prosodic cues, along with gestures, gaze and grammar, when referring to an absent object: [showing
an empty hand that was holding the lost ball 1.5 min earlier] CELLE-LÀ ‘THIS ONE’ [showing another toy in the
other hand] pas celle-là ‘not this one’.
The paper maps the phonetic and prosodic features onto the embodied actions (e. g. the posture and gaze of a
dog when the human participant is hiding; the empty hand as an indexical sign) and the grammatical (modal)
constructions (negation, directives, interrogation) observed. In doing so, it describes in depth the multilayered
semiotics and interactional complexity in human-animal communication. It also shows how the capacity of
language structures to target entities of various conceptual degrees (Talmy 2017) is used by human children
when co-constructing absence in interspecies play. The study attests to the interdisciplinary complementarity
and potential of the approaches used.
References are available on request.

1070
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Students imitating sounds of non-human animals

Panel contribution

Dr. Mika Simonen 1 , Dr. Tuure Tammi 2 , Dr. Pauliina Rautio 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. University of Oulu

Human speakers are known to imitate non-human animal vocalizations (e.g., what does the duck say? quack
quack) (Leevallik & Ogden 2020). Prior studies have also found that animal vocalizations uttered by humans do
not necessarily carry symbolic meanings to their interlocutors. For instance, a dog produces a bark and the dog’s
caretaker imitates the vocalization (e.g., Harjunpää 2021). In this presentation, we investigate (i) how upper
secondary school students imitate sounds of non-human animals and (ii) how students orient to the imitations
of non-human animals made by other students.
The students participating in our ongoing citizen science project—Citizens with Rats—were instructed to seek
places suitable for non-human animals from the surroundings of their school. The students’ task was to gather
observations with their phones and a video camera; the materials recorded in 6 days (approximately 15-60
minutes x 3-4 groups + short cell phone video clips) were the starting point of this study. Some students were
not finding any non-human animals so they walked around the school and organized group presentations of
various non-human animals. The students’ presentations are investigated in this study.
The data collected by the students were subjected to conversation analysis (Sidnell & Stivers 2013). During
the analysis, we decided to focus on sound patterns indexing non-human animals, and for that purpose, we
used Praat 6.3.06 to study prosody. We identified several cases where the students are presenting non-human
animals.
Example (1) considers a student mimicking a bird. The student utters two short bird sounds and announces
being a bird (mä oon lintu:: “I am a bird::”). The intonation contour moves from 157 Hz to 131 Hz during the
announcement. Then, the student produces vocalizations which could be interpreted being sounds from a bird
flying high above. The pitch contour depicting the non-human animal descends from 4447 Hz to 976 Hz.
Soon after imitating the flying bird, the student begins to hop forward. Cartoon boing sounds and later produced
laugh tokens receive a positive assessment from another student (hyvä et se lintu pomppii noin “it is good that
the bird is hopping in that way”). The pitch contour of the boing sound moves between 97 Hz and 174 Hz.
The student’s presentation is ending. At this point in time, the student is not hopping anymore but uttering bird
sounds. The pitch contour fluctuates; the highest frequency for the bird sounds is 7744 Hz. The performance is
abruptly interrupted by a classmate who calls the imitator.
The analyzed sound patterns were recorded by the student. The videos recorded on the video camera were
analyzed and three bird sounds that were uttered by the student were found: the maximum pitch was approx-
imately 4000 Hz.
Example (1) shows the main finding of the study: the student uses atypical voice frequencies to imitate sounds of
a non-human animal. The student performing the imitation was “being and doing a bird,” and in this transfor-
mation prosodic features played the central role. To conclude, some students fulfilled their school assignment
by mimicking non-human animals.

1071
Stance-taking,
differentiation and
(a)typicality in discourse:
Ideologies of language,
personhood, and
competence in
multilingual and
multigendered
communities (organized
by Jacqueline Messing)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Atypical Hearing-Deaf Signing in an Urban Community

Panel contribution

Prof. Barbara LeMaster 1


1. CSULB

This paper uses narrative and discourse data to explore the atypicality of a deaf school in Dublin, Ireland at a
time when everyone signed. All hearing members of this community signed with everyone, including with each
other, without using spoken language. This example of a deaf-hearing signing community emerging at a deaf
residential school from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s is atypical in a number of ways, from their location in an
urban setting, to deaf people being in the majority, to having deaf staff (from teachers to cooks to custodians), to
having hearing staff who signed with everyone. There have been reports of deaf-hearing signing communities,
in rural villages, (cf. Kusters 2009, Johnson 1991), with a “high prevalence of deafness” (Kusters 2009) from 1%
in the Ban Khor Thai community (Woodward 2003) to 3.3% among the Bedouins (Kusters 2009). In comparison,
the school population would have encompassed an overwhelmingly high prevalence of deaf people compared
to a minority hearing staff. Yet the staff had greater social authority over the students than is seen in other
deaf-signing communities reported to-date. This paper presents an atypical situation of a deaf-hearing signing
community, retrospectively comparing what is known about village signing communities with the historic Irish
deaf-hearing school signing community. The driving question is one about language and language modality
accommodation underlying notions of typicality and atypicality of personhood where deaf people and hearing
people live together.

1073
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Epistemic stance-taking and advice giving in collaborative


planning in an architectural design studio

Panel contribution

Dr. Min-Seok Choi 1 , Dr. Leslie Moore 2


1. Francis Marion University, 2. The Ohio State University

Design instructors consider collaborative planning as a space for opportunities to develop competence in com-
municating design ideas to others (e.g., other designers, clients). A body of research on collaborative planning or
student group work time before task presentation and its assessment (e.g., rehearsal, strategic planning) has fo-
cused on planning as a product, which often obscures the complexity of meaning-making and its consequences
for identity construction (Lee & Burch, 2017). For example, through collaborative planning, who has the right to
assess is constructed through students’ positioning of selves and others, which often reflects specific language
ideologies (e.g., Native vs. Non-Native) to shape their discursive interaction. This study examines how a group
of linguistically diverse college students take epistemic stances and negotiate their conflicts in an architectural
design studio. As part of a semester-long ethnographic study conducted in a sophomore landscape architecture
design studio, the present study analyzed a video recording of the two-hour-long group planning activity outside
of the studio class, wherein Solomon, an English monolingual speaker, and his three multilingual peers work
together to prepare their in-class presentation. To triangulate, follow-up interviews with the participants were
conducted and analyzed. While students focused on design features, students discussed who had the right to
assess each other’s design. Students embedded the instructor’s prior utterances, in the form of constructed di-
alogue (Tannen, 2007), in their speech to offer and reject critique. Kay rejected Solomon’s entitlement to assess
her design by reporting the instructor’s voice. By modifying the instructor’s voice, Kay and two other students
claimed their assessment entitlement. Unlike this case, when Solomon shifted their attention to the language of
the presentation, no negotiations occurred, and more tokens of alignment and affiliation (Stivers, 2008) were
used by others. Solomon explicitly projected the binary positioning, NES vs. NNES, by saying, “I can sympathize
on its not your first language so I guess that is hard” and connected it with competence. This speech made visi-
ble who has the right or more competence to assess the language of the presentation. This study compares the
participation structure on design features and the participation structure on the language of expression. This
study shows how ideologies of native/non-native English speaker (NES/NNES) categories shape the interaction.
References
Lee, J., & Burch, A. R. (2017). Collaborative planning in process: An ethnomethodological perspective. TESOL
QUARTERLY, 51(3), 536-575.
Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation.
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31-57.
Tannen, D. (2007). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge
University Press.

1074
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metapragmatic commentary and stance-taking in


Guadeloupean Comedy

Panel contribution

Dr. Kathe Managan 1


1. University of Louisiana Lafayette

As Basso (1979) reminds us, humorous public performances provide ethnographers a privileged window into
cultural conceptions of people and places. This paper explores metapragmatic commentary on types of persons
in sketch comedy from the island of Guadeloupe, focusing on the semiotic processes of differentiation. Most
Guadeloupeans are bilingual in a variety of French, the official language, and a variety of Kréyòl, a French-
lexicon creole with regional language status. Guadeloupean comedy sketches draw on the entire linguistic ecol-
ogy: local French, metropolitan French, basilectal gwo kréyòl (a variety of Kréyòl with little influence from
French), “Frenchified” Kréyòl, code-switching and even some English and other languages spoken by immi-
grants. These comedy sketches feature stock characters that playwrights and actors suggest mirror Guadelou-
pean society (see Naudillon 2010 on Antillean comedy as “un théâtre mirroir,” ‘a mirror theater’). Indeed, in my
interviews, playwrights and actors insisted that the common characters of their sketches reflect typical persons
and situations that they observe in the daily life, rather than exaggerated stereotypes. Through their depictions,
actors in Kréyòl comedy sketches position different Guadeloupean “types” into an imagined social landscape
that spans the island, the Caribbean and the mainland, past and present. Drawing on ethnographic observation
of live performances, this paper analyzes performance recordings (my own and purchased DVDs) to illuminate
stance-taking in comedy sketches. I engage with Agha’s (2007) discussion of the process of enregisterment, by
which identifiable linguistic styles emerge as metapragmatic models linking linguistic varieties to types of peo-
ple or contexts. Using this perspective, I study how comedy sketches elaborate and circulate enregistered styles
as Guadeloupean performers and audience members engage with stock characters such as the mamie (grand-
mother) to take stances on their society and current social issues (see Jaffe 2009 on stance).

1075
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Nahuatl, indigeneity and narrative stance-taking in


conversations about bilingual schooling and linguistic
activism in Mexico

Panel contribution

Dr. Jacqueline Messing 1


1. University of Maryland-College Park

Multiple ideologies of language, indigeneity and progress abound in the Nahuatl-speaking region of central
Mexico. In my ethnographic field research, in several communities, schools and revitalization projects, I have
observed great linguistic ideological variation among individuals and within families, regarding degrees of
knowledge of and interest in learning/using Nahuatl. This paper offers an analysis of narratives selected from
recorded, real-time speech of Nahuatl/Spanish bilingual teachers’ workshops and elicited interviews with teach-
ers and language activists. Evidence will be offered from this discourse analytic data of individuals who describe
how their ideological stances towards Nahuatl language learning/use have changed over time, in some cases
leading to a reactivation of Nahuatl. These shifts in ideological stance motivate some speakers to interrogate
and seek to invert the racism that has been recursively reproduced in local Mexicano communities in their nar-
ratives, particularly within language activist and teacher-training contexts. It is through narrative that local
language promoters consciously express and illustrate competing local linguistic ideologies and stances, to so-
cialize new bilingual teachers and their students into more pro-indigenous, rather than anti-indigenous stances.
Local identity conflicts related to experiences of racism are mirrored, discussed and ultimately resolved, in and
through the telling of these narratives, and thus these raciolinguistic (Flores & Rosa 2015) narratives are of crit-
ical importance to Nahuatl language activists and students of language shift and revitalization. These speakers
employ pragmatic strategies such as stance-taking (Jaffe 2009) and ideological differentiation (Gal & Irvine,
2019) that serve to position themselves and others along scalar axes of typicality and a-typicality. What speech
and nonverbal practices are considered more or less “Indian”? How are notions of “modernity” and “racism”
understood and circulated in these narratives? Through my analysis of ideologically-laden, postcolonial speech
practices and conscious stance-taking by language activists and resident-scholars, I argue that we must pay close
attention to individuals in community language shift to support language revitalization or reclamation efforts.
References
Flores, Nelson, & Rosa, Jonathan (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language di-
versity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149-171.
Gal, Susan, & Irvine, Judy. (2019). Introduction. In Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (pp.
1-26). Cambridge.
Jaffe, Alexandra, ed. (2009) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford.
Messing, Jacqueline & Ramos Rosales Flores (2013). Syncretic speech, linguistic ideology, and intertextuality. In
The Persistence of Language: Constructing and confronting the past and present in the voices of Jane H. Hill. Edited
by Shannon T. Bischoff, Deborah Cole, Amy V. Fountain and Mizuki Miyashita, Pages 291-318. John Benjamins.
Messing, Jacqueline (2007). Multiple ideologies and competing discourses: Language shift in Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Language in Society, 36(4), 555-577.

1076
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stance-Saturated Orthography: Making Sense of


Russian-in-Ukrainian Facebook Posts

Panel contribution

Dr. Jennifer Dickinson 1


1. University of Vermont

This paper considers how orthographic play in Ukrainian Facebook posts enacts a form of double-voicing
through an interpretive complex of ideological, linguistic, and social stances. These instances of play, in which
Russian utterances are represented phonetically using the Ukrainian writing system, serve to buffer or dis-
cursively “contain” codeswitching while also effecting interpretive distance from the semantic and ideological
content of the Russian text.
As Jaffe (2009: 3) notes, some forms of writing are more saturated with stance than others. In context of the war
in Ukraine, codeswitching between Ukrainian and Russian is stance-saturated by itself; the addition of uncon-
ventional orthography adds an element of both play and distance between the writer and the words. Like all
linguistic play, these written representations of Ukrainian and Russian make significant demands of potential
readers, to understand both the representations and their role in supporting the writer’s stance. As ortho-
graphic play compresses orthography, language, and political ideology into a “charicaturized” and “othered”
Russian-language voice, it also serves to highlight oppositional points of view in the moment of stance-taking.
In analyzing written examples from social media, this paper explores the shifting meaning of Ukrainian/Russian
bilingual discourse in Ukraine, where bilingualism remains high in spite of recent sociolinguistic shifts. In ad-
dition to aspects of stance, including differentiation and representations of typicality, this paper considers the
applicability of Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia to these examples.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Hoquist; translated
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance. In Stance: Sociolingusitic Perspectives. Ed.
A. Jaffe. Oxford: University Press. Pp. 3-28.

1077
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The language of political leadership in atypical times: the case


of Boston’s mayoral campaigns

Panel contribution

Dr. Jennifer Sclafani 1


1. University of Massachusetts Boston

This study examines the discursive construction of political identity in the 2021 Boston mayoral election, which
featured two candidates who were both women of color and mothers – Annissa Essaibi George and Michelle
Wu. Their campaigns not only reflect the shifting demographics of Boston, which until then had seen only white
men seated in the city’s top executive position, but the changing face of political leadership during a tumultuous
period for the city, as it reeled from the global pandemic and growing economic, racial, health, and educational
inequalities.

I perform a qualitative discourse analysis of the campaigns of George and Wu, examining data from campaign
advertisements, debates, town halls, interviews, and local news coverage. Focusing on interactional stance-
taking (Du Bois & Kärkkäinen 2012) and framing strategies (Sclafani 2015), I examine how the candidates de-
fine themselves, their agendas, and their place within Boston’s historic trajectory and its current cityscape. The
analysis reveals that while both women highlight their roles as working mothers and their professional trajec-
tories to establish existential coherence as mayoral candidates (Duranti 2006), George stylistically emphasizes
her status as a native Bostonian, while Wu, who ultimately won the election, draws on generic spatiotemporal
categories to connect with a diverse electorate.

This chronotopic analysis of identity work (Blommaert and De Fina 2017) sheds light on the complex scalar
projects involved in claiming local belonging in a dynamic, superdiverse, cosmopolitan city. It reveals that
through oppositional alignments, politicians call into question typical assumptions about the indexical link be-
tween personal identity and political ideology. Along with the other papers in this panel, it contributes to our
understanding of the dialectic relationship between ideologies of gender, modernity, and diversity and language
use in contemporary public discourse.

1078
Storytelling about and
over food (organized by
Polly Szatrowski)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Food and storytelling in German Taster Lunches

Panel contribution

Prof. Stefan Diemer 1 , Dr. Marie-Louise Brunner 1


1. Trier University of Applied Sciences, Environment Campus Birkenfeld

Interaction over food is frequently accompanied by storytelling, as observed by Goodwin 1981, 1984, and Mon-
dada 2009, Szatrowski 2010, Karatsu 2012). Our paper examines how stories may be prompted by food, who
tells the stories, which types of stories are told, and how stories are contextualized.
The data for this study comes from a set of German Taster Lunches, each with three German native speaker
participants, recorded at Saarland University, Germany, in July 2016. Participants were given three different
courses to taste, one Japanese, one Senegalese, and one German, without providing information about the re-
spective backgrounds of the meals (see Szatrowski 2014: 27ff. for the concrete setup of the Taster Lunches). The
naturally occurring conversation during the meal was recorded and selectively transcribed.
Our data shows that in Taster Lunches, food indeed constitutes a frequent starting point for stories and nar-
ratives that anchor speakers’ evaluation and establish their (non-)expertise. Food also prompts stories that
express individual stance or negotiate joint stance, and to showcase individual or group identit(ies).
Storytelling occurs frequently in our data, and stories are told by all participants, illustrating that they are an
integral part of interaction over food. During storytelling, the storyteller’s interruption of the tasting (i.e. eating)
process (though the other participants continue eating, unless they engage in co-operative storytelling), marks
the activity as a telling (and thus different from a remark, see also Goodwin 1984).
In terms of topics, the participants in our dataset tell stories that place food in a personal, experiential, or fic-
tional setting. Participants draw upon the properties of the food they are consuming to tell personal stories
that feature this food item in family or regional settings. In these (mostly positively marked) contexts, the food
item constitutes an important facet of personal identity. Experiential food storytelling details past tasting ex-
periences and recreates an individual impression from the past, frequently in a travel setting, that illustrates
the food in its particular, often exotic, context. Experiential storytelling can contribute to personal identity con-
struction, establish or strengthen expert identity, and also support food evaluation. It is frequently elaborated
far beyond the food prompt. Fictional stories start off with a tasting experience, but quickly move beyond food
in question and can create complex “food fantasies”, often as joint tellings by several participants. Like personal
and experiential stories in our data, fictional stories are employed to transport and express humor.
Storytelling over food is an interactive, multimodal experience that uses the food item as a joint locus of at-
tention and access point. Storytelling is accompanied by gestures and frequently structured and framed by
laughter. Affirming responses and corroborating second stories create shared identities; stories may also frame
disagreement in terms of evaluation, establishing varying identities.

1080
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stancetaking as storytelling in focus groups on food

Panel contribution

Mr. Jonathon Coltz 1


1. Saarland University

In this paper, I ask: Why do participants in focus groups on food tell stories to evaluate the foods they are tasting?
Drawing from 8 hours of recorded data (n = 24 participants in total), I show that participants tell stories when
they dislike a particular food, and I argue that in such cases, they use stories to soften their negative stances.
In focus groups on food, negative evaluations of the foods presented may be considered dispreferred responses
to the moderator’s probes. Classic work on dispreferred responses has identified several of their features;
among them are prefaces, qualifications, hesitations, and accounts (Pomerantz 1975, Atkinson and Drew 1979;
summarized in Levinson 1983, Schegloff 2007, and Leech 2014). The stories that focus group participants tell
about foods they dislike include some or all of these features. In excerpt 1, Holly takes a stance on a snack bar
she dislikes:
Excerpt 1
Moderator: What direction did this one go in?
Holly: Uh, I wasn’t sure until I tasted it. I was gonna reserve judgement. But I smelt it before I tasted it; I have
a tendency to do that. And then, uh, I kind of thought ‘this tastes like something that’s supposed to be good for
you.’
In this excerpt, Holly avoids a straightforward evaluation of the bar. Rather, she engages in an extended nar-
rative in which she describes the process of consuming the bar. Throughout her narrative, Holly uses prefaces
(prefatory ‘uh’), qualifications (‘I wasn’t sure’), hesitations (further use of ‘uh’), and accounts (‘this tastes like
something that’s supposed to be good for you’). In this case, each of these features is woven together in a nar-
rative that softens her negative stance.
One feature of interest that may be related to accounts is distancing, or the social closeness among interlocutors
(Brown and Levinson 1987). Distancing – and in its extreme case, othering – can be used to create a common
identity among participants in interaction (Brunner 2021). Participants’ negative stances in focus groups can
incorporate such distancing, as is observed in excerpt 2, in which Janel is evaluating another snack bar:
Excerpt 2
Janel: To me this looks healthy. If I opened this up two years ago, I woulda said ‘this looks too healthy.’ I wouldn’t
eat it. But as a personal trainer I look at that and go ‘oh yeah, that’s lookin’ pretty healthy.’
Here, Janel attributes her negative stance to her prior, ‘other’ self. By distancing her ‘other’ self from her current
self in her story, she effectively absolves her current self from the full responsibility of the stance she is taking,
thereby enabling her to maintain common ground with the moderator and her fellow participants.
This paper extends current work on politeness in stancetaking, and more generally, it contributes to our under-
standing of the linguistics of food.

1081
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stories in Japanese Taster Lunches

Panel contribution

Dr. Polly Szatrowski 1


1. University of Minnesota

In this paper I investigate how Japanese speakers tell stories during a Taster Lunch. The data come from video-
taped conversations of 13 Japanese triads, each eating and commenting on three courses containing 3-4 foods
from Japan, America and Senegal, respectively. The analysis focuses on 1) what kind of stories are told in the
Taster Lunches, 2) what triggers the stories, and 3) how the stories influence the assessment and categorization
of food in the Taster Lunch.
I divided the stories in the Taster Lunches into two types: simple reports of past experience and stories with a
clear event structure. Most of the reports/stories related directly or indirectly to the appearance, taste, smell,
shape of the food, the use of eating utensils, eating order, etc. while others were triggered by an association
with something in the meal/conversation primarily for amusement (Sacks 1992, Jefferson 1978). I analyzed the
types of stories, story triggers, and influence of the stories on the assessment and categorization of food building
on previous research on storytelling in interaction (Sacks 1992, Labov 1972, Jefferson 1978, C. Goodwin 1984,
Maynard 1987, M. Goodwin 1990, Norrick 2000, Szatrowski 2010, and Karatsu 2012) and language and food
(Szatrowski 2014, 2021). The point of the story tended to be made using internal evaluation (Labov 1972), e.g.
onomatopoeic words for the climax, and the connection between the story and assessment of a food in the Taster
Lunch was displayed by story recipients’ responses to the story as it developed.
The content of the stories suggested aspects of food that were important in the participants’ culture/social group
(Bourdieu 1984, Ochs & Shohet 2006), and memories from their childhood shed light on how they had been
socialized around food (Ochs, Pontecorvo, & Fasulo 1996). For example, stories by Japanese speakers showed
their concern for eating unfamiliar foods in the correct order with proper eating utensils, and comments and
questions related to these concerns and insecurities often triggered a relevant report or story. While participants
over 30 told stories about their childhood to reveal how their tastes had changed, participants under 30 recalled
foods that they had eaten in their childhood. Recollection of past experiences about food revealed aspects of
the storyteller’s identity and strengthened bonds between participants when these experiences were shared
(Karatsu 2012). Participants’ stories about their experiences with and assessments of similar foods in the past
influenced other participants by providing support for their categorization of unfamiliar foods and justification
for assessments of foods eaten at the Taster Lunch.
Results from this research contribute to the growing body of research on language and food and storytelling
by elucidating how stories related to food and eating are triggered and developed in the interaction. They also
contribute to cross-cultural understanding.

1082
Student practices in
educational interaction
(organized by Myrte
Gosen, Karianne
Skovholt, Marit Skarbø
Solem)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

BUT-Prefaced Turns in L2 Students’ Collaborative Talk

Panel contribution

Dr. Leila Kääntä 1 , Dr. František Tůma 2 , Dr. Teppo Jakonen 3


1. University of Jyväskylä, 2. Vienna University of Economics and Business, 3. University of Turku

This presentation centres on EFL students’ collaborative talk during meaning-focused speaking tasks carried
out in pairs or groups. We focus on the role of the turn-initial particle BUT as a component of L2 interactional
competence and how students use it to manage the ongoing task and negotiate their ideas. While English gram-
mars tend to describe BUT as a coordinating conjunction with a contrastive meaning, little is known about
its interactional functions in turn-initial position. Studies from other languages show that turn-initial parti-
cles with a similar meaning, such as the Russian “nu” (Bolden, 2018), German “na ja” (Golato, 2018), or the
French “mais” (Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018), are employed in conversation to convey disagreement with
the previous turn(s), to misalign with the preceding question, or to project the tell-worthiness of a story. To our
knowledge, the only study in the L2 classroom context on the French “mais” has shown how students use it to
display disagreement (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2011).
Our analysis is based on video-recorded upper secondary EFL classes from Czechia and Finland, from which
we have identified 42 instances of turn-initial BUTs. In line with recent studies that have taken an interest in
L2 grammar-for-interaction and its development (e.g. Pekarek Doehler et al., 2021), we employed multimodal
conversation analysis to investigate the sequential environments and interactional functions of BUT-prefaced
turns during L2 speaking tasks.
Our findings suggest that BUT-prefacing is used by students predominantly to add to the emerging task an-
swer by presenting a counter argument or a different stance; students also use turn-initial BUTs to continue
a joke and to pursue a response. We argue that these BUTs in turn-initial position display sensitivity to an ac-
tion’s placement in the broader activity and help configure the upcoming action. The findings contribute to
our understanding of L2 interactional competence and grammar as social phenomena and shed light on the
interactional organisation of collaborative peer talk in upper secondary educational settings.
References
Bolden, G. B. (2018). Nu-prefaced responses in Russian conversation. In J. Heritage & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.),
Between Turn and Sequence: Turn-initial Particles Across Languages (pp. 25–58). John Benjamins.
Golato, A. (2018). Turn-initial naja in German. In J. Heritage & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Between Turn and Sequence:
Turn-initial Particles Across Languages (pp. 413–443). John Benjamins.
Pekarek Doehler, S., & Berger, E. (2018). L2 interactional competence as increased ability for context-sensitive
conduct: A longitudinal study of story-openings. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 555–578.
Pekarek Doehler, S., & Pochon-Berger, E. (2011). Developing ‘methods’ for interaction: A cross-sectional study
of disagreement sequences in French L2. In J. K. Hall, J. Hellermann & S. Pekarek Doehler (eds.), L2 Interactional
Competence and Development (pp. 206-243). Multilingual Matters.
Pekarek Doehler, S., Polak-Yitzhaki, H., Li, X., Stoenica, I. M., Havlík, M., & Keevallik, L. (2021). Multimodal
assemblies for prefacing a dispreferred response: A cross-linguistic analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.

1084
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Peer interactions around collaborative writing in early


childhood education

Panel contribution

Dr. Myrte Gosen 1 , Dr. Frans Hiddink 2


1. University of Groningen, 2. NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences

This contribution focuses on peer interactions in early childhood education. It will highlight practices of chil-
dren while interacting with each other during activities that involve collaborative writing. Children involved
in this study are in Dutch kindergarten (first two years of Dutch primary education) and are 4-6 years old.
The emergent literacy (Teale et al, 2020) of young children of 2-7 years old forms the base for formal reading
and writing development at a later age (Mol & Bus, 2011). One of the first indicators for emergent literacy are
children’s emergent writing practices. Mostly, young children’s writing products are embedded in the task or
the activity. Consequentially, emergent writing is a social and functional phenomenon (Friedrich & Peterson,
2022). However, it seems that teachers do not always recognize emergent writing as it becomes apparent in
young children’s behavior (Berenst & Hiddink, 2022; Deunk, Gosen, Hiddink & Berenst, 2022; Reyes & Azuara,
2005). In addition, teachers are often concerned with the formal development of the alphabetical script (Van
Oers, 2007) instead of focusing on emergent writing as social and functional in for instance role-play with peers
(Ihmeideh, 2015; Quinn et al., 2021).
Peer interactions are considered to be contributive to emergent reading (Cekaite et al., 2014) and to emergent
writing. Studies show that conversations among children about emergent writing performances may stimulate
individual children to reflect on their products and on their identity as literate beings (Coates & Coates, 2006;
Kissel et al. 2011). So, peer interactions in the process of writing, may contribute to children’s emergent writing
development. Nevertheless, there are, to our knowledge, no studies on the interactional details of young chil-
dren’s peer interactions occurring in collaborative writing, while studies investigating dialogic writing among
older primary school children have revealed very interesting details (e.g. Herder, 2020).
The current study contributes to this lack of knowledge by investigating peer interactions of kindergartners
in collaborative writing. These interactions are video recorded at four different kindergarten classrooms as
part of a multiannual practice-oriented research (Hiddink, 2021). Relevant pieces of data are transcribed ac-
cording to Conversation Analytic conventions (Jefferson, 2004). In the analysis, the focus lies on how children
interact in this particular context and how the observed practices in interactions relate to emergent literacy.
It will be shown that children are involved in at least three main interactional activities: interacting about the
correctness of written text, discussing the appropriateness of written text and reflecting on the organization of
collaborative writing. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated how these particular discussions look like and what
are considered to be practices that offer room for peer interactions that are contributive to children’s emergent
literacy. Both theoretical and practical implications of these detailed insights will be discussed.

1085
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Peers as models for explaining and arguing: Students’


recycling practices in whole-class discussions

Panel contribution

Prof. Miriam Morek 1 , Prof. Vivien Heller 2


1. University of Duisburg-Essen, 2. University of Wuppertal

It is widely assumed that classroom discourse may provide opportunities for students to develop their oracy
and literacy skills (e.g. Grøver et al. 2019). Predominantly, studies emphasize the role of teachers in supporting
students’ language use and language development (e.g. Michaels/O’Connor 2015; Uccelli 2019; van der Veen et
al. 2017; Quasthoff et al. 2022). However, the question of what role classmates might play in students’ language
learning through classroom discourse has not gained attention so far (but see Anderson et al. 2001).
This is surprising as language socialization research has recognized for some time the potential of peers for
children’s language acquisition (Blum-Kulka/Snow 2004; Cekaite et al. 2014). For instance, studies on play inter-
actions and peer-groups show how peer-talk helps to practice complex discourse practices such as explaining or
arguing. One interaction-based mechanism identified as a possible resource for language acquisition through
peer-talk is other-repetition (Arendt/Zadunaisky 2020). Other-repetition represents a form of “linguistic recy-
cling” (Haapanen et al. 2020). When reusing prior utterances of others, e.g. by a verbatim repetition or a mod-
ified imitation, a speaker does not only tie in with the communicative format established by a co-interlocutor
(Goodwin/Goodwin 1987) but s/he also reuses linguistic material in order to build conversational action (Good-
win 2013) and actively practice particular language use. Although Anderson et al. (2001) point to the existence
of “snowballing” of argumentative strategies among peer-talk in classrooms, recylings of peer utterances have
not yet been examined systematically.
The present study thus explores the question of whether recylings of co-learner utterances occur in teacher-
fronted whole-class discussions and if so, what recyling practices can be identified. Assuming that recylings
may prove a particularly useful resource when it comes to coping with complex discursive demands, we focus
on instances where students are required to produce “big packages” (Sacks 1995; Quasthoff et al. 2017), such as
arguments, reports or explanations. We draw on a corpus of video recorded lessons in grade 5 of German Sec-
ondary Schools (language classes, biology, maths, history) and use an interaction-analytic approach (Quasthoff
et al. 2017) to compare repetitions of linguistic surface structures and underlying global structures in students’
neighbouring big packages. In our lecture we present prototypical examples of students’ recyclings and show
that prior student utterances may be re-used at different levels (e.g. lexical level, syntactic level, level of textu-
alization). The different types of recyclings are discussed with regard to their role in facilitating participation
in discourse practices and developing discourse skill over time.

1086
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Students’ practices in educational peer talk: On the


accomplishment of mutual helping

Panel contribution

Ms. Denise Robbins 1


1. University of Wuppertal

Mutual helping is a frequently occurring activity in the classroom in which students negotiate their individual
problems with their classmates and thus independently organize and shape their subject-specific learning pro-
cesses. In educational contexts, helping generally takes place alongside other classroom activities, such as the
processing of tasks given by the teacher or even during class discussions in plenary phases. Depending on the
significance or urgency of the difficulty in question, the students resort to different practices in order to solve
the problem (Wakke/Heller, 2022).
Previous studies on learning-oriented peer assisstances already suggest the existence of different “forms of
‘help’ ” (Beaumont, 1999, p. 243), such as copying (Beaumont, 1999), sharing solutions, or providing explanations
(Webb/Mastergeorge, 2003; Svahn/Melander Bowden, 2021; Wakke/Heller, 2022). They further reveal that these
different forms comprise communicative requirements of varying complexity and allow the co-participants to
a variable extent to engage in the construction of problem solutions and thus of knowledge. However, a sys-
tematic study of helping practices in educational peer interaction, their sequential unfolding, and the discursive
demands they pose on learners has not yet been conducted.
The contribution addresses this research gap by examining students’ mutual helping as an activity that is inter-
actively constituted and sequentially organized, focusing the following research questions: 1) What interactive
practices do learners draw upon when helping each other with their learning and how are these practices orga-
nized? 2) Which participation structures do the practices entail? The data are based on 16 videotaped German
lessons from two primary and two secondary school classes (grade 2 and 5). The sequences of interest were
transcribed and analyzed using ethnomethodological conversation analysis.
The results indicate that the repertoire of helping practices is highly diverse and includes both sequentially and
interactively uncomplex locally organized (e.g., answering information questions, confirming already devel-
oped solutions) and complex discursive practices (e.g., explaining, arguing, advising). Moreover, regarding the
underlying participation structures, different interaction modes that are largely independent of the practices
are evident. Hence, the problem-solving process may be primarily the epistemic responsibility of the help-
ing person, who provides a (candidate) problem solution. Alternatively, the participants may discuss different
potential approaches and co-construct solutions. Thus, the distinct helping practices in conjunction with the
interaction modes induce different learning opportunities for the learners.
References:
Beaumont, C. J. (1999). Dilemmas of Peer Assistance in a Bilingual Full Inclusion Classroom. The Elementary
School Journal, 99(3), 233–254.

Svahn, J. & Melander Bowden, H. (2021). Interactional and epistemic challenges in students’ help-seeking in
sessions of mathematical homework support: presenting the problem. Classroom Discourse, 12(3), 193–213.
Wakke, D. & Heller, V. (2022). Helping as a Concurrent Activity: How Students Engage in Small Groups While
Pursuing Classroom Tasks. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 784906.
Webb, N. M. Mastergeorge, A. (2003). Promoting Effective Helping-Behavior in Peer-Directed Groups. Interna-
tional Journal of Educational Research, 39(1-2), 73–97.

1087
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Students’ vocabulary explanations in a beginner-level L2


French classroom: a conversation analysis perspective

Panel contribution

Ms. Loanne Janin 1


1. University of Neuchâtel

This contribution addresses L2 students’ participation in vocabulary explanation sequences in classroom inter-
actions. Explanations are one of the most typical activities in the language classroom and require mobilizing
language, logical thinking, as well as adapting to others and context. They can thus present a challenge, to pro-
duce and understand, particularly for students who have limited L2 resources and cannot rely on a shared L1
between them or with the teacher. By zooming in on students’ practices to provide vocabulary explanations,
a responsibility traditionally assumed by the teacher, I demonstrate how students take initiatives, challenge
institutional roles and become active participants in classroom interactions.
My data consist of 50 hours of video-recorded whole-class interactions in a language school for adult migrants
in Switzerland, where students follow intensive beginner-level L2 French courses. The collection-based study
draws on multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2018) to investigate how vocabulary explanations are
accomplished, sequentially organized and how other students respond to them.
More specifically, I will discuss

• how students mobilize a set of linguistic and multimodal resources, including depictive gestures, gaze
and classroom artifacts, to provide vocabulary explanations;
• how students respond to these explanations, for instance by claiming or demonstrating
(non)understanding.

The analysis builds on previous research on student’s initiatives in explanation sequences (Kääntä & Kasper,
2018; Koole, 2010; Merke, 2016; Stoewer & Musk, 2019; Tai & Brandt, 2018; Waring, 2011). It shows how
helping their peers to solve knowledge gaps allows students to demonstrate both linguistic and interactive
expertise, and to collaboratively create ‘frames for their own learning opportunities’ (Mortensen, 2011, p.
157). The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the functioning of vocabulary explanations in the
L2 classroom and, in particular, of the specific participatory dynamics in beginner-level language classes for
adult students. They also highlight the multimodal participatory practices adopted by students, enabling them
to participate actively even with limited language resources.

References
Kääntä, L., & Kasper, G. (2018). Clarification requests as a method of pursuing understanding in CLIL physics
lectures. Classroom Discourse, 9(3), 205-226. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2018.1477608
Koole, T. (2010). Displays of Epistemic Access: Student Responses to Teacher Explanations. Research on Lan-
guage & Social Interaction, 43(2), 183-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351811003737846
Merke, S. (2016). Establishing the explainable in Finnish-as-a-foreign-language classroom interac-
tion: Student-initiated explanation sequences. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 9, 1-15.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2016.03.002
Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges
for Transcribing Multimodality. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 85-106.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1413878
Mortensen, K. (2011). Doing word explanation in interaction. In G. Palloti & J. Wagner (Eds.), L2 Learning as
Social Practice: Conversation-Analytic Perspectives. National Foreign Language Resource Center.

1088
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stoewer, K., & Musk, N. (2019). Impromptu vocabulary work in English mother tongue instruction. Classroom
Discourse, 10(2), 123-150. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2018.1516152
Tai, K. W. H., & Brandt, A. (2018). Creating an imaginary context: teacher’s use of embodied enactments in
addressing learner initiatives in a beginner-level adult ESOL classroom. Classroom Discourse, 9(3), 244-266.
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2018.1496345
Waring, H. Z. (2011). Learner initiatives and learning opportunities in the language classroom. Classroom Dis-
course, 2(2), 201-218. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2011.614053

1089
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Taking notes while leading the discussion: Multiactivity in


student-led discussion circles

Panel contribution

Dr. Hanbyul Jung 1 , Dr. Gabriele Kasper 2


1. Seoul National University, 2. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Diverse institutional activities are routinely accomplished with the help of notes. From a conversation-analytic
perspective, notes have been examined as a category of inscribed object in use (Day & Mortensen, 2017). Across
activity types, (1) the production and use of notes is tightly coordinated with the talk and embodied practices in
the unfolding interaction, such as gazing and nodding (Svinhufvud, 2016); (2) notes are produced in orientation
to their anticipated institutional use. Ro (2021) demonstrates how tutors in language tutorials take notes of
student performance and subsequently mobilize the notes as an interactional resource for advising the students
on how to improve their language use. Other studies predominantly examine notetaking, i.e. how notes are
generated in situ as emergent objects.
Prior research also suggests that notetaking is organized differently in dyadic interaction between a profes-
sional and a client and in multiparty interaction among members collaborating on a joint project. In asym-
metric encounters such as police interrogations (Komter, 2006), student counseling (Hazel & Mortensen, 2014;
Svinhufvud, 2016), and language tutorials (Ro, 2021), notetaking is almost exclusively done by the professional
as a category-bound activity. In contrast, in such multiparty events as a collaborative design activity in a busi-
ness setting (Mortensen, 2013), citizens’ planning meetings (Nissi, 2015), and a peer support group (De Stefani
et al., 2016), the records or statements are produced collectively by the group members.
Our study further examines how notetaking is managed in coordination with an ongoing institutional activ-
ity. The setting is an advanced course in English for academic purposes at a university in South Korea. One
course objective is to lead an academic discussion, implemented through several class sessions of student-led
discussions on controversial current topics, and report the outcome to the whole class. The video-recorded data
comprise 30 discussion circles in groups of 4 students for a total of 15 hours. The students, 43 in all, speak Ko-
rean as their first language and are advanced speakers of English. During the discussion circles, the discussion
leader takes notes, either handwritten or typed on a laptop. Using multimodal conversation analysis (Mon-
dada, 2019), we examine how the discussion leaders accomplish note-taking while leading the discussion as a
multiactivity (De Stefani et al., 2016; Haddington et al., 2014 ). Specifically, our analysis will elucidate (1) how
the discussion leaders manage the two activities in orientation to the current phase of the discussion and the
later report to class report, and (2) how the notetaking changes from a peripheral to the focal activity as the
discussion approaches its final stage.

1090
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Students’ summons practices for initiating problem solving


in small group work – and their interactional consequences.”

Panel contribution

Dr. Marit Solem 1 , Dr. Karianne Skovholt 1


1. University of South-Eastern Norway

How do students’ initiate the need for assistance from the teacher while working in small groups – and what
are the interactional trajectories that follow the students’ initiations? When students work in small groups in
classrooms, situations arise where they need the teacher’s assistance to continue with their group work and ex-
plicitly request assistance by using verbal initiation cues. We know know a lot about how dyadic conversation
starts (Schegloff, 1968, 1979), and research on conversational openings in dyadic interaction has found that par-
ticipants follow a set of modular components to build a copresent opening phase (Pillet-Shore, 2018). However,
we know very little about the methods students and teachers use to initiate and coordinate problem solving in
classroom group work, even though these activities occur regularily in classrooms. This paper contributes to
the study of conversational openings in multiparty interaction in an institutional setting and how the opening
contributes to the trajectories for classroom problem solving.
The study is based on a collection of small group work (3 – 5 students) in six Norwegian secondary school
classrooms. Using conversation analysis, we transcribed and analysed group work in 11 lessons with a total
of 54 student initiated problem solving activities. Analysis revealed that students initiate the interaction in
different ways; they summon the teachers by hand raising, by name or a combination of these. Preliminary
results show that when students summon the teacher, they are also held responsible for initiating the problem
solving activity, and the summons are followed by three types of problem formulations: 1) No-knowledge claims
(“I don’t understand anything”); 2) Information seeking questions (“What do literary devices mean?”) and 3)
Knowledge displays (Hjalmar was a therapist, right?). The findings suggests that the way students initiate and
present the problem solving is consequential for the development of the proceeding interaction. The study
provides empirical basis for teachers’ assistance in classrooms, and we discuss the pedagogic implications of
the student initiated entries for the proceeding teacher-student-interaction.
References:
Pillet-Shore, D. (2018) How to Begin. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51:3, 213-231, DOI:
10.1080/08351813.2018.1485224
Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist, 70(6), 1075–1095.
doi:10.1525/aa.1968.70.issue-6
Schegloff, E. A. (1979). Identification and recognition in telephone conversation openings. In G. Psathas (Ed.),
Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology. New York, NY: Irvington.

1091
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Turn your brain off”: The coaching process of young children

Panel contribution

Ms. Cynthia Hicban 1


1. Queensland University of Technology

The capacity for young children in early childhood education settings to engage in peer-to-peer teaching is
well documented (Smith, 2012; Williams, 2007). Indeed, the concept of a ‘more knowledgeable other’ mov-
ing peers through their ‘zone of proximal development’ is the cornerstone of Vygotsky’s (1934/1978) work in
socio-cultural theory. Bruner’s (Wood, et. al, 1976) work on peer-to-peer scaffolding has also been shown to
improve children’s participation in early childhood settings (Theobald, 2019). What is less common is the con-
cept of a ‘child-coach’ and the capacity for young children to enact the same practices associated with coaching.
Conversation analysis has been used to explore adult coaches in sport (Evans & Fitzgerald, 2017; Miller, 2012;
Mondada, 2018), counselling (Stommel & van der Houwen, 2013), and business (Aksu, 2014). This paper uses
ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to identify the features of how young children in an early child-
hood education setting display, negotiate, and co-construct a coach-coachee relationship. It also examines how
peers manage risk in the absence of an adult and overcome the epistemic dilemma of access and authority (Her-
itage, 2011; Sacks, 1984; Versteeg & te Molder, 2016). The study draws on video recordings of educator-child
and child-child interactions in an early childhood education setting in Queensland, Australia, featuring chil-
dren aged 15-mths to 5-years-old. The multimodal transcription is based on Mondada, version 5.0.1, Nov.2019,
(www.lorenzamondada.net/multimodal-transcription). The example is a short sequence of children climbing
above the sanctioned height in a kindergarten. Findings include how ‘my side’ tellings (Pomerantz, 1980) can
be applied by young children to manage risk and describe the potential characteristics of child-led coaching.
The paper contributes to the recent investigation of Arminen and Simonen (2021) into the multidimensionality
of epistemics in interaction, and how risk and knowledge co-habit in institutional encounters.
Aksu, Y. (2014). Form, function and particularities of discursive practices in one-on-one supervision in Germany.

Arminen, I., & Simonen, M. (2021). Expertise as a domain in interaction.


Evans, B. & Fitzgerald, R. (2017). The categorial and sequential work of ‘embodied mapping’ in basketball coach-
ing,.
Heritage, J. (2011) Territories of knowledge, territories of experience
Miller, P. K. (2012). Arsène didn’t see it: Coaching, research and the promise of a discursive psychology.
Mondada, L. (2018). Driving instruction at high speed on a race circuit.
Mondada, L. (2019). Conventions for transcribing multimodality.
Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: ‘Limited access’ as a “fishing” device.
Sacks, H. (1994). Lectures on conversation
Smith, P. (2012). Children as teachers: Creating opportunities for children to share expertise with their peers.
Stommel, W. & van der Houwen, F. (2013). Formulations in “trouble” chat sessions.
Theobald, Maryanne (2019) Scaffolding storytelling and participation with a bilingual child in a culturally and
linguistically diverse preschool in Australia.
Versteeg, W., & te Molder, H. (2016). What my body tells me about your experience
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Williams, P. (2007). Children teaching children.
Wood, D., Bruner, J.S. & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving.

1092
Symptomatic speech: A
challenge for pragmatic
approaches (organized by
Maria Francisca
Lier-DeVitto, Lucia
Arantes)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Asymmetric interaction as a triggering notion in the speech


therapy in the Language Clinic fields

Panel contribution

Dr. Lucia Arantes 1 , Dr. Maria Francisca Lier-DeVitto 1


1. PUC-SP

Pragmatics has, indeed, become a source of investigation for both Language Pathology researchers and for
speech-therapists. Such a widespread tendency is frequently attributed to the fact that Pragmatics has as cen-
tral trends of reflection and discussion notions which are core problems for researchers and clinicians who are
interested and who deal with questions related to communication and interaction difficulties. In other words,
asymmetric interactions and communication problems are permanently at stake in those theoretical and clini-
cal areas. This paper focuses on watch we consider “lack of rigor” in the movement of extraction of the interac-
tion and communication concepts from Pragmatics and their subsequent incorporation in the Speech Therapy
therapeutic discourse. It is claimed in the above-mentioned field, that patients’ communicative behaviors can
be better described with tools imported from that area of Pragmatics. In this article, we discuss the limits of the
application of Pragmatics, especially the notions of interaction and communication in speech-language pathol-
ogy studies. Our critique focuses on the thoughtless use of the notions of communication and interaction and
not on the conceptual elaborations that drive the field of Pragmatics. The discussion we make has two defined
objectives, namely, to distinguish classical Speech-Language Pathology and Language Clinic, as proposed by
Lier-DeVitto (1997, 2000, 2006, among others), through the critical comments that we make and, also, to define
the way in which the notion of communication/interaction is understood and theoretically worked in the field
of Language Clinic, which has its roots in Interactionism in Language Acquisition, as proposed by De Lemos
(1992, 2002, 2005, among others). It is understood, in this context, that Psychoanalysis takes place: difference
and non-similarity between participants in a dialogue is taken as the driving force of the relationship among
speakers. Segments of intriguing clinical interactions will be presented and discussed.

1094
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Body and language: speech acts and the constitution of the


subject-researcher in language acquisition

Panel contribution

Ms. Glória Carvalho 1


1. Universidade Católica de Pernambuco

This work is based on the position taken by Shoshana Felman (2003). It is a unique position on the relation-
ship between body and language, highlighting the intersection between the Austinian theory of speech acts and
psychoanalysis. The author assumes the proposal that an act is what leaves traces. As a consequence, there is
no act without linguistic inscription, that is, without language effects. Thus, this position breaks the dichotomy
between body and spirit, between matter and language. When it comes to the human, the body is, therefore, a
speaking body. The relationship between body and language, between act and speech is, however, paradoxical,
insofar as it is inseparable and incongruous. For Shoshana Felman, the act cannot know what makes it and, as
a consequence, the act (of language) subverts both consciousness and knowledge (of language). Approaching
performatives in their enigmatic and paradoxical character, that author also discusses the criterion of “hap-
piness”. By bringing this proposal to the field of language acquisition, we raise the following question: how
the speech act of the other, in their relationship with the child, is inscribed in the child’s body. In an inverse
movement, we also ask: how is the child’s act of “speech” inscribed in the body of the other (the mother or the
investigator)? Firstly, the notion of speech must be broadened, so that it encompasses sound manifestations
and other manifestations of the child’s body, extrapolating the Saussurean notion of speech, which allows us to
treat them as acts of “speech” that affect the other. Without intending to answer the questions posed, we aim
to approach them taking some consequence of the performative proposal, a consequence that could be stated
in the following terms: the speech act, both of the child and of the one who dialogues with him/her, constitutes
the subject (in their unconscious) as a researcher of children’s language. In order to address the issues raised in
this work, we will deal with speech acts in their paradoxical dimension both from Austin and also (and above
all) based on the reading of the austinian performative analysis made by Shoshana Felman, in which she makes
visible the intersection of this analysis with the psychoanalytic proposal, especially with regard to the relation-
ship between body and language. Thus, considering that this intersection proposal could shed light on some
questions that arise in the field of investigation of language acquisition, we chose the question of the researcher
in his/her relationship with children’s speech, which we will seek to base empirically with the analysis of speech
records of a child in spontaneous dialogues with her mother.

1095
18th International Pragmatics Conference

L’asymétrie dans les dialogues de l’enfant avec l’adulte. Entre


faits de langue et effets dans le discours

Panel contribution

Dr. Rosa Figueira 1


1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Dans la perspective ouverte par ce panel, parmi les enjeux propres aux domaines de la Clinique et de
l’Acquisition du Langage, les chercheurs ont l’occasion de discuter, conforme leurs documents, des dialogues
qualifiés comme asymétriques. Notre contribution consistera à faire connaître des exemples de l’asymétrie
dans le parcours de l’enfant avec la langue, selon une approche sémantico-pragmatique, consacrée au dictum
et aux effets de dire. Nous cherchons à évaluer comment les concepts et les principes de la pragmatique (Austin
1962) sont utilisés dans l’analyse, sans perdre de vue des aspects du fonctionnement linguistique, dans la tra-
jectoire des enfants brésiliens (âgés 2 à 5 ans) avec le portugais-langue maternelle. Le corpus est constitué
par des notes prises dans un journal et des enregistrements audio, auxquels nous ajoutons quelques données
sur l’acquisition du français (Les Jeux de Mots de l’Enfants, Aimard 1975). Les occurrences enregistrées, en
touchant les limites consolidées de la langue, provoquent chez le destinataire, en raison de leur caractéristique
particulièrement divergente de l’usage adulte, une étrangeté, voire le rire. Des effets, intégrés à la description,
permettent d’exploiter quel est le fait linguistique dont ils sont issus, dans une approche théorique cherchant
à valoriser la singularité de la parole de l’enfant, face à celui qui l’interprète ; pour reprendre un terme de De
Lemos (2002), il s’agit de faire attention aux vicissitudes de la parole de l’enfant. En voici quelques-unes. Il
existe (i) des répliques (non, ce n’est pas X, c’est Y), (ii) des jeux sonores entre des éléments phoniques purs, qui
résonnent dans une cascade de substitutions, auxquelles l’interlocuteur peut rester indifférent, ou il peut, au
contraire, partager avec l’enfant le moment ludique du jeu – domaine auquel il faut considérer les notions de fig-
ure vocale et forme, du manuscrite De l’Essence Double du Langage (Saussure 2002). Nous utilisons également la
réflexion saussurienne pour (iii) les innovations de vocabulaire, fondées sur le jeu ouvert du mécanisme linguis-
tique (Cours de Linguistique Générale, Saussure [1916] 1971) ; celles-ci affectent les échanges verbaux, parfois
sujets à l’interprétation divergente de ce qui est dit. Nous ajoutons des questions à propos de (i) l’homonymie
occasionnelle, source de non-coïncidences du dire. Que se passe-t-il lorsqu’un élément homonymique émerge
dans un acte de langage ? L’enfant est-il sensible à la duplicité de significations ou en est-il indifférent ? Un
thème surgit dans ce scénario : le circuit d’interaction entre les interlocuteurs révèle la zone de l’équivoque,
affectant, de différentes manières, l’enfant et l’adulte (ou le patient et le thérapeute). Les exemples s’attachent
à contempler l’espace empirique qui se tient sous une base théorique commune (De Lemos 2002 ; LierDeVitto
et Carvalho 2008). Les trouvailles enregistrées montrent la position du sujet par rapport à la langue et à l’autre,
ses vicissitudes dans une interaction qui se présente hic et nunc.

1096
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Les asymétries du dialogue: que peut-on dire sur


l’argumentation entre l’adulte et l’enfant ?

Panel contribution

Prof. Maria Fausta Pereira de Castro 1


1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas- UNICAMP/CNPq

La linguistique moderne attribue à la Pragmatique l’étude du langage à partir du point de vue des sujets par-
lants, de leurs choix, mais aussi des contraintes qui leur sont imposées lorsqu’ils utilisent la langue dans une
interaction sociale ( Mondada 1997, Parret 1988, Crystal 2008). Dans la foulée de cette question suivent - parmi
tant d’autres éléments de l’univers de la pragmatique - les principes qui régissent la communication, le prob-
lème de l’intention des interlocuteurs et leurs capacités mutuelles à interpréter le point de vue de l’autre. Dans
cette perspective et en harmonie avec le thème de ce Pannel, notre travail porte sur l’argumentation en jeu
dans l’interaction entre l’adulte et l’enfant. L’argumentation dans la langue est un point sensible dans l’étude
de l’asymétrie entre les participants au dialogue. Milner (1978: 101) précise le mode de communication en af-
firmant que « deux êtres parlants sont nécessairement et réellement distincts et que d’aucun point de vue leur
différence ne peut être comblée.». C’est ainsi que un tel modèle fonctionne comme un masque qui appose à la
relation de la conjonction impossible le principe de la symétrie: la non-conjonction devient ainsi l’espace de
la communication entre paires. S’il est vrai que la non-conjonction se maintient à l’arrière-plan de la mise en
scène, il est tout de même possible de la nier par le biais de certaines démarches. Dans ce contexte de discussion
notre but est d’explorer la relation adulte-enfant, tout en tenant compte du fait que, malgré l’extrême asymétrie
entre la parole de l’un et de l’autre, la langue, par sa dimension performative ( Austin, [1962]1990) soutient le di-
alogue entre la mère (ou l’adulte) et l’enfant. Dans cette perspective et à partir de notre lecture de la formulation
de Ducrot et Carel (s.d.) sur l’argumentation dans la langue, nous la posons comme contrepoint ou contention
de la dérive d’un énoncé. De la sorte, comme parole toujours dirigée à un autre, l’argumentation instaure dans
le dialogue des effets de conversion de la disparité en nivellement de la différence, en oblitérant « la topolo-
gie de la non-conjonction » (pensons, par exemple, à l’incorporation d’arguments de l’adulte par l’enfant). En
revanche, en tenant toujours compte sa présence en sourdine, nous signalerons dans la structure du dialogue
l’irruption de la non-conjonction, animée par la singularité de la parole de l’enfant. Des extraits de la parole de
l’enfant en relation avec l’adulte constitueront la base empirique de cette étude.

1097
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Symptomatic speech and debility: intriguing problems


concerning asymmetric interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Luciana Carnevale 1


1. Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste

This study focuses on a specific phenomenon concerning nonsensical dialogical occurrences motivated by
speech productions which systematically frustrate the interlocutors’ expectations. The first inquiries on the
subject matter arose from the speech therapy clinical care of a 22-year-old boy, Mário, diagnosed with Down
Syndrome. His speech was often disturbing because it unexpectedly deviated from the ongoing dialogic
direction or monologic narrative construction. One can understand why the boy’s parents said that they
could not hold a conversation with him and also that they had difficulty making sense of what he was saying.
These complaints were responsible for their demand for therapeutic care. Up-to-date studies found in the
areas of Language Pathology and Language Therapy generally refer that subjects with Down Syndrome are
“quite sociable” and “cooperative” from a communicative point of view. The authors argue that, although
there may be some impairment in “speech intelligibility”, communication “repair strategies” include the
production of gestures that end up “compensating” for this deficiency and enabling the interlocutor to
“capture” communicative intentions and infer meanings during a “conversation” (CHAPMAN, 1997). Dialogical
problems, when present, are due to the inability of these subjects to offer referential clues that can facilitate
the understanding of what they say. (ABEDUTO & MURPHY, 2004). It is stated here that the pragmatic aspects
mentioned above have not received due attention. Mario’s utterances, to be presented and discussed in this
paper, do not fit or match the descriptions and explanations found in the literature. Mario does not make use
of communicative “adjustments”, he does not reformulate his speech, nor do gestures appear to “facilitate”
understanding. Mario’s performance could be seen as an “exception to the communicative cooperation rule”
attributed to subjects with Down Syndrome. In this paper, we intend to present an alternative theoretical and
clinical approach to the asymmetrical dialogue involving patients with the aforementioned syndrome. We
intend to shed light on the research program called Clinic of Language, proposed by Lier-DeVitto (2002/2006
among others), based both on European Structuralism (Saussure, Jakobson, Benveniste) and on Psychoanalysis
(Freud, Lacan).

REFERENCES
ABEDUTTO, L.; MURPHY, MM Linguagem, cognição social, comportamento desadaptativo e comunicação na
síndrome de Down e na síndrome do X frágil. Em ML Rice & SF Warren. Distúrbios do desenvolvimento da
linguagem: dos fenótipos às etiologias . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Eds.), 2004.
CHAPMAN, R. Desenvolvimento da linguagem em crianças e adolescentes com Síndrome de Down. Não. P.
Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (orgs.). Compêndio de linguagem da criança. Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas, 1997,
pp. 517-533.
LIER-DeVITTO, MF Patologias da Linguagem: sobre as “vicissitudes de falas sintomáticas”. In MF Lier-DeVitto
& L. Arantes (orgs.). Aquisição, Patologias e Clínica de Linguagem. São Paulo: EDUC, FAPESP, 2002d/2006b,
p.183-200.

1098
Tales from the South:
Doing narrative analysis
beyond the canon
(organized by Liana de
Andrade Biar, Naomi
Orton, Liliana Cabral
Bastos)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I don’t interview Blacks”: (anti)racist narratives, Blackness


and Whiteness in the corporate context.

Panel contribution

Ms. Cleide De Mello 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

This research began in 2016, when I was working at a non-profit institution that prepared Black youth in the
favelas in Rio de Janeiro - thus, from very low-income families - to enter the job market. I soon realized that
despite our efforts as Social Educators to provide participants with educational resources so that they could
apply for jobs in companies, they were hardly ever called for job interviews. My suspicion of racism echoed
when a White businessman posted a clearly racist occurrence on the LinkedIn social network in 2017. He had
recommended a highly qualified Black acquaintance of his for a job opening, but when the recruiter saw the
skin color of the candidate, he immediately refused to talk to him, saying: “I do not interview Blacks”. This post
generated more than half a million views and made me realize that it is not enough to qualify Black youth to
work in companies, if companies are not qualified to receive them because of corporate racism. The business-
man who posted the complaint became an activist for greater diversity in companies and also part of a group
called “CEOs Legacy” with 30 other executives, who created the “Impact Movement-CEOs for Diversity and In-
clusion (D&I)”, hitherto unprecedented this way, with the involvement of top business executives. As of May
2020, due to the vertiginous increase in anti-racist protests around the world over the brutal murder of George
Floyd in the USA and of Alberto Freitas in Brazil, there has been growing interest from companies, many of
them global, in hiring and promoting Black professionals, and in anti-racist education programs as well. This
interest in D&I among White executives raised the following research questions: 1) What beliefs and ideologies
of Whiteness and Blackness are in conflict in the corporate environment? 2) How do these CEOs create and
grow their engagement in anti-racist movements? 3) How do narratives of engagement, defense and action for
racial inclusion in companies support and strengthen (or not) these anti-racist movements? To answer these
questions, I have created data corpora based on in-person interviews and on the launch live of the Impact Move-
ment. With an interpretative qualitative methodology and the epistemological support of intellectuals - mostly
Black - on Narrative Analysis, Race and Racism, Whiteness and Blackness, Diversity and Inclusion, I have an-
alyzed the narratives of three CEOs of the aforementioned Impact Movement and three representatives of the
Black Movement who were invited as consultants for this D&I project. The results so far are showing that CEOs
are very concerned about hiring Blacks and using “politically correct” language, for fear of having their compa-
nies “canceled” from the market. Although the end of racism, which has lasted for five centuries in our society,
cannot yet be seen, any pro-change movement is welcome, as it allows the rise of a generation of Blacks who,
until now, even with academic and professional qualifications, is out of the labor market or underemployed, in
a country where 56% of the population is Black.

1100
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Black resistance through oral narratives in brazilian


universities

Panel contribution

Mrs. Natália Felix 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

The present research is part of my thesis and aims to approach the identity construction forged from the orality
of young black students in the academic context. To fulfill this purpose, we appropriated the analysis of the nar-
ratives in their individual and collective construction of themselves and their peers, through the meetings held
at the Coletivo Nuvem Negra (PUC-Rio). In the context of the consolidation of a black collective that includes the
trajectories, experiences and challenges experienced by its participants, we are interested in deducing, through
oral narratives, how these young people construct themselves and are constructed in the collective. Moreover,
our research is anchored in the way in which the construction of these narratives and the movement of the
aforementioned collective move the racial and territorial tensions involved in a mostly white academic con-
text and how these tensions reinforce the structural racism (ALMEIDA, 2018) very strong and present in the
Brazilian conjuncture. This research presents as theoretical key the Narrative Analysis (BASTOS AND BIAR
2015; MOITA LOPES, 2006; RIBEIRO AND GARCEZ, 2002), from intersections that deprecate the racial point of
view of Language (FANON, 2008; NASCIMENTO, 2019; SILVA SOUZA, 2011), besides serving as a highlight for the
reverberation of southern voices (BOAVENTURA SANTOS, 2009; GONZALEZ, 1984).
Thus, we are interested not only in language/discourse as an instrument of communication and viability of
meaning, but also, and mainly, in the negotiation of social and identity constructions that are made from inter-
actional contexts. Through the participant linguistic exchange, we believe it is possible to deduce the relations
established between the identity construction that the subject makes of itself and the endorsement received
by his interlocutor in the creation of this self. In this sense, identity would be revealed from the interactional
discursive practices (MOITA LOPES, 2002).
This research analyzes the narrative of a former student of PUC-Rio. The narrative in question stems from the
data generated in my thesis and seeks to deduce, through a Labovian perspective, how his speech reinforces
places of conflict and reaffirmation of whiteness (SOVIK, 2009), as well as the importance of aquilombing spaces,
such as the ‘Nuvem Negra’ collective, built by the students of the institution itself. It is also worth noting that in
addition to functioning as a space for the construction of identities and presentation of new social practices, they
point to new pedagogies woven through a critical racial literacy (FERREIRA, 2014) and reverberate marginalized
voices, the voices of the South.
Keywords: Narratives; Race; Identity; Resistance; Literacy.

1101
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Brazilian social movements and their narratives as a tool in


the fight for change

Panel contribution

Dr. Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo 1


1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

Contemporary social movements have been studied from different perspectives, and particularly in terms of
the various strategies they use to denounce problems in the public sphere. The main purpose of this paper is to
observe how storytelling has been used as one of the most important discursive strategies of social movements
in the Global South. To do so, I analyze how narratives shared by Black Brazilian mothers engaged in social
movements speak to wider issues of structural and structuring racism, as well as to the banalization of violence
against Black communities. These are women who have lost their children to police brutality as part of the
so-called “war on drugs,” which largely takes place in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. This study draws on Narrative
Analysis (BASTOS and BIAR 2015) and is underpinned by an interpretive qualitative research methodology. The
corpus includes narratives told by Black Brazilian mothers at events and demonstrations held in 2018/2020 and
organized by movements such as the “Rede the Comunidades e Movimentos contra a Violência” and the “Mães
de Manguinhos.” Guided by an understanding of narrative as a device which organizes human experience
(Linde, 1993; Bruner, 1997) and as a powerful tool operationalized by social movements to pressure the State (De
Fina, 2020), initial findings suggest the existence of a prototypical narrative, here called engagement narrative,
which organizes the suffering over the loss of a child. While widespread among mothers who participate in
such social movements, these narratives can be seen as atypical insofar as they disrupt the Labovian canon
in a very particular manner. When all the mothers’ narratives are taken together, a parallelism can be seen
according to which tragedy is repeated, pain is collectivized and the racialization of Brazilian police violence
is foregrounded. On the one hand, their narratives frame the events that led to the death of their children as
individual experiences. On the other, such narratives connect the painful shared experience of losing a child to
a wider context of violence and structural racism. It is my understanding that these narratives actively dispute
long-standing racist discourses and practices which organize police and legal practices, demanding that the State
introduce effective, transformative measures. The circulation of such narratives in public spaces and social
media platforms may help other activists, as well as family members of those victimized by police brutality, to
join the fight for justice.

1102
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourses of perceived empathy: A sociolinguistic analysis of


chronic patients’ narratives of medical practices

Panel contribution

Dr. Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar 1 , Ms. Grimanessa González-Tapia 1


1. Universidad Católica del Maule

The assessment of doctors’ communication and interpersonal skills is a valuable and well-established method
in medical education and counselling because it helps (often doctors in training) to shape the way they deliver
diagnoses, initiate therapy, and establish a caring relationship with their patients. Whether evaluating doctors
are assessing residents or fellow practicing doctors, some scholars would well argue that the power structures
at play in such assessments may be somewhat horizontal as all parties involved share some degree of social
and professional recognition in their professional community as well as in the society more generally. What
happens, however, when it is patients of the Chilean public healthcare system (often from underprivileged
and/or vulnerable backgrounds) who are asked to evaluate their doctors, who, in turn, are foreign and have
different cultural backgrounds? In this case, while traditional (top-down) vertical power structures may be in
place when patients reflect on formal aspects of the doctor-patient relationship, rather fluid (possibly bottom-
up) vertical power structures may have a more crucial role when they reflect on cultural issues and preferences.
All in all, this may work to mediate the way patients manage the potentially face-threatening task of assessing
their doctors.
With this contextual information in mind, this study draws on seven in-depth audio-recorded interviews with
chronic patients of public healthcare institutions of the central region of Chile, conducted by a psychologist us-
ing a protocol that involved a question guide and activities with visual cues. Viewing medical empathy as a
fundamental pillar in the social construction of the doctor-patient relationship and as a sensitive one in inter-
cultural communication, we analyse chronic patients’ evaluations focusing in particular on their narratives of
doctors’ empathic communication in routine medical consultations in the public system. To this end, this paper
builds on the work of Barone and Lazzaro-Salazar (2015, 2016) regarding the assessment of doctors’ communi-
cation skills, and of Lazzaro-Salazar and Zayts (2021) regarding the role of narratives of personal experience
(NoPE) and narratives of vicarious experience (NoVE) in intercultural clinical settings to: 1) identify the prag-
matic resources that characterise patients’ narratives of doctors’ empathic communication; 2) to explore novel
intersections of NoPE and NoVE as patients draw on them for multiple social purposes; and 3) reflect on the
underlying culture order present in the construction of patients’ narratives and the pragmatic resources that
characterise them, as patients manage potentially face-threatening behaviour when evaluating their doctors.
To conclude, we explore the findings for these three points to contest some of the often-taken-for-granted di-
chotomic ordering principles of vertical power structures in the doctor-patient relationship.

1103
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Marked-body Language in labour narratives

Panel contribution

Ms. Barbara Venosa 1 , Dr. Liliana Bastos 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Key words: narrative; mothering; agency; body; affection, birth


This qualitative-interpretive study (Denzin; Lincoln, 2006) aims to analyse the construction and effects of hege-
monic discourses (Foucault, 1988) regarding pregnancy and birth by analysing labour narratives of Brazilian
mothers located in distinct social contexts.
In the narrative performances (Goffman, 2011) which emerge from three research interviews (conducted both
on and offline), we observe how speakers build agency in relation to body/affect (Le Breton, 2004). The narra-
tives of these women - from diverse social backgrounds (in terms of race, class, age, private/public health system
users) - are analysed focusing on how these stories build intelligibility that governs social life and which can
curtail bodies – leading us to reflect on the pervasiveness of medical discourse and its impacts on the experience
of mothering and maternity. Our understanding of gender is based on Matricentric Feminism – a branch of fem-
inism which aims to further mothers’ visibility from an intersectional perspective (O’Reilly 2016). As part of an
emerging tradition of “undisciplined”, Contemporary Applied Linguistics of Latin America (Moita Lopes, 2006),
this study draws on Narrative Analysis (Mishler; 1984; Linde, 1997; Bastos e Biar; 2015), in order to further un-
derstanding of locally constructed identities and their relationship with the surrounding world. Our analysis
examines the building of “evaluation” (Labov, 1972) - a narrative component which heightens drama, convey-
ing the story’s very “raison d’être” - in order to consider the discursive dimension of affect. Our examination
of the relationship between culture, discourse, body and affect, enables us to identify the way these insidious
discourses leave their mark on mothers; either through reprimands, constraints and the erasure of control over
their own corporeality or otherwise by prompting autonomy and agency. Thus, by paying attention to these dis-
cursive scars both researchers and research participants are able to analyse, interpret, rework and reimagine
the lived experience of labour.

1104
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narrative Analysis and displacement processes: The case of


Venezuelans in Brazil

Panel contribution

Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

In this work, we reflect on some ways in which Narrative Analysis can contribute to the reception of refugees
and asylum seekers in Brazil. The research is theoretically based on the idea that the ‘refugee’ category is
produced performatively (Butler, 1990) in narrative practices in which asylum seekers, social actors in the field
of eligibility, media representations and institutional frameworks participate. Here, we intend to observe at
least two dimensions of this process.
The first one comes from fieldwork on the Brazil-Venezuela border, one of the critical points of the biggest
exodus in recent Latin American history: The recent displacement of Venezuelans due to the massive impov-
erishment of the population. In 2020, Brazil became the Latin American country with the largest number of
recognized Venezuelan refugees, with a total number of more than 46,000 people.
Throughout our ethnographic incursion, we conducted interviews with Venezuelans, state agents and NGO vol-
unteers involved in the reception of migrants. Through the lens of narrative analysis, we identify the main
discursive disputes emerging from the first contacts between Venezuelan asylum seekers and the Brazilian
population. In this context, we could highlight in the narrative construction of their journeys and their process
of insertion and adaptation in Brazil a constant tension between cordiality and hostility.
In the second dimension of the study, we focus on the formal process of determining refugee status in Brazil -
a process that fundamentally depends on the applicant’s narrative competence and his/her possibility of con-
forming his/her experience of displacement in a normative matrix about the refugee experience. Based on
interviews carried out with different actors involved in the institutional eligibility process we observe, once
more within the framework of Narrative Analysis, how linguistic ideologies especially the actors’ beliefs about
the nature of narrative construction, operate as protagonists of this institutional process. The research results
point to the fragility of the category of refuge and the need to think about the discursive-interactional processes
of labeling in this field.

1105
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narratives of (re)discovery: perspectives of black Brazilian


undergraduate students in processes of racial self-awareness

Panel contribution

Ms. Joana Gomes 1 , Dr. Liana De Andrade Biar 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

This paper aims to investigate Racial Literacy (FERREIRA 2015; TWINE 2004) and Pigmentocracy (TELLES 2014;
DEVULSKY 2021) – one of the racist manifestations which considers skin color an important factor of social
stratification. Pigmentocracy privileges light skinned people over darker ones -, and is a topic which emerges in
the narratives of light-skinned undergraduates at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).
In these narratives we focus on how the participants construct their racial identities, the meanings attributed
to these, as well as how these develop in social interaction, in order to reflect on racial literacy development as
a continuous presence at university. The theoretical framework draws on categories stemming from Narrative
Analysis (MISHLER 2002; BIAR, ORTON and BASTOS 2021). This enables us to prioritize a micro social per-
spective, paying attention to the social encounters brought to life during storytelling. The interactions which
develop as these story worlds unfold at once reinforce and disrupt settled social arrangements which become
visible as a result of narrative practice. Moreover, we observe how the students’ identity practices relate to
discursive conflicts surrounding racism in a largely white elitist institution situated in Rio de Janeiro’s South
Zone: PUC-Rio.

1106
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narratives of a “camelô-ambulante”: (Sur)vival on Rio de


Janeiro’s commuter trains

Panel contribution

Mr. Douglas dos Santos 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

Up and down Rio de Janeiro’s commuter trains, the city’s working class buckles under the strain of latter-day
capitalism. These commuters are predominantly made up of babysitters, maids, general services assistants,
doormen, and salespeople more generally speaking. In the midst of this group, the salespeople who operate on
the train itself are frequently recognized and recognize themselves as a highly stigmatized category of work-
ers. Some of them call themselves ”camelôs-ambulantes” (travelling salespeople), sellers of the most varied
types of products who trade their products on their laps between train carriages and train stations. “Camelôs-
ambulantes” epitomise a precarious workforce which sustains itself on the edge of neoliberalism. They are their
own employers, acting on their own without the support of any legal framework — an undertaking that subsists
in a legal grey area (PIRES, 2011). It is thus by analyzing narratives of their toil that the present study aims to
identify some of the circumstances that lead “camelôs-ambulantes” who work/have worked on Rio de Janeiro’s
commuter trains to seek a profession of little social prestige. Drawing on life stories (LINDE, 1993) — narratives,
extracted from a semi-structured interview with a “camelô-ambulante”, Mr. Geraldo, the proposed analysis
pays close attention to the meaning making practices in which he engages as he narrates his experience of work
on the train. In addition to the theoretical-methodological resources of Narrative Analysis (LABOV; WALETZKY,
1967; LABOV, 1979; BAMBERG; GEORGAKOPOULOU, 2008) the study relies on indexicality (SILVERSTEIN, 2003)
to etch out connections between Geraldo’s storytelling practices and the wider context of contemporary work
and pragmatic survival (OLIVEIRA, 2019) to subsequently identify how “camelôs-ambulantes” create ways to ex-
ist and survive from their work. The analysis suggests that work for “camelôs-ambulantes” such as Mr. Geraldo
is a survival strategy, under constant threat from both Rio de Janeiro’s railway system and neoliberalism — an
economic system which exploits the poor and encourages competition —, which oppose their presence on the
train, in the station, and in society in general. This study finds its social relevance in seeking to understand the
facets that underlie the success of neoliberalism according to those who form its basis and, at the same time, are
the most harmed ones. This research aims at collaborating academically with the understanding of the narra-
tive as a semiotic resource for the production of meanings that uses evaluations to index an interactional order
to social orders. And also, this research instigates the academic debates which have addressed work precari-
ousness in times of uberization, as we understand that as the neoliberal discourse is expanded and naturalized,
more stories of social injustice are understood as stories of resilience and personal success.

1107
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narratives- the Weapon of the Powerless: Lay Witnesses’


Tactical Tool

Panel contribution

Ms. Tasheney Francis 1


1. University of Manitoba

“I had nowhere to stay,” says McLeod. “My house was . . .”, then following a slight pause “burnt down.”
“You saw your house . . . burnt-”
“Yeah.” Then McLeod adds with emphasis, “I watched it burnt down!”
The above extract is one of the many instances where resident witnesses of the West Kingston Truth Commission
use narrative to transmit to ‘the courtroom reality’ (Gibbons, 2003), the lived ‘external reality’ of the deadly in-
vasion of armed forces into their Jamaican, inner-city community. The joint-military operation was to arrest an
alleged area-leader, instead, over 70 community members, family and friends died. A national outcry initiated
the probe into what exactly happened.
While the overarching goal of a truth commission is to reveal the truth, there are competing communicative
goals in courtroom discourse (Coulthard & Johnson, 2007). This paper explores the discourse strategies these
traumatized residents employ to effectively participate in the ‘framing contest’ that ensue (Hedley & Clark,
2007). Using Dell Hymes’ (1972) linguistic-anthropological Speaking Grid to delineate the communicative
components of the speech event, I examine 12 hours of resident witnesses’ televised interviews. The study
reveals how these socially, institutionally and linguistically powerless resident witnesses employ storytelling to
rekey the discourse, save face, reassign blame- amidst their institutional constraints, and facilitate role-taking.
In doing the latter, particularly, resident witnesses establish agreement and initiate social action through
empathy (Coulthard & Johnson, 2007; Bonds, 2009).

The study shows how these lay witnesses exploit the polyphonic nature of narratives by manipulating
the production format through reported speech. This in turn facilitates embedded evaluation (Labov &
Waletzky, 1967) which protects their positive face (Tracy, 2002), and then allows them to collectively resist
cross-examining counsels’ attempts to dehumanize the incident and discredit their witness. Similarly, the data
reveal how the multiplayer characterization of narratives allows these lay witnesses, using multimodal codes,
to rearrange the participation framework at the intersecting planes of the courtroom and external realities.
This way, the witnesses have the audience trade places, have an intersubjective experience of what they went
through (Coulthard & Johnson, 2007; Bonds, 2004), and thus challenge the negative master narrative about
them and their community.

References

Bonds, E. (2009). Strategic Role Taking and Political Struggle: Bearing Witness to the Iraq
War. Symbolic Interaction, 32, 1-20.
Coulthard, M. & Johnson, A. (2007). An introduction to forensic linguistics: language in
evidence. Routledge.
Gibbons, J. (2003). Forensic linguistics: An introduction to language in the justice system.
Blackwell Publishers.
Hedley, M., & Clark, S.A. (2007). The Microlevel Discourse of Social Movement Framing:
Debating Antiwar Protests on a University Listserv. Sociological Focus, 40, 26 – 47
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience.

1108
18th International Pragmatics Conference

In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 67–96). University of
Washington Press.
Tracy, K. 2002. Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities. NY: The Guilford Press.

1109
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Public health crisis or typical behaviour? Examining


narratives of traffic violence in the Global South from a
feminist perspective

Panel contribution

Dr. Naomi Orton 1


1. PUC-Rio (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)

Year on year, traffic violence leaves millions bereft of loved ones and yet millions more with life changing in-
juries. Although a global public health crisis, until recently, little scholarly attention has been directed to the
ways in which such violence is discursively neutralised and thus rendered “typical”. Based on the assumption
that public perceptions of traffic violence as an inevitable malaise of contemporary society may similarly be
challenged in discourse, this presentation forms part of a broader, ongoing investigation which critically inter-
rogates the construction and contestation of blame in the narratives this violence gives rise to.
Taking Brazil as a case study where - unlike in many parts of the Global North - the covid-19 pandemic has failed
to bring about significant changes in the division of public space or attitudes towards its use, this paper draws
on newslike narratives produced by traditional media outlets, as well as their textual trajectories: readers’
comments, as well as recordings of public debates held by a group of feminist bicycle advocates in Rio de Janeiro,
of which I am a participant.
The narratives of resistance which unfold in these debates ‒ discomforting stories of everyday urban violence
and misogyny featuring unconventional protagonists - frequently defy both narrative conventions and Brazil-
ian norms of femininity which dictate that, on venturing beyond the domestic sphere, women should remain
subdued and demure, while simultaneously adhering to crippling aesthetic standards. Moreover, since the ac-
ceptance of displays of physical prowess ‒ including cycling in traffic ‒ is largely contingent on their appealing
to the male gaze, the “transgressions” which provide the impetus for the group’s storytelling practices are of-
ten met with specifically gendered sanctions, or forms of “bikelash”, from those who subscribe to conservative
ideologies. Faced with such adversity, these stories act as a central force in the group’s reimagining of public
space, as participants attempt to reconcile their experiences with common sense beliefs, re-signifying gendered
slurs and confronting the territorial norms which simultaneously constrain their agency.
Despite these processes of ressignification, discursive struggles over meaning which punctuate both narrated
and narrative worlds highlight the tension between competing interpretations of gendered traffic violence and
the “injurious signs” by which this is framed. Furthermore, the consistent framing of story protagonists as atyp-
ical, threatening members of society - by both hegemonic media and by the very victims who resist these master
narratives - means responsibility for the perpetuation of systemic traffic violence fails to be levelled at the State
or society more generally. This oscillation between acts of resistance and resignation to the sanitised violence
which characterises their daily commutes suggests the study of atypical narrative practices in the Global South
may be key to broadening debates on the inevitability of modern-day violence and the ways in which cities
around the world may eventually be reconstrued as inclusive spaces.

1110
18th International Pragmatics Conference

South re(existences): Narratives of women in the face of


gender violence in Rio de Janeiro

Panel contribution

Ms. Alice Santos 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

This research is part of the production of my doctoral thesis in which we work with the narratives of women who
suffer/have suffered domestic/gender violence and are/were assisted by the MMSG - Movimento de Mulheres, a
philanthropic association which provides assistance to these women. MMG is located in the city of São Gonçalo
– an underprivileged metropolitan region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, taking as a starting point the moment of
reception of these women in the support group to the path they take to new forms of continuities in their lives.
The generation of data follows an ethnographic and participatory perspective (MISHLER, 1986) and relies on
interviews with subsequent transcriptions. The analysis is guided by the lens of Narrative Analysis, the concepts
of ‘face work’ and ‘embarrassment’ (BASTOS, 2005; BASTOS and BIAR, 2015; GOFFMAN, 2009; BUTLER, 1990),
based on the idea that identities are collectively constructed and that the hegemonic gaps, once reached, are
agents of transformation in the world through language. Moreover, language/discourse is understood not only
as a tool of communication and production of meaning, but also as a vehicle for the negotiation of social and
identity constructions. (MOITA LOPES, 2016)
We consider that analyses of oppression and situations in which rights are imminently threatened are not in-
tended to give voice to research collaborators, but rather to echo these participants in order to disrupt hege-
monic discourses of subordination, which make society a favorable place for these violations to occur (hooks,
1989; HALL, 2003).
Therefore, in this analysis we try to understand the ways in which the narratives and identities that are con-
structed by the participants can be dialogically related to other dominant discourses and coherence systems
validated in common sense about women who suffer gender and domestic violence. We further examine how
their reception by MMSG is able to act as a turning point in their process toward (re)existence, as these women
reverberate through collective resistance, rising up to create new paths from the South (BOAVENTURA SANTOS,
2019; FREIRE, 1992; GONZALEZ, 1984).

1111
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“You’re part of the family, aren’t you?”: Applications of


narrative analysis to the critical racial literacy of health
professionals.

Panel contribution

Dr. Clarissa Souza 1 , Dr. Liliana Bastos 1


1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

The reported speech featured in the title of this abstract may be examined from at least two analytical perspec-
tives: as a medical appointment, in which a white female professional and a black female patient participated,
and as a manifestation of the structural racism (Almeida, 2019) that organizes interactions in contemporary
Brazilian society. Taking this into account, we have analyzed segments of that consultation in order to further
understanding of the construction of this social event from an intersectional feminist perspective (Crenshaw,
1989; Akotirene, 2019). This perspective includes the observation of race, class, and gendered markers, with a
view to explaining the possible effects of the whiteness of a health professional who cares for a black patient.
The analytical methodology is qualitative and interpretive (Denzin; Lincoln, 2006) and the selected excerpts
contain interactional narratives (Labov, 1972; Mishler, 2002; Bastos; Biar, 2015), chosen for being a produc-
tive locus for the identification of identity performances (Bastos, 2005). In this case, the analysis of identity
performances proves to be relevant as it enables the oppressive mechanisms of whiteness in discourse to be
highlighted. Thus, the analysis speaks to critical whiteness studies and “narcissistic pacts” in racism (Bento,
2002) insofar as it denounces white privilege and the tendency to validate only topics that concern white peo-
ple. Although no direct conflicts or racist slurs are identified in the interactions analyzed, the results suggest
that structural racism can have a negative impact on interracial doctor-patient interactions—even those that
take place between women. These negative effects include patronising black patients, disregarding their com-
plaints and circumstantial statements, as well as the dismissal of the racially inflected power structures which
still shape relations between domestic workers and their employers in a post-slavery society—as underscored
in the reported speech selected for the title of this abstract. As such, our research suggests an urgent need for the
implementation of critical racial literacy (Borret et al., 2020; Ferreira, 2014) for health professionals, in general,
and physicians, in particular.
REFERENCES

AKOTIRENE, Carla. Interseccionalidade. 2019.


ALMEIDA, Silvio de. Racismo estrutural. 2019.
BASTOS, Liliana Cabral. Contando estórias em contextos espontâneos e institucionais. 2005.
BASTOS, Liliana Cabral; BIAR, Liana de Andrade. Análise de Narrativa e práticas de entendimento da vida social.
2015.
BENTO, Maria Aparecida Silva. Pactos narcísicos no racismo. 2002.
BORRET, Rita Helena; ARAUJO, Dagles Henrique Sartori de; BELFORD, Pollyanna Silva et al. Reflexões para uma
prática em saúde antirracista. 2020.
CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. 1989.
DENZIN, Norman K.; LINCOLN, Yvonna S. (orgs.). O planejamento da pesquisa qualitativa. 2006.
FERREIRA, Aparecida de Jesus. Teoria racial crítica e letramento racial crítico: narrativas e contranarrativas de
identidade racial de professores de línguas. 2014.
LABOV, William. The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. 1972.
MISHLER, Elliot G. Narrativa e identidade: a mão dupla do tempo. 2002.

1112
Telling/not telling stories
in discourses about Japan
under atypical situations
(organized by Kaori Hata,
Akira Satoh)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constructing Stigma against the Socially Marginalized amid


the COVID-19 Pandemic: As Seen in Re-narrated Stories about
People with Mental Illness

Panel contribution

Mr. Yingqian Zhang 1


1. Osaka University

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, instances of various sorts of discrimination and exclusion have been reported
to globally escalated as the numbers of cases and deaths grow. Existing studies have employed quantitative
approaches to interrogate discrimination and exclusion based on racism and occupation; they report that peo-
ple of Asian, in particular, Chinese, descent have become the target of racial discrimination, especially after
Western politicians have racialized the virus as “China Virus” (He et al. 2020; Reny & Barreto 2022) and that
medical workers and their families in Japan and Nepal are facing exclusion due to their high risk of exposure
to the virus (Makino et al. 2020; Singh & Subedi 2020). To further explore the potential negative impact on the
socially marginalized, this research employs qualitative approaches to interrogate the narrative of people suf-
fering from mental illness amid the COVID-19 pandemic and aims to reveal how those people are stigmatized
through re-narration and, thus, exclusion and discrimination against the socially marginalized are constructed
and reproduced.
The data of this research comprise three episodes excerpted from an online one-to-one interview between the
author and a middle-aged Japanese woman in 2021. Invited to share any experience about the COVID-19 pan-
demic, the interviewee talked about her acquaintance who had been suffering from mental illness for years and
had claimed to feel “relieved” watching others suffer from the pandemic. This original story was re-narrated, re-
spectively, by the interviewee and the interviewer throughout the three episodes. Using the positioning theory
(Bamberg 1997) and the concept of small stories (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) as the theoretical frame-
work, the current study analyzes the stories and discusses (1) How the interviewee and the interviewee differ-
ently re-narrate the original story about the interviewee’s acquaintance who claims to have a mental illness and
(2) What sorts of identities are being constructed in the re-narrated stories, and, thus, what different attitudes
against the socially marginalized are present.
By re-narrating the original story, the interviewee constructed her acquaintance as “distorted” and “glad to
see others suffer.” Despite the interviewer’s attempt to invoke empathy and reconstruct the acquaintance as
“desperate for company” and “comforted to know they are not the only one suffering,” the interviewee further
compared her acquaintance to an indiscriminate murderer and, thus, constructed that person’s identity as a po-
tential threat to the society and herself as a quasi-victim from such people. According to Becker (1963)’s labeling
theory, people stigmatize others by labeling them as deviant based on behaviors distinct from socially accepted
moral codes. This study reaffirms his theory by showing that marginalized groups, such as people with a mental
illness, are labeled as deviant for holding “incorrect” opinions or emotions than others within a global context
of an atypical situation, i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic. Having analyzed the process of constructing identities and
conveying attitudes against the socially marginalized in narratives, the study revealed the retelling essence of
a narrative and how such a narrative could contribute to the increase in stigmatization.

1114
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourses about Japan’s position on nuclear weapons

Panel contribution

Dr. Akira Satoh 1


1. Osaka University

Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine shows no signs of stopping. President Vladimir Putin has expressed his
readiness to use nuclear weapons, and the world is now facing a very real nuclear threat. Meanwhile, China’s
modernization and North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons has been upsetting the military balance in
Asia. Under these circumstances, the first meeting of the States Parties to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was held in Vienna, Austria in June 2022 to discuss efforts toward nuclear abolition.
Hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki attended the conference as observers, but Japan, the only country to
have experienced nuclear war, did not participate in the process at all. Why doesn’t Japan join this treaty? Or
more generally, what is Japan’s position on nuclear weapons?
In this paper, I investigate the rhetoric in discourses about Japan’s position on nuclear weapons, paying attention
to the words of Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida, whose constituency is the atomic-bombed city of Hiroshima and
whose lifework is to realize a world without nuclear weapons, and the criticism against his words.
As the Foreign Minister of Japan at that time, he decided not to participate in the negotiating conferences of
TPNW held in 2017, saying that the negotiation could be counterproductive in that it would deepen the con-
flict between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states. He concluded that Japan should act as a
“bridge” between the two sides through the framework of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review
Conference, which includes both nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states, and should give prior-
ity to advancing nuclear disarmament in a realistic manner. But critics say his approach is not realistic, since
he says that extended deterrence including U.S. nuclear umbrella is indispensable.
In his book published in 2020, he claims that being the only country to have been exposed to atomic bombs in
a war is Japan’s soft power or “trump card” in appealing to international public opinion for nuclear abolition,
and that he will make maximum use of its “moral authority” to mediate between nuclear weapon states and
non-nuclear weapon states. But critics say he is too optimistic, idealistic, and complacent about peace. I will
examine what the word “realistic” means to Prime Minister Kishida and his critics, and how they represent the
position Japan should take with regard to nuclear weapons.

1115
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How to survive in atypical situation as minority people: A


comparative study of immigrants’ narratives in Korea and the
UK

Panel contribution

Ms. Hiroe Takemura 1 , Prof. Kaori Hata 1


1. Osaka University

The purpose of this study is to examine how immigrant women, who have been turned to be identified as
‘discriminated’ by some social transformations, survive in the country they are living, by applying positioning
theory (Bamberg 1997, 2004) and small stories (Georgakopoulou 2007).
Georgakopoulou defines the small stories as “an umbrella term that captures a gamut of frequent and salient
narrative activities in conversational contexts, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events,
shared or known events, also allusions to previous tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell” (2012:396).
Thus, this study will focus on the small stories to reveal the messages conveying during the interaction in here
and now situation.
Firstly, this study analyses how Japanese women deal with the situation amidst the growing anti-Japanese sen-
timent towards Japan when a boycott of Japanese products took place in South Korea due to the worsening
of relations between Japan and South Korea. In the case of Japanese women in South Korea, it was observed
that they felt uneasy and uncomfortable when their Korean husbands criticised Japan in South Korea, where
bad feelings towards Japan/ese have become apparent. However, in cases where the husbands were neutral
between Japan and South Korea, the women accepted their husbands’ criticisms of Japan objectively, and ap-
peared to separate their husbands’ comments from their husbands’ personal intentions. In contrast, when the
husbands unilaterally condemned Japan, the women were seen to tolerate their husbands’ comments and pass
them over, based on the understanding that it is difficult for them, as minorities in Korean society, to express
their opinions to the majority. Furthermore, the husbands were not conscious that their comments discrimi-
nated against their wives, suggesting that the unconscious comments of the husbands may have caused emo-
tional trauma to the Japanese women as well as giving them the perception that they had been discriminated
against by their husbands.
Second is how Japanese women as Asians survive amidst the manifestation of discrimination against Asians
during the COVID-19 pandemic. These will be illustrated by analysing the semi-structured interviews that have
been conducted as longitudinal studies, and how the identities are represented in the narratives. As well as the
Korean cases, the Japanese women living in the UK chose whether they tell their experiences facing discrimina-
tion against Asian people. Some told it from the Asian side, as one of the Asian; and some tried to avoid telling
the experiences by moving away from the subject. The significant point is that the decision was made how they
positioned themselves. The participants who divide Asia into two parts, discriminated/not discriminated, they
reveal their unconscious discriminatory way of thinking against the other Asian people, especially China.
For the presentation, actual scenes will be examined by analysing their pragmatical discourse markers, such as
overlapping, laughter, filar, silence and so on.

1116
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Implicatures in Russian regional news media in atypical


situation

Panel contribution

Ms. Anastasia Semenova 1


1. Osaka University

The present study aims to investigate the discourse of regional news media in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia),
a Russian Far Eastern region, during an atypical situation, namely the “special military operation” announced
by the Russian government on February 24th, 2022. The law imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading
“fake” news about the military and the suspension of independent media (e.g., Ekho stolitsy, Dojd TV, Meduza)
indicate a critical discourse moment (Chilton, 1988). Prior research on news discourse during atypical situa-
tions has primarily focused on coverage by nationwide media outlets in Russia (i.e., Рябченко Н.А. и др., 2021;
Brusylovska & Maksymenko, 2022). However, little attention has been given to Russia’s regional media during
critical discourse moments, which could provide valuable insights into the discourse (re)production in territo-
ries far from Moscow.
Moreover, this project aims to bridge the gap between studies of top-down relations of dominance and bottom-
up relations of resistance, compliance, and acceptance in discourse (van Dijk, 1992; Negm, 2015). This study fo-
cuses on regional-level mass media in Yakutia), located in the Far East from Moscow and the Russian-Ukrainian
border, which has been colonized by Russians in XVII. By focusing on media coverage in this particular region,
the study aspires to offer a deeper understanding of media discourse in a republic that is ethnically and cultur-
ally diverse, where communication plays a crucial role in uniting the sparse population of the world’s biggest
administrative and territorial subdivision.
The data for the study comprises articles from Republic-wide internet news outlets ysia.ru (1067 entries), ykt.ru
(271 entries), sakhalife.ru (642 entries), and the weekly newspapers “Yakutsk Vecherny” (3 issues), “Yakutia” (3
issues) and “Vsyeo dlya Vas” (3 issues), published in the period from February 24th to March 10th, 2022. The
study is aligned with the multidisciplinary approach to media discourse analysis (Lams, 2010), which argues
against the exclusive use of linguistic analysis as a method. Therefore, the materials will be analyzed using a
combination of methods from critical discourse studies (Chilton, 1998; van Dijk, 1995, 2008) and multimodal
discourse analysis (Kress van Leeuwen, 2006) to investigate textual and visual data in Yakutian mass media in
relation to the context.
The results indicate that the coverage during the first two weeks after the announcement of the “special military
operation” was mainly regular in terms of complying with the state guidelines. However, a few cases were found
to be irregular, as they employed implicatures to communicate the atypicality of the situation to the readers.
For instance, implicatures were made using visual tools, such as an edited Soviet poster to promote peace and
the crossed-out phrase “No to war!” which was censored in a given critical situation and made it impossible to
distribute the periodical after publication. Additionally, the study discusses an example of the closing statement
of the major media portal in Yakutia in reaction to enhanced censorship in order to preserve its reputation. The
findings reveal that although implicit, an irregular approach to addressing the atypical situation is possible.

1117
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Resonance in Agreement/Disagreement Process in Japanese


Discourse: A Case Study of Multi-party Conversation in
Atypical Situation

Panel contribution

Ms. Mugiho Kojima 1


1. Osaka University

This study investigates how “resonance” (Du Bois, 2007; 2014) occurs in multi-party conversation among
Japanese women. Specifically, it demonstrates how resonance relates to agreement/disagreement between the
participants when they share their thoughts about an atypical situation – the COVID-19 pandemic. Resonance is
“the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances” (Du Bois, 2014; 372) in any form, such as words, prosodic
structures, pragmatic functions, and so on. Based on this, Takanashi (2020) and Hata (2020) analyzed Japanese
conversation and found that resonance occurs during bonding between the participants. Previous conversa-
tion analysis works found that “agreement” is preferred over “disagreement” – therefore, manifestation of dis-
agreement is usually delayed or avoided (Sacks, 1987; Pomerantz, 1984; Gruber, 2001). Reviewing these studies,
relations between resonance and other interactional acts have not been explored enough. Therefore, this study
examines resonance by focusing on how the participants establish agreement and avoid disagreement in con-
versation among Japanese women in the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing resonance, this study aims to reveal
participants’ perspectives toward the situation.
As a theoretical framework, this study employs diagraph (Du Bois, 2014) to investigate resonance as an ana-
lytical tool to observe connections across utterances. The data was collected January 2021 on Zoom as part of
a longitudinal study that the researcher has been working on since 2018 targeting approximately 30 Japanese
women. This study analyzes one Zoom recording, a conversation among close friends in their mid-twenties in
Tokyo. During the 20-minute recording, the researcher’s camera and microphone were turned off, enabling the
collection of casual conversation.
It was found that resonance occurs differently when the participants agree and disagree. When they agree
on the possibility that they have COVID-19 with no symptoms, dialogic resonances occurred actively while their
utterances overlapped with each other. Dialogic resonances such as “un (yes)”, “sou (yes)” and “ne (interactional
particle)” showed participants’ mutual agreement. On the other hand, when “disagreeable” emerged between
them as one of them revealed that she feels unsure about the vaccine, no resonance occurred until one of the
listeners slightly changed the point of discussion by saying that she doubts that vaccines will be accessible to
them. After listening to that statement, the participants showed partial agreement along with some resonance
such as “a: (oh)” and “tashikani (good point)”.
These findings show that the participants engaged in rapport-oriented interaction, and their strategies for agree-
ing and disagreeing with resonance helped them accomplish that. Though the active resonance, the participants
confirmed that they have similar opinions toward their possibilities of having COVID-19. On the other hand, by
choosing not to discuss the safety of vaccine, they successfully avoided a conflict over something they might
disagree on with each other. At the end, they found something they can mutually agree on – the accessibility
of the vaccine for young adults. In sum, this study enabled close understanding of these interactional acts and
capture of the participants perspectives toward COVID-19 in an atypical situation.

1118
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stereotype and Code-Switching: A case study of interactions


among young people who have had the experience of studying
abroad

Panel contribution

Ms. Satsuki Inaba 1


1. Osaka University

The Japanese government has encouraged more university/college students to study abroad to become “global
human resources” (MEXT 2022, translation mine) even under this atypical situation. However, the image of stu-
dents who have studied abroad is broadcasted negatively in Japan. One of the specific features of the students
in the media is “code-switching”. Bucholtz (2010) and Sierra (2019) have examined the language ideologies and
stereotypes which are born by media references. People use various media every day; therefore, when an ide-
ology or stereotype is spread by the media, and people conduct the language practice in their daily life, the
stereotypes are reproduced and reinforced among them. In Japan, people who study abroad who are in the me-
dia, such as YouTube or TikTok, are treated as an object of ridicule and with criticism; hence, the representation
of these people is shown negatively.
According to Gumperz (1982: 59), conversational code switching is “the juxtaposition within the same speech
exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems”. Code-switching
is generally a common language skill among bilinguals or multilinguals used to communicate with each other,
and it is used in various ways depending on who they talk to. In addition, Ahearn (2021: 146) explains code-
switching as “[t]he sorts of shifts from one language variety to another that occur in a single social setting”.
Code-switching allows people to index not only the context, but also social relationships and meanings.
This presentation focuses on the discourses among the students who have studied abroad, especially when
they produced code-switching about COVID-19, and discusses the stereotype of Japanese students who have the
experience of studying abroad from the perspective of code-switching.
The participants in the data are five Japanese students who have studied abroad for more than six months in
America or Canada, including the presenter. They had several online meetings on Zoom and shared their stories
of studying abroad in Japanese. In the data, when they were talking about their experience of COVID-19, the
participants code-switched, for example using “positive” and “negative” for the results of COVID-19 Tests and
“booster” for a vaccine booster shot.
COVID-19 had a great impact on the students who studied abroad under the atypical situation. Particularly,
the situation and the experience which related to COVID-19 affected their language use. The participants spoke
English with their professors and friends, and COVID-19 was a popular topic among them. In addition, they
were required to correct information about COVID-19 in English during their studying abroad. Therefore, it is
considerable that the Japanese words referring to COVID-19 were replaced with English, because they often used
the English words in their everyday conversation. Thus, they switched the words into English in the discourses.
Contrary to the image of people who have studied abroad which the media produces, code-switching has proper
context and it relates the language use in interactions. This presentation also contributes to understanding
why people use code-switching and how stereotypes about those which are made by media are broadcasted
inappropriately.

1119
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Telling or Not Telling Stories of Mental Illness? A


Socio-linguistic Approach to a Japanese Woman’s
Self-Disclosure Narrative

Panel contribution

Ms. Bingzhu Zhou 1


1. Osaka University

This study aims to analyze how experiences of self-disclosure are told in the narrative of a Japanese woman
with mental illness by a socio-linguistic approach and then clarify social norms of mental illness in Japanese
society. To this aim, this study will address the following research questions.

• What are linguistic/non-linguistic resources used in the narrative of self-disclosure?


• What are social norms about mental illness represented through narrative?

Self-disclosure refers to “the act of making yourself manifest [and] showing yourself so others can perceive
you” (Jourard, 1971, p. 19). In this study, I use the word to tell others about one’s characteristics and attributes,
especially those that may be the ‘reason’ for discrimination or oppression but which have not been revealed
before.
The data was collected as a part of a longitudinal study, including semi-structured interviews with ten persons
with mental illness. The interviews were conducted between November 2019 and August 2022. In this study, I
will focus on two conversations conducted through Zoom in May 2022 from the above data. The interviewee, SZ,
works as an office worker and serves as a volunteer in a group for people with depression. During the interview,
SZ disclosed that she is a cane user, revealing her complicated positioning as a person with mental and physical
disabilities.
In Data 1, It can be seen that SZ is drawing a clear line between disclosing（“shitteru（knowing）,” “open”）and
not disclosing(“shiranai (not-knowing)” “close”) her illness when in relationships. She chose to disclose romantic
relationships and relationships between people with mental illness. In the case of friendship, it can be seen that
SZ is carefully judging and selecting the targets of self-disclosure while contacting with others, quoting her own
voice “a(.) konohitonara syabettemoheikidana↑�Oh, maybe this one is okay）”. Meanwhile, the selection process
revealed the social norm implicitly working behind this narrative, that it may not be “okay” for a person who
discloses their mental illness.
In Data 2, SZ described her mental illness as something that “I just can’t say it（doushitemo, iinikui）.” Then she
disclosed that she is a cane user and brought up his physical disability to explain the difficulty of self-disclosure
of mental illness. As for her physical disability, she used the sentence structure “I must ~（�nakyaikenai）”
to advocate the necessity of disclosing her physical disability to others. In contrast, it was found that SZ re-
gards mental illness as a disability that she can choose to disclose or not. Thus, we can conclude that SZ’s
disclosure/non-disclosure of disability is connected to whether there is visible impairment or not. At the end of
Data 2, SZ said that mental illness is not understood at all, suggesting that the level of social understanding of
disability may be a hidden social norm intertwined with visible impairment.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The unspoken language of exclusion: family discourses on a


leprosy victim during past wartime within their family

Panel contribution

Dr. Ritsuko Izutani 1


1. Mukogawa Women’s University

The study aims to clarify the existence of discrimination against leprosy patients in Japan, in unspoken words
or silence in discourse among their families on past wartime.
In 1996, Japan’s Parliament abolished the Leprosy Prevention Law, which had long resulted in the forced hos-
pitalization of leprosy patients. The government was held responsible for this legislative inaction by the Ku-
mamoto district court in 2001. However, a 2003 local news article reported a hotel in Kumamoto refusing resi-
dents of leprosariums, indicating that the stigma surrounding leprosy still persists in Japan.
In this presentation, atypical events are forced life-long residence and confinement in the leprosarium of the
grandfather and exclusion from his family due to separation, discrimination, and broken relationships. The
researcher investigates how these events are talked about among family members and whether they invite
discourses that identify him as an atypical, threatening member of society.
The data analyzed are part of a recording of naturally occurring conversations among the great-aunt, her niece,
and her daughter. The site of surveillance is the question of why the grandfather had never returned to the fam-
ily despite being clinically cured. Atypical language is detected through the expression of grief over exclusion
from family graves, attempts to locate responsibility, and responses of silence or avoidance of the topic. Dis-
courses that identify individuals as atypical, threatening members of society are reflected in the avoidance of di-
rectly mentioning the grandfather, his pseudonym, or the place and in the use of euphemisms to describe his sit-
uation. Conventional discourse explains the past situation by using the words “jidai”(old days) or “toshi”(aged).
Protest discourses avoids the use of terms such as “discrimination ”or “prejudice”.

1121
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Why is ‘Listen to the Bell Ringing’ no longer screened?

Panel contribution

Prof. Takeshi Hashiuchi 1


1. St. Andrew’s University, Osaka

In December 2020, a newly made independent movie of Niirada1 , a prefectural high school for Hansen’s disease
patients, was screened in Setouchi, Okayama, Japan, for the first time. The screenplay focused on the four-year
residential school attached to Aiseien Leprosarium2 , whose students came from all 13 national sanatoria. Writ-
ten and directed by Mr. Mamoru Yamamoto, this film entitled “Listen to the Bell Ringing”3 aimed at creating
a society devoid of discrimination and prejudice against the patients. In July 2021, the Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recommended this as an excellent cinema for human rights enlighten-
ment. However, after five public screenings, it has been put in storage.
Why did the screenings stop? This paper uncovers the serious hidden risks in filmmaking discourse under the
sites of lepra ex-patient alumni surveillance, reported below.
The filmmaking was planned in 2018 by several former Niirada teachers. Incooperated with these teachers, a
committee was established with the cooperation of selected local volunteers. Both staff and casts were local
nonprofessionals. Apart from Aiseien Leprosarium, there was not much support from other organizations.
However, the independent film committee earnestly wished to inform the general public that there was a high
school solely for Hansen’s patients in Aiseien, founded in 1955 and shut down in 1987.
Unfortunately, there were various unfair discriminatory rules at the stigmatized institution. For instance, the
teachers in preventive clothes were allowed to enter classrooms and dormitories, but the patient students were
not allowed to enter the teachers’ room, as nonpatients were terribly afraid of contracting lepra infection. As
the film title suggests, a student must ring the call bell to meet the teachers outside their room. After several
discussions between the two bodies, however, the rule was withdrawn. Finally, the students could enter the
teachers’ room for consultation. They were thus liberated from the notorious school regulation.
Apart from financial shortage, the hardest challenge to filmmaking came from a group of Okinawa alumni. They
said, “A screenplay focused on Niirada should neither be made nor be shown publicly, because the education
there was terribly discriminatory and because its graduates and their families have still been suffering from
indescribable prejudice.” They feared that a movie based on this unusual school might further promote the
unfavorable image of the alumni into the public.
The film committee repeatedly negotiated with the alumni group to screen this film for those interested, but
in vain. The opponents persistently appealed to the filmmakers that the screenplay be banned. Finally, they
arrived at a consensus that the movie shall only be screened once at Setouchi City Hall Auditorium and four
times at Aiseien Leprosarium. No subsequent screenings were held.
Notes
1 Niirada High School accommodated 30 students per class, with a gradual decline in enrollment until its closure.
2 Aiseien Leprosarium is the first national lepra sanatorium established at Nagashima, an island in the Setouchi
Inland Sea, in 1930.
3 This movie is 90 minutes long.

1122
The complex relationship
between pragmatics and
theory of mind:
Empirical evidence
across populations and
theoretical consequences
(organized by Valentina
Bambini)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Adult Pragmatic Individual Differences and Adolescent


Audience Design: Neural and Developmental Evidence on a
Partial Segregation from Theory of Mind

Panel contribution

Dr. Julia Udden 1


1. Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology, Stockholm University

Interpretation of Gricean speaker meaning builds on an understanding of the underlying intentions of utter-
ances. As intentions (alongside beliefs and desires), are unobservable mental states, meaning interpretation
in dialog would thus fall under the scope of Theory of Mind (ToM) processing. However, ToM can no longer
be referred to as one domain-general function, as recent meta-analyses of neuroimaging research indicate that
different categories of ToM tasks result in different activation patterns. In the following two studies, we tested
for partial segregations between pragmatics and ToM.
In the first study (Bendtz et al., 2022), 199 young adult participants were assessed on their mentalizing (or ToM)
ability using a non-verbal test (Reading the mind in the eyes, RMET). Based on two novel pragmatic tests (a
prosodic test and the same audience design test used in the second study), we selected two groups of partici-
pants: (1) a “high scoring” (HS) group vs (2) a “low scoring” (LS) group (potentially representing a more literal
processing style). From these groups, we recruited participants for an fMRI session (N = 57) using an estab-
lished fMRI-task of indirect speech act processing. The HS group showed higher “Indirect vs Direct” activity
than the LS group, in two brain regions outside core language and ToM regions. The performance on the ToM
task (RMET) did not correlate with any of the pragmatic tasks and none of the two regions reported were modu-
lated by individual differences in RMET, suggesting segregation between this specific non-verbal ToM task and
the pragmatic processes we measured.
The topic of the second study (Arvidsson et al., 2022) was the development of audience design during adoles-
cence. Our results show that 11-12 year olds do not utilize relevant ToM information during audience design,
to the same extent as 15-16 year olds. The development of AD that we observe cannot be explained by mea-
sures of how typical participants individual ToM judgements were. Typical ToM judgements on what we can
assume that an interlocutor knows (based on age and gender, i.e. knowledge attribution), were already present
and ready to be accessed around age 11-12. However, this aspect of ToM seemed to be accessed only when ado-
lescents were specifically prompted for this information. We are left with a view on adolescence as a period
of significant growth specifically with respect to the ability to utilize ToM during online communication. This
could be viewed as a pragmatic audience design process segregated from ToM representations of knowledge
attribution.
Taken together, these results suggest a potential partial neurocognitive and developmental segregation of
domain-specific communicative inference and audience design processes, from aspects of domain-general ToM,
such as complex emotion recognition and knowledge attribution.
References
Arvidsson, C., Pagmar, D., & Uddén, J. (2022). When did you stop speaking to yourself? Adolescent development
of world knowledge-based audience design. Royal Society Open Science. 9: 220305
Bendtz, K., Ericsson, S., Schneider, J., Borg, J., Bašnáková, J., & Uddén, J. (2022). Individual differences in indirect
speech act processing found outside the language network. Neurobiology of Language, 3(2), 287-317.

1124
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Empirical study on face-threatening acts in autism:


relationship between social cognition and pragmatic aspects
of politeness

Panel contribution

Ms. Regina Mezőlaki 1 , Dr. Lívia Ivaskó 2


1. PhD student, 2. associate professor

In an interaction, participants manifest their intentions applying rationality (e.g. being efficient) and interper-
sonality (e.g. maintaining one’s face to any degree) motives (Németh T., 2004; Nemesi, 2011).
Face-threatening acts (FTAs) intrinsically run contrary to the face wants of the speaker or of the hearer. One
minimizes these threats, unless their main want is to be efficient and urgent. According to Brown and Levinson
(1987), mutual knowledge of interactants’ face, and the social necessity to orient oneself to it, are universal
features of facework.
Therefore, facework requires perspective-taking and emotion-attribution involving cognitive and affective min-
dreading abilities, as well as (meta)pragmatic abilities.
Studies have shown that autistic people might favor honesty, and might be less concerned about others’ and
their own face (Koskinen et al., 2021), and self (Williams & Happé, 2009) than non-autistic individuals.
As follows, we formulated the following research hypotheses.

1. Autistic people might prefer verbal strategies along the principles of rationality rather than of inter-
personality. Thus, autistic people might not necessarily minimize the threat of their FTAs in a face-
threatening situation.
2. There might be a relationship between subjects’ verbal facework and their ToM abilities.
3. Emotion-attribution ability may be related to the subjectively assessed severity of the face-threatening
situation.

Adult non-autistic and autistic individuals requiring support (level 1) participate in this study. In-person ses-
sions take 1,5-2 hours on average, involving Faux Pas Detection task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999), Autism-Spectrum
Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), and a self-developed pragmatic task focusing on FTA-related verbal strate-
gies. Currently, the corpus involves data from 14 subjects.
Depending on affective and cognitive theory of mind abilities, what similarities and differences are present
between the results of non-autistic and autistic individuals on the above-mentioned socio-cognitive and socio-
pragmatic tests?
As a conclusion, findings might contribute to the understanding of the relationship between intentions,
metapragmatic and mindreading abilities.
References:
Baron-Cohen, S., O’Riordan, M., Stone, V., Jones, R., & Plaisted, K. (1999). Recognition of faux pas by normally
developing children and children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of autism and
developmental disorders, 29(5), 407–418.
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ):
evidence from Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 31(1), 5–17.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Koskinen, E., Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2021). The Recognition and Interactional Management of Face
Threats: Comparing Neurotypical Participants and Participants with Asperger’s Syndrome. Social Psychology
Quarterly.
Nemesi, A. L. (2011). Az udvariasság elméletei. In: uő, Nyelv, nyelvhasználat, kommunikáció. Hét tanulmány.
Budapest: Loisir Könyvkiadó, 67–86.
Németh T., E. (2004). The Principles of Communicative Language Use. Acta Linguistica Hungarica. 51. 379-418.
Williams, D. M. & Happé, F. (2009). What Did I Say? versus What Did I Think? Attributing False Beliefs to Self
amongst Children with and without Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 39:865–73.

1126
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Infants’ earliest pragmatic abilities: Social interaction and


pragmatic development in the first year of life

Panel contribution

Dr. Gideon Salter 1 , Dr. Danielle Matthews 1


1. University of Sheffield

Infants’ first display pragmatic abilities in the context of social interactions with their caregivers. Using facial
expressions, vocalisations and gestures, infants are able to refer to the world around them and establish joint
attention to targets of interest. These early pragmatic abilities are argued to be the foundation on which later
language abilities are built. Understanding these early abilities is therefore crucial for our understanding of
the pragmatic mechanisms involved in communication and language. However, there are still a number of key
questions regarding infants’ earliest pragmatic abilities and the experiences that give rise to their emergence.
The first question is: when do infants first display pragmatic abilities? Addressing this question, we present a
longitudinal study that examined the very beginnings of infants’ capacity to initiate joint attention through “joint
attention looks”; a look, coordinated with a smile and/or vocalisation, used to communicate about a referent.
Following a cohort of 25 infants monthly from 6 to 10 months, a novel elicitation procedure was developed in
order to elicit joint attention looks. In contrast to previous claims regarding the emergence of joint attention
at 9 to 12 months, it was found that infants as young as 6 months were capable of such behaviours, with the
majority of infants producing a joint attention look by 8 months.
The second question is: what sort of social experiences during infants’ first year shape infants’ pragmatic de-
velopment? To address this question, we report on a randomised controlled trial with families from diverse
socioeconomic circumstances (SEC). The trial was developed to mitigate differences in early language abilities
due to SEC that have been found to emerge as young as 18 months of age. Families were assigned to either the
intervention condition in which they received video resources with educational video content promoting re-
sponsive caregiving, or an active control in which they received content promoting dental health and nutrition
for infants. Infants’ communicative behaviours and caregivers’ responses were coded from home video record-
ings. It was found that the intervention led to caregivers producing more semantically contingent responses-
verbal responses referring to the activity of the infant- with particularly large increases in lower-SEC families.
Infants in the intervention condition produced more communicative behaviours, suggesting that promoting
caregiver responsiveness influences infant communication.
These studies demonstrate that infants’ first year is a crucial period for the development of pragmatic abilities.
Our research shows that early pragmatic abilities are already starting to emerge from as young as 6 months,
and that the way caregivers respond to their infant’s communication across the first year influences the devel-
opment of ever more mature abilities. We discuss both the theoretical significance of these findings, and the
practical implications regarding the development of interventions that can mitigate early-emerging SEC-based
differences in language development.

1127
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interplay between pragmatics and Theory of Mind in autistic


adolescents: What the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (A-CPT)
suggests

Panel contribution

Dr. Ilaria Gabbatore 1 , Prof. Francesca M. Bosco 1


1. GIPSI Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Turin

Core difficulties in the autism spectrum include communication and social interaction [1]. The pioneering pro-
posal [2] to consider Theory of Mind [ToM, 3] a primary difficulty in autistic individuals has been supported
by several empirical evidences. Indeed, a fully developed ToM appears necessary to communicate effectively
[4] and may be considered conducive to the ability to use language and other expressive means in a given con-
text, i.e., pragmatics [5]. Autistic people may fail understanding the communicative intention of an interlocutor
when the literal and implicit meanings do not match and when contextual cues need to be considered for full
understanding [6]. Nevertheless, the nature of ToM-pragmatic relationship is still quite debated [7], and [8] re-
cently argued that despite its contribution to a person’s communicative ability, ToM does not fully overlap with
communicative-pragmatic competence.
It is noteworthy that programs to improve communicative-pragmatic skills have not received much attention
and that most studies have focused on children [9] neglecting other age groups, like adolescents. We recently
developed a 15-session group training program, Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment for Adolescents [A- CPT,10], and
tested its feasibility and ability to specifically improve the communicative-pragmatic performance of autistic
adolescents. Since difficulties are not limited to language use but also extend to the nonverbal, i.e., gestural, and
paralinguistic domains [11], we targeted all these components with the A-CPT. A group of verbally fluent autistic
adolescents participated in A-CPT and were assessed pre- and post- training, and at three-month follow-up,
using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication [ABaCo, 12], a tool designed to assess
a variety of pragmatic phenomena expressed through several expressive means. In addition, tasks assessing
ToM and other cognitive domains such as attention, memory, executive functions were performed.
Results showed an improvement in participants’ performance in all ABaCo scales - linguistic, extralinguistic,
paralinguistic, contextual - persisting at follow-up. No improvement was observed in ToM and cognitive do-
mains, with the sole exception of expressive vocabulary.
These findings have theoretical and clinical implications. First, comprehensive programs for autistic individ-
uals specifically designed to improve various facets of pragmatics could be effective and increase their social
interaction skills in the longer term. In addition, the results support the specificity of pragmatics in relation to
ToM, as highlighted by the observed pragmatic improvement that is not accompanied by an improvement in
ToM skills.

References
[1] APA (2013). Diagnostic Statistical Manual Mental Disorders 5thEd.
[2] Baron-Cohen S et al. (1985). Cognition, 21(1).
[3] Premack D, Woodruff G. (1978). Science, 202(4367).
[4] Sperber D, Wilson D. (2002). Mind Language, 17(1).
[5] Levinson S (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge.
[6] Loukusa S, Moilanen I. (2009). Research Autism Spectrum Disorders, 3(4).
[7] Domaneschi F, Bambini V. (2020). Pragmatic competence. Routledge Handbook Philosophy Skill and Expertise.
[8] Bosco FM et al. (2018). Frontiers Psychology, 9, 1453.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

[9] Parsons L et al. (2017). PloSOne, 12(4), e0172242.


[10] Gabbatore I et al. (2022). Language Learning Development, 18(1).
[11] Angeleri R et al. (2016). Minerva Psichiatrica, 57.
[12] Bosco FM et al. (2012). Journal Communication Disorders, 45(4).

1129
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metaphors, pragmatics and theory of mind: A developmental


perspective

Panel contribution

Prof. Serena Lecce 1 , Prof. Valentina Bambini 2


1. University of Pavia, 2. iuss

What is the nature of the relationship between pragmatics and theory of mind? This question has been ad-
dressed through a variety of approaches, from brain imaging to studies on atypical populations. Here we will
tackle this issue from a developmental perspective, focusing on a specific aspect of the pragmatic competence,
namely metaphor understanding and on typically developing children. We will present a series of studies on
metaphor comprehension in middle childhood indicating that children’s ability to interpret metaphors matures
hand in hand with mindreading skills, yet the two domains are sufficiently distinct. In particular, capitalizing
on a novel task including different types of metaphors (the Physical and Mental Metaphors task), we showed
that the link between theory of mind and metaphor understanding is specific, being greater for metaphors with
mental content compared with metaphors with physical content, and varies depending on the children age,
being greater for younger rather than older children (Lecce et al. 2019; Tonini et al. submitted). Furthermore,
when addressing the direction of the relationship between metaphor skills and theory of mind via longitudinal
and training designs, we showed that the two abilities are bidirectionally connected over development, but the
effect of metaphor on ToM seems larger, i.e., extending to different aspects of ToM, whereas the effect of ToM on
metaphor seems to be more specific to some metaphor tasks (Del Sette et al. 2020; Del Sette submitted). Collec-
tively, these findings confirm the relevance-theoretic view of metaphor as involving interpreting how another
person sees the world, while at the same time acknowledging the specificity of the role of theory of mind in
metaphor development. In discussing these theoretically relevant aspects, we will also highlight the impact of
metaphors on school achievement and social life at large (Del Sette et al. 2021, Tonini et al. 2022).
References
Lecce, S., Ronchi, L., Del Sette, P., Bischetti, L., and Bambini, V., 2019. Interpreting physical and mental
metaphors: Is Theory of Mind associated with pragmatics in middle childhood? Journal of Child Language,
46 (2), 393–407.
Del Sette, P., Bambini, V., Bischetti, L., and Lecce, S., 2020. Longitudinal associations between theory of mind
and metaphor understanding during middle childhood. Cognitive Development, 56, 100958.
Del Sette, P., Bambini, V., Tonini, E., Bianco, F., Basile, C., and Lecce, S., submitted. Are Theory of Mind and
Metaphor Comprehension Causally Related? A Training Study in Middle Childhood.
Del Sette, P., Ronchi, L., Bambini, V., and Lecce, S., 2021. Longitudinal associations between metaphor under-
standing and peer relationships in middle childhood. Infant and Child Development, (April), 1–22.
Tonini, E., Bischetti, L., Del Sette, P., Tosi, E., Lecce, S., and Bambini, V., submitted. On the specificity of the rela-
tionship between metaphor skills and Theory of Mind in middle childhood: reviving the Referential Metaphors
task.
Tonini, E., Lecce, S., Del Sette, P., Bianco, F., Canal, P., and Bambini, V., 2022. Efficacy and benefits of the MetaCom
training to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. First Language.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic processes vs typologies of outputs

Panel contribution

Prof. Mikhail Kissine 1 , Prof. Napoleon Katsos 2


1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2. Cambridge University

Much of experimental research in pragmatics focuses on determining to which extent this or that pragmatic
process involves Theory of Mind, with many researchers questioning whether all pragmatics is necessarily
rooted in the ability to represent other people’s communicative intentions. Independently of one’s favourite
model, however, this research paradigm presupposes that pragmatic processes map on a typology of pragmatic
outputs, such as implicature, metaphor, indirect speech act or irony. This way thinking conflates the rational
reconstruction of pragmatic processing as an inferential link between two syntactic strings–what is said and the
putatively derived meaning–with the actual interpretation process. We will present experimental data that sup-
ports the alternative view, according to which pragmatic processes and the contextual ressources on which they
are based depend on contextual demands and individual characteristics, in a fashion orthogonal to typologies
of pragmatic outputs.

1131
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Realist irony: Two empirical studies

Panel contribution

Dr. Yolanda García-Lorenzo 1 , Ms. Elise Clin 2 , Prof. Mikhail Kissine 2


1. University of the Basque Country, 2. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Attributive theories of irony like the echoic account (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95; Wilson 2006, 2009; Wilson
and Sperber 1992; 2012) and the pretense theory of irony (Clark and Gerrig 1984) defend that the ironic speaker
attributes an utterance/thought to someone else (or to herself at a different time), and that by means of this
attribution, she criticizes the attributed utterance/thought and (possibly) its attributee. If that were the case,
irony understanding would require 2nd order ToM, ability that has been reported impaired in autistic people
(Happé 1993). That would explain why autistic people have difficulties understanding irony (Happé 1993) and
why ironic speech is more difficult to understand than literal or other non-literal speech (Bryant 2012; Colston
and Gibbs 2002).
Notwithstanding, arguably, irony isn’t always attributive. It can be about a state of affairs/event. In those cases,
the speaker mocks/criticizes the state of affairs/situation the utterance is about, and, if any, the person she holds
responsible for it. We call this type of irony realist irony.
We present data from two empirical studies (one with autistic participants —38 autistic and 38 neurotypicals—
and other with neurotypical participants —414— in Spanish, French and English —138 participants each) that
support the existence of realist irony. Both studies consist in 36 stories including a chat-like conversation. De-
pending on the final remark, stimuli is either Direct criticism, Direct praise or Ironic stimuli –12 stories each.
Ironic stimuli can be either Attributive belief, Attributive assertion or Realist stimuli —4 stories each. After each
story, participants are asked whether the speaker of the final remark really thought the content of the utterance;
and whether the speaker of the final remark was criticising/mocking their interlocutor (answered in a 5-point
Likert scale).
Results were analysed in R suing different generalised multilevel models with respect to the nature of the de-
pendent variable. The results of both experiments support the existence realist irony. Also, the answers to the
two questions are influenced by different factors in both studies. Surprisingly, in the first study, autistic partici-
pants rated ironic instances as highly negative despite not being able of determining the thought of the speaker.
This points to partial understanding of ironic instances.
REFERENCES
Bryant, G.A. 2012. Is verbal irony special? Language and Linguistics Compass 6:673–685.
Clark, H.H. & R.J. Gerrig. 1984. On the Pretense Theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
113(1):121-126.
Colston, H.L. & Gibbs, W.G. 2002. Are Irony and Metaphor Understood Differently? Metaphor and Symbol
17(1):57-80.
Happé, F.G.E. 1993. Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism. A test of relevance theory.
Cognition 48(2):101–119.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1995[1986]. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D. 2006. “The Pragmatics of Verbal Irony: Echo or Pretence?” Lingua 116(10):1722–43.
Wilson, D. 2009. “Irony and Metarepresentation.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 21:183–226.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 1992. “On Verbal Irony.” Lingua 87(1–2):53–76.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2012. Explaining Irony. In Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press:123–45.

1132
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Slowdowns in scalar implicature processing: Isolating the


intention-reading costs in the Bott & Noveck task

Panel contribution

Dr. Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos 1 , Dr. Ira Noveck 2


1. University of Oslo, 2. Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

An underinformative sentence, such as Some cats are mammals, is trivially true with a semantic (some and
perhaps all) reading of the quantifier and false with a pragmatic (some but not all) one, with the latter reliably
resulting in longer response times than the former in a truth evaluation task (Bott & Noveck, 2004). Most anal-
yses attribute these prolonged reaction times, or costs, to the steps associated with the derivation of the scalar
implicature. In the present work we investigate, across three experiments, whether such slowdowns can be
attributed (at least partly) to the participant’s need to adjust to the speaker’s informative intention. In Exper-
iment 1, we designed a web-based version of Bott & Noveck’s (2004) laboratory task that would most reliably
provide its classic results. In Experiment 2 we found that over the course of an experimental session, partici-
pants’ pragmatic responses to underinformative sentences are initially reliably long and ultimately comparable
to response times of logical interpretations to the same sentences. Such results cannot readily be explained by
assuming that implicature derivation is a consistent source of processing effort. In Experiment 3, we further
tested our account by examining how response times change as a function of the number of people said to pro-
duce the critical utterances. When participants are introduced (via a photo and description) to a single ‘speaker’,
the results are similar to those found in Experiment 2. However, when they are introduced to two ‘speakers’,
with the second ‘speaker’ appearing midway (after five encounters with underinformative items), we found a
significant uptick in pragmatic response latencies to the underinformative item right after participants’ meet
their second speaker (i.e. at their sixth encounter with an underinformative item). Overall, we interpret these
results as suggesting that at least part of the cost typically attributed to the derivation of a scalar implicature
is actually a consequence of how participants think about the informative intentions of the person producing
the underinformative sentences. To formulate it in more current psychological terms, our account calls for
addressees to consider a speaker’s mental states (specifically, their intentions and beliefs) when interpreting
the critical underinformative items (see Grice, 1989). In other words, we view the slowdowns linked to Bott &
Noveck’s critical items as due to Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985).

1133
18th International Pragmatics Conference

ToM and social pragmatics in dementia: Do patterns of


neurodegeneration and language profiling matter?

Panel contribution

Dr. Olga Ivanova 1


1. Universidad de Salamanca

Deficits in the cognitive ability known as the Theory of Mind (ToM) can play an important role in pragmatic
disorders of different etiology, including dementia (Cuerva et al., 2001; Cummings, 2013). Different dementias,
however, trigger different profiles of pragmatic impairment due to deficits in ToM. Across dementia spectrum,
behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is usually rated as the most vulnerable clinical picture
to the disruption of ToM and pragmatics based on social cognition (e.g., lies or humor) (Shany-Ur et al., 2012).
In most cases, such deficits in ToM and social pragmatics are linked to the pattern of neural degeneration in the
right hemisphere supporting both abilities.
In this study, we explore two questions of importance for understanding the relationship between deficits in
ToM and pragmatics. On the one hand, we pay attention to deficits of ToM and social pragmatics (mainly, under-
standing of verbal lies and humor) in dementias with neurodegenerative patterns affecting social cognition to
a lesser extent (mainly, occurring in left hemisphere and frontal lobe). On the other hand, we focus on the role
specific language profiling (for example, more semantic in the case of Semantic Dementia (SD) or more phono-
lexical in the case of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)) can play in predicting ToM and pragmatic deficits. In doing so,
we rely on a systematic review of data provided by experiment research on processing and comprehension of
verbal lies and humor in speakers with bvFTD, SD, AD, Parkinson’s disease (PD) and progressive supranuclear
palsy (PSP).
Our results suggest that (i.) impairments in specific cognitive abilities (for example, working memory) and (ii.)
impairments in specific language functions (for example, naming), can predict the degree of impairment of ToM
and pragmatics across dementia spectrum. We discuss the implications of these results for the cognitive theory
of pragmatics.
References
Cuerva, A.G., et al. (2001). Theory of Mind and Pragmatic Abilities in Dementia. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychol-
ogy & Behavioral Neurology, 14(3), 153-158.
Cummings, L. (2013). Clinical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind. In A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic
Pragmatics, pp. 23-56. Springer.
Ivanova, O., M. Fernández del Viso & J.J. García Meilán (2021). Humor y demencia: una aproximación al estudio
del humor en el deterioro cognitivo. Estudios de Lingüística del Español, 43, 183-213.

Shany-U, T., et al. (2012). Comprehension of insincere communication in neurodegenerative disease: lies, sar-
casm, and theory of mind. Cortex, 48(10), 1329-1341.

1134
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Weighting the neurocognitive correlates of pragmatic


disorder in schizophrenia, between theory of mind and
executive functions: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Panel contribution

Mr. Federico Frau 1 , Dr. Chiara Cerami 2 , Dr. Alessandra Dodich 3 , Dr. Marta Bosia 4 , Prof. Valentina
Bambini 1
1. Department of Humanities and Life Sciences, University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Pavia, 2. IUSS Cognitive
Neuroscience ICoN Center, University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia/IRCCS Mondino Foundation, Pavia, 3. Center for
Mind-Brain Sciences-CIMeC, University of Trento, Trento, 4. School of Medicine, San Raffaele University/IRCCS San Raffaele
Scientific Institute, Milan

Introduction. Pragmatic impairment is considered a hallmark of schizophrenia.[1,2] Nonetheless, the neurocog-


nitive underpinnings of pragmatic impairment are still largely debated: while some studies tend to conflate
pragmatic deficits with social cognition (SC) problems, others highlight the role of executive functions (EF),[3,4]
and yet others view pragmatics as independent from other cognitive skills.[5–7] This debate challenges the status
of pragmatic ability within the architecture of the mind and brings relevant implications for the remediation of
pragmatic impairment in schizophrenia. This study aimed to collect and weigh the strength of the associations
between pragmatic skills, SC and EF in schizophrenia via a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Methods. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic review on PubMed/Medline and Sco-
pus databases to collect research papers describing a correlation between pragmatics and both SC and EF in
schizophrenia. Afterwards, we used these correlations to fit a meta-analysis, aiming at quantifying the absolute
association between pragmatics and SC and between pragmatics and EF. Then we fitted a multivariate mixed-
effects model with correlation type as moderator to compare the strength of the association between pragmatics
and SC vs. pragmatics and EF.
Results. After extracting and assessing for eligibility 2,668 records, 16 papers were included in the systematic
review. Included studies assessed different facets of pragmatics (i.e., discourse, conversation, and figurative
language), EF (i.e., working memory, planning, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), and SC (i.e., emotion recog-
nition and theory of mind). Ten papers reported effect sizes and could be included in the meta-analysis. The
analysis showed that SC had a moderate-to-strong association with pragmatic skills (R=0.49, CI[0.33–0.66]), while
EF had a weak-to-moderate association (R=0.33, CI[0.20–0.46]). The multi-variate model confirmed that, relative
to EF, the association with SC was stronger (F(3,27)=27.20, p<.001; post-hoc: t(27)=3.47, p=.005).
Discussion. The results of this work point to the joint impact of SC and EF on pragmatic disorder, with the
former having a greater role. In particular, the results support the idea that SC is especially linked to pragmatics,
but not in an exclusive fashion. Furthermore, a closer look at the weight of the correlations revealed that the
role of these cognitive skills in pragmatics – even in the case of SC – is rather moderate. This points to the
specificity of pragmatic impairment, which cannot be fully accounted for solely in terms of other neurocognitive
domains.[6,7] These findings have relevant clinical implications for schizophrenia and suggest that, while socio-
cognitive and neurocognitive interventions may also strengthen pragmatic abilities, more specific treatments
targeting specifically pragmatic impairment are needed.[8]
References.
1. Covington et al. Schizophr. Res. 2005; 77: 85-98.
2. Bambini et al. Compr. Psychiatry 2016; 71: 106-20.
3. Langdon et al. Psychol. Med. 2002; 32: 1273-84.
4. Brüne & Bodenstein. Schizophr. Res. 2005; 75: 233-9.
5. Parola et al. Psychiatry Res. 2018; 260: 144-51.

1135
18th International Pragmatics Conference

6. Bosco et al. Front. Psychol. 2018; 9: 1453.


7. Domaneschi & Bambini. In Fridland & Pavese. Routledge Handbook of Skill and Expertise. 2020.
8. Bambini et al. J. Commun. Disord. 2022; 97: 106196.

1136
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“You are so clean!”: ToM, Irony production and affective


relationships in school-aged children

Panel contribution

Prof. Francesca Ervas 1 , Ms. Roberta Cocco 1 , Dr. Sara Congiu 1 , Dr. Cristina Sechi 1 , Prof. Natalia
Banasik-Jemielniak 2 , Prof. Roberta Fadda 1
1. University of Cagliari, 2. Maria Grzegorzewska University

Understanding an ironic utterance, such as “You are so clean!” pronounced by a schoolmate when someone
fell down in a mud puddle, is a complex process. Previous research suggests that an advanced theory of mind,
typically emerging in middle childhood, is responsible for the relatively late irony understanding (Winner 1997;
Keenan-Quigley 1999). Irony might also be considered as demanding precisely because it involves an implicit
evaluation of the speaker, charged with an affective attitude (Barrett 2006; Moeschler 2009; Yus 2015). The
abilities required in the production of irony have been less studied, especially compared to irony understanding
in the developmental age (Filippova 2014). Some studies showed that a positive interaction of children with their
parents and the use of irony in the family context favor both irony understanding and production (Pexman et
al. 2009; Whalen-Pexman 2010).
The empirical study we aim to present is part of a wider research project, based on a previous longitudinal
study, which has been extended by further testing the (N=40) families who were enrolled in the research pro-
gram. The longitudinal study aimed to investigate the relationship between parental Mind-mindedness (the
ability to recognize the mental and intentional states of the child) and Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities in chil-
dren from early-infancy to school-age. Mother-infant interactions during feeding (Chatoor et al. 1997) and play
(Chatoor 2006) have proven to be important experiences in the development of children’s early social abilities
(Stern 1995; Biringen 2000). The longitudinal study showed a stable relationship over time between the dyadic
interactions and children’s social and communicative abilities also in extra-dyadic interactions. We generally
expect that the quality of parental interactions influences not only social-communicative abilities in general
but, more specifically, pragmatic abilities. Therefore, the project aims to investigate the pragmatic abilities
of school-age children in relation to the development of their abilities of Theory of Mind (ToM) and parental
Mind-mindedness.
For the aims of this study, we expect that parental Mind-mindedness especially influences the pragmatic abili-
ties that most involve an affective component (McHale 2007; Simonelli 2010), as in the case of irony. We expect
that a more developed affective ability in a familiar context helps the child to distinguish whether the speaker’s
intention is nice or mean (Mascaro-Sperber 2009; Wilson 2009; Sperber et al. 2010), especially in the case of sar-
casm, that is directed toward a person, the “victim” of an ironic remark (Gibbs 1986; Giora 2003). The material
was a set of 12 stories already validated (Banasik-Bokus 2019). Children were presented with 6 literal remarks
and 6 ironic (3 ironic + 3 sarcastic) remarks at the end of the stories, and asked on a Likert scale whether they
would have produced such a remark, whether it was nice or mean and it might hurt the listener. Preliminary
results show that participants avoid producing remarks hurting the listener, especially when sarcastic. This
correlates with ToM and parental Mind-mindedness abilities.

1137
The cross-cultural
pragmatic study of
intercultural encounters:
(Strictly!)
language-anchored
inquiries (organized by
Juliane House, Daniel
Kadar, Meredith Marra)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A cross-cultural study of hedging in academic spoken


discourse

Panel contribution

Ms. Yuxiang Duan 1 , Prof. Liesbeth Degand 2


1. UCLouvain, 2. UC Louvain

As a type of indispensable metadiscursive strategy in academic communication, hedges have been studied for
several decades after Weinreich (1966) first described them as metalinguistic operators. The present study sets
out to discuss the distribution and linguistic features of hedges based on Hyland’s model (1998) including Vart-
tala’s (2001) additions; and reveals how hedging tactics are realized in Mandarin Chinese and two varieties of
English (L1 English and English as a lingua franca - ELF) within academic spoken genres from a cross-cultural
perspective. The analysis was based on a collection of 63 scientific presentations in the fields of education, sociol-
ogy, psychology, and linguistics distributed as follows: The first corpus consists of 23 transcripts totalling 58,434
running words of L1 Chinese academic talks; Likewise, 21 transcripts (58,386 running words) of L1 English sci-
entific speeches were selected from the same domains. In addition, 19 transcripts (52,929 running words) of
academic talks were extracted from the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings Corpus (2008). Each of
the six types of hedges was retrieved independently by two well-trained coders with a computer-assisted soft-
ware program on the ground of a modified framework. To this end, both “close-ended” lists and “open-ended”
lists were adopted to detect target devices. Finally, a rigorous analysis was conducted taking the functional
meaning into account, and statistical tests were run to assess significant differences between the languages con-
cerned. Notwithstanding that the current procedure may not cover the whole hedging potentials, we believe
that it proposes a well-ordered and reliable delineation from lexical-grammatical and usage-based aspects.
Results indicate the predominant presence and functional diversity of hedging conventions in Anglophone
cultures as compared with ELF and Mandarin Chinese and take on a colloquial tendency. Owing to the differ-
ences in language and academic norms between English and Chinese, although both have similar pragmatic
categories, there is no exact correspondence in terms of distribution and individual structure, particularly
regarding epistemic nouns and non-lexical hedges. As such, a unique hedging model based strictly on Chinese
rhetorical characteristics is created for further discourse analysis and scholarly peer communication. As far
as rules of appropriateness vary by culture, hedging techniques in ELF represent a distinct variety from L1
English. More precisely, the framework and potentials reported supply a preliminary listing of hedging devices
that may be used by non-native speakers of English and Chinese scholars and students to retain information
on how it works in the academic context. Future research could be expanded to a more in-depth discussion of
comparison and/or contrast within spoken and written registers.

References:
ELFA. 2008. Director: Mauranen, A. http://www.helsinki.fi/elfa (date of last access).
Hyland, K. 1998. Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Varttala, T. 2001. Hedging in Scientifically Oriented Discourse Exploring Variation According to Discipline and
Intended Audience. PhD Dissertation, University of Tampere.
Weinreich, U. 1966. “On the Semantic Structure of English”, in Greenberg, J.H. (ed.): Universals of Language.
2nd Ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 142-217.

1139
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Are you human? AI-human intercultural communication


which scams the scammer.

Panel contribution

Prof. Rosina Marquez Reiter 1


1. The Open University

Natural language bots permeate our everyday lives offering a wide range of services from customer support,
friendship and coaching, to name but a few (McTear & Bond, 2020). Research has shown that users engage with
AI-generated bots as if they are social actors. For these interactions to be successful the bot must be designed
to enhance user trust by exhibiting human-like characteristics associated with competence, benevolence and
integrity (Zhou, Gao, Li, & Shum, 2018). To date, research on user engagement has predominately used quanti-
tative methods (Rapp, Curti, & Boldi, 2021), although there is an emerging literature using interactional studies
(e.g.,Chaves, Egbert, Hocking, Doerry, & Gerosa, 2021; Dev & Camp, 2020). However, no research has been con-
ducted into how bots, designed with malevolent intent, act to undermine user trust and what impact this has.
This paper outlines an interactional pragmatics analysis of a corpus comprising recordings of unsolicited tele-
marketing calls responded to by an automated answering system, deployed to simulate an interested customer.
The analysis extends the intercultural communication metaphor to explore the features of communication be-
tween the bot and user which serve to break human users’ trust. The analysis also identifies the users’ emotional
and behavioural responses towards the bot which indicate distress. The research offers a novel perspective
on the power configurations that artificial intelligence brings into communication, whereby the human user
naïvely assumes they are the controlling party by virtue of their human condition and the distressing conse-
quences of this.
References
Chaves, A. P., Egbert, J., Hocking, T., Doerry, E., & Gerosa, M. A. (2021). Chatbots language design: the influence
of language variation on user experience. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.11089.
Dev, J., & Camp, L. J. (2020). User engagement with chatbots: a discursive psychology approach. Paper presented
at the Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces.
McTear, M., & Bond, R. (2020). The conversational user interface: A brief history and futurology of chatbots. Paper
presented at the History of Human Computer Interaction.
Rapp, A., Curti, L., & Boldi, A. (2021). The human side of human-chatbot interaction: A systematic literature
review of ten years of research on text-based chatbots. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 151,
102630.
Zhou, L., Gao, J., Li, D., & Shum, H.-Y. (2018). The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social
Chatbot. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.08989

1140
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Danish and German folk conceptions of ‘hate speech’ framing


talk with / about the cultural other on Twitter

Panel contribution

Dr. Eckhard Bick 1 , Dr. Nicole Baumgarten 2


1. University of Southern Denmark, 2. University of Sheffield

The paper presents results from an investigation of current folk conceptions of ‘hate speech’ and the pragmatic
value of the term ‘hate speech’ in framing talk about the cultural other. The study is based on two data sets:
A large-scale bilingual German-Danish Twitter and Facebook corpus of 3.2 billion words (Baumgarten et al.
2019) and 36 semi-structured interviews with German and Danish native speakers about experiences and
perceptions of hate speech online. The corpus has been linguistically annotated at the morphosyntactic and
semantic levels (Bick 2020).

The data were collected in the aftermath of the so-called European migration crisis and during the first wave
of the coronavirus pandemic during which perceptions of cultural difference both within and across linguacul-
tures were at the centre of public discourse.
The data were analysed through a combination of quantitative corpus linguistic methods, focusing on struc-
tural and semantic features, and qualitative contrastive content and pragmatic discourse analysis, focusing on
contextual meanings of the term ‘hate speech’.
We propose that similar to the expressions ‘politeness’ or ‘civility’, the English load word ‘hate speech’ in Dan-
ish and German (and to a different degree related German and Danish expressions such as ‘Hassrede’, ‘Hetze’,
‘had(e)tale’, ‘had’) has developed into a metapragmatically significant expression in the two linguacultures,
which functions as a pragmatic evaluative token, framing device, and silencing speech act. In these functions,
the expression ‘hate speech’ can be used in metapragmatic assessments of one’s own and other’s talk as well as in
the creation of variously defined fault lines between cultural in- and outgroups (e.g. left-rightwing, progressive-
conservative, native-foreign, native-‘anti-native’), which are then made to clash in antagonistic intercultural
encounters online. The comparison of the two data sets suggests that the ‘performative’ usage of the term ‘hate
speech’ online is ahead of informants’ explicit reasoning about the phenomenon. We discuss implications of this
disconnect between popular usage and popular reasoning for the identification and regulation of ‘hate speech’
in intercultural contexts.
References:
Baumgarten, Nicole; Bick, Eckhard; Klaus, Geyer; Iversen, Ditte Aakær; Kleene, Andrea; Lindø, Anna vibeke;
Neitsch, Jana; Niebuhr, Oliver; Nielsen, Rasmus; Petersen, Esben Nedenskov (2019). Towards Balance and
Boundaries in Public Discourse: Expressing and Perceiving Online Hate Speech (XPEROHS). In: Mey, Jacob;
Holsting, Alexandra; Johannessen, Christian (ed.): RASK - International Journal of Language and Communica-
tion. Vol. 50., pp. 87-108. University of Southern Denmark.
Bick, Eckhard (2020). An Annotated Social Media Corpus for German. In: Calzolari, Nicoletta et al. (eds.),
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC2020 (Marseille,
May 2020). pp. 6129-6137. ACL / ELRA

1141
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Evaluations related to the pointing with a finger in a request:


a multi-method, cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of an
intercultural encounter

Panel contribution

Dr. Johanna Isosävi 1


1. University of Helsinki

In everyday interactional encounters, it is rare that politeness or other relational aspects are explicitly com-
mented on by the interactants. Although one may assume that such comments are more frequent in intercul-
tural encounters where problems are more likely to occur, my dataset of 12 hours of discussions in French
between Finnish and French speakers in private and professional settings (recorded in 2016-17 in Helsinki,
Lyon and Paris) show that they are extremely rare (cf. also Spencer-Oatey & Kádár 2021: 327-328). Due to this
rarity, it was a salient feature when the pointing of a finger of a Finnish interactant was commented by a French
interactant, and it merited a closer study.
In this study, I do a multi-method qualitative analysis. First, using multimodal conversation analysis, I analyse
the transcriptions related to the actual pointing of the finger of a Finnish woman, the comment of the French
man, the discussion that these two people have after the comment, and the re-initiation of the discussion on
the matter by the French man after his brother comes to the room. Second, I analyse a post-interview made
with the Finnish interactant in 2022 to find out how she felt during the interaction. Post-interviews have been
used in a relational analysis of face-to-face interactions (e.g. Ogiermann 2019), and the time gap between the
original interaction and the post-interview enabled the Finnish interactant to have a broader perspective on
the intercultural interaction. Third, to further examine cross-cultural evaluations of the pointing with a finger,
the transcriptions were shown to a group of (mostly) Finnish students and will be shown to a group of French
students in autumn 2022 who filled/fill a questionnaire (cf. Chang & Haugh 2011).
My results show, first, that due to different language skills, the native speaker has a dominant role, and the non-
native speaker may not have fully understood what was the “problem” in her behaviour commented. Second,
the evaluations of the Finnish group showed that there is not a one cultural interpretation of the pointing with
a finger, but the informants took into consideration also factors related to the situation and the fact that a non-
native speaker may have wanted to clarify her request. As a conclusion, I propose that a multi-method approach
is fruitful for a cross-cultural pragmatic study of intercultural encounters.
References
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody & Haugh, Michael. 2011. Evaluations of im/impoliteness in an intercultural apology.
Intercultural Pragmatics 8: 3. 411-442.
Ogiermann, Eva. 2019. Researching Im/politeness in Face-toFace Interactions: On Disagreements in Polish
Homes. In From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness eds. Eva Ogiermann & Pilar Garcé-Conejos
Blitvich), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 146-174.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen & Kádár, Daniel. 2021. Intercultural Politeness. Managing Relations across
Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1142
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How Learners of Chinese Misunderstand Politeness and


Impoliteness – A Speech Act Point of View

Panel contribution

Prof. Juliane House 1 , Prof. Daniel Z. Kadar 2


1. University of Hamburg, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics

In this talk, we present a framework for capturing misunderstandings relating to politeness and impoliteness
in situations of study abroad where foreign learners of Chinese first enter their target country. This framework
in centred on the study of interaction from a bottom–up and speech act-anchored angle, which we outlined in
detail in two recent monographs (Edmondson et al., 2023; House and Kadar, 2023). As a case study, we zero
in on examining intercultural encounters where misunderstanding occurs in relation to the speech acts Greet
(and its lack), Extractor and Congratulate. We argue that a key advantage of the strictly language-anchored and
bottom-up inquiry presented is that it allows us to go beyond sweeping intercultural overgeneralisations.
Reference
Edmondson, Willis, Juliane House, and Daniel Z. Kadar. 2023. Expressions, Speech Acts and Discourse: An Inter-
actional Pedagogic Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane, and Daniel Z. Kadar. 2023. Contrastive Pragmatics and Language Learning. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press.

1143
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Questioning the East/West politeness divide by


language-anchored regrouping: A psycholinguistic LIWC
clustering of 55-country 51-year of United Nations General
Debate (1970-2020)

Panel contribution

Ms. Lin Shen 1


1. Beijing Foreign Studies University

The East/West divide in politeness has been an important subject of cross-cultural research. The previous the-
oretical studies, however, mostly feature cultural pre-grouping. As the empirical, non-essentialist analysis into
the complex, naturally-occurring linguistic data draws more scholarly attention for politeness research, the con-
trastive cross-cultural pragmatics is considered as a promising approach for the East/West politeness debate.
To conceptualize cultures through linguistic patterns, this study uses a language-anchored bottom-up approach.
Instead of testing differences between two presumed cultural groups, this study categorizes 55 countries’ polit-
ical speeches into two clusters according to the linguistic use of politeness and see how the linguistic grouping
relates to the East/West cultural divide. Also, although the cross-linguacultural politeness divide in political lan-
guage has been examined with many synchronic studies, less diachronic analysis is seen. This study compares
the politeness difference between two linguistically-determined clusters from 1970 to 2020.
For the markers of politeness, this study uses a psycholinguistic tool (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, LIWC),
which is updated with a “politeness” category in its latest LIWC-22 version, to quantify the instances of politeness
use. Based on the United Nations General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) that comprises comparable multi-cultural po-
litical speeches, a linguistic regrouping is conducted for the 2,518 speeches (altogether 7,090,221 tokens) of 55
countries from the cultural East (East, South, and Southeast Asia) and West (European Union, North America,
and Australia) on the normalized frequencies of politeness use and visualized as a heatmap with ggplot2 in R
(by complete linkage and euclidean distance). A 51-year diachronic comparison is then made for the two lin-
guacultural groups identified by linguistic clustering. The statistical tests of cross-group difference in politeness
are also performed for each of the 51 years with R.
The clustering heatmap and the diachronic test results can be accessed through
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UM6JIB on Harvard Database. The language-anchored regrouping relates
weakly with the East/West divide, with Group 1 (showing generally less politeness use) comprising 20 Western
cultures and 9 Eastern cultures and Group 2 (showing generally more politeness use) comprising 11 Western
cultures and 15 Eastern cultures. This linguistic regrouping questions the applicability of the East/West cultural
divide for politeness in political settings.
The diachronic analysis displays that from 1970 to 2020, Group 2 shows significantly more use of politeness at
the UNGD on 39 years, while the cross-group difference is insignificant on the other 12 years (1970, 1982, 1983,
1985, 1986, 1987, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2007, and 2014). This diachronic contrast points to a dynamic view of
cross-linguacultural politeness in political settings.
A contextualized analysis of the politeness markers identified by LIWC-22 is also conducted to explore the poten-
tial drivers behind the changing cross-linguacultural politeness differences in the UN setting. It is hypothesized
that the cross-linguacultural political communication and unstable international relations may contribute to
the changes. As all the texts in the corpus are English-translated speeches to ensure comparability in LIWC-22,
the impact of translation may be further investigated with more source-text data.

1144
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Work in progress: biculturalism through bilingual policies in


professional contexts

Panel contribution

Prof. Janet Holmes 1 , Dr. Bernadette Vine 2 , Prof. Meredith Marra 2


1. Victoria University of Wellingtom, 2. Victoria University of Wellington

Biculturalism is a complex concept; understanding and appreciating these complexities always involves some
degree of contrastive pragmatic analysis. What is meant by biculturalism differs in different countries, in dif-
ferent contexts, and for members of different linguacultures. Focussing on biculturalism as a process and draw-
ing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and recordings of meetings of the senior management team in
a bicultural (Māori and Pākehā/European) organisation, we explore the dynamic nature of biculturalism in
interaction. Moreover, in this organisation our analysis of meetings and interviews, involving members of the
multicultural senior leadership team over a two month period, indicate that for them biculturalism is perceived
as inextricably intertwined with bilingualism.
This presentation will explore some ways in which a Māori perspective differs from a Pākehā/European per-
spective on this complex process. Our theoretical stance is represented in a model developed through years
of close analysis of naturally-occurring workplace talk: Discourse indexes and is constrained by a number of
contextual layers, from the interactional norms of the particular discourse activity, through those of the com-
munity of practice or team to which we belong, and the workplace, organisation or institution within which the
interaction takes place. These in turn are embedded within industry sector and wider societal norms, includ-
ing, but not limited to large scale social structures represented by hierarchies such as the gender order and the
culture order. The focus of our research, an organisation committed to biculturalism, provides a paradigmatic
case for exploring the challenges entailed in the constraints of such embedded contexts and in the effective
management of potentially contrasting pragmatic norms.

1145
The cross-cultural
pragmatics of language
and politics (organized by
Daniel Kadar, Juliane
House, Zohar Kampf)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Contrastive Study of Face Threats in Historical Chinese and


Japanese Memorials: A Speech Act Point of View

Panel contribution

Ms. Mengyao Liu 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3 , Mr. Iori
Ohashi 2
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

In this talk, we present a contrastive pragmatic study of face threatening-acts in historical Chinese and Japanese
memorials written in the early 19th century. Such memorials are particularly relevant for the study of face-
threatening acts because they represent a genre in which in the context of negative news an official is ritually
expected to provide a report for their emperor, and also to suggest a necessary course of action. While language
use in this genre – which existed in various East Asian cultures using Chinese writing – followed strict ritual con-
ventions (Kadar, 2017), it was nevertheless dangerous for an official to fulfil his duty and inform his ruler about
problems and provide suggestions as messengers of bad news. Interestingly, to date little research has been
done on face-threating acts in memorials because most scholars have studied ancient Chinese ‘admonishing’
rather than the newer political genre of memorial (see e.g. Chen and Shen, 2019; Kadar et al., 2021). We aim to
fill this knowledge gap.
In our research, we propose a bottom-up and speech act-anchored approach through which we can tackle face-
threat in the genre under investigation without resorting to sweeping cultural overgeneralisations. We follow
the contrastive pragmatic approach of House and Kadar (2021), by analysing the genre of memorials with a finite
and interactional typology of speech acts. We contrastively examine Chinese and Japanese data, which provide
an excellent tertium comparationis because a) the two countries were in a comparable historical situation in the
early 19th century, and b) memorial was a standard genre in both linguacultures.

1147
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Chinese and German political discourse in contrast: An


analysis of speeches at UN meetings on climate change from
the perspective of Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

Panel contribution

Dr. Chiara Bertulessi 1 , Dr. Nicolò Calpestrati 2


1. University of Milan, 2. University for Foreigners of Siena

United Nations (UN) meetings are pivotal moments in international relations, during which world leaders come
together to discuss topics of global relevance and that raise issues of often sensitive nature. In these contexts,
speeches are delivered by the participants to the meetings (e.g., world leaders or their representatives) within
a specific and ritualised framework. As a genre of political communication (Cap and Okulska 2013), speeches
at UN meetings can be analysed to identify the recurrent linguistic patterns and their pragmatic functions that
operate in the construction of the discourse on a specific topic. This appears to be particularly interesting when
the analysis is carried out in a contrastive vein, and, specifically, when investigating, from the perspective of
Cross-Cultural Pragmatics (House and Kádár 2021 and 2022), how these recurrent patterns and functions are
realised by speakers of typologically distant linguacultures.

Based on these premises, the present paper explores Chinese and German political discourse on climate change
in the context of UN meetings from a contrastive and cross-cultural pragmatic perspective. Specifically, it pro-
vides an analysis of a corpus of speeches delivered by China’s and Germany’s representatives during meetings
held to discuss issues concerning climate change within the framework of the UN (e.g., the Conference of Parties,
the Climate Ambition Summit, etc.).
The objective of the paper is thus to analyse the conventionalised expressions employed in the standard situa-
tions in which the speeches under scrutiny occur, the different speech acts these expressions realise and observe
them in their discourse context, also contrastively highlighting differences and similarities between the Chinese
and German texts. From a broader perspective, the paper also aims to contribute to the understanding of the
different discursive and pragmatic strategies employed by the political representatives of China and Germany
to present to the international community their country’s endeavours in contrasting climate change, which, as
a global matter of major importance, intertwines with issues related to image-building and consensus gathering
on the part of the different countries, both domestically and internationally.
References:

Cap, Piotr, and Urszula Okulska. 2013. “Analyzing genres in political communication: An introduction”.
In Analyzing genres in political communication, edited by Piotr Cap, and Urszula Okulska, 1-26. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2022. “Political Language in Contrast: An Introduction”. Journal of Prag-
matics 188: 132-137.

1148
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Chinese and U.S. American Official Conflictive Discourse - A


Contrastive Pragmatic Analysis

Panel contribution

Mr. Sen Zhang 1


1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages

In this study, I contrastively examine Chinese and U.S. American conflictive discourse in the context of the
Sino-US trade friction. By so doing, I aim to examine a highly loaded and very recent (ongoing) international
encounter, relying on contrastive pragmatics which allows one to look at such intercultural political encoun-
ters through the cold eye of the researcher. In the spirit of contrastive pragmatics, I follow a bottom-up and
data-based approach, and interconnect contrastive pragmatics with interaction ritual theory (Kádár, 2017). The
current research aims to fill a knowledge gap in the contrastive pragmatic study of language and politics, consid-
ering that Sino-American encounters – and similar large scale political intercultural encounters – have received
little attention in previous contrastive inquiries into political language use.

1149
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Comrade Little Vegetable, we believe you are real: atypical


humor as motivated rudeness on presidential candidates’ FB
walls.

Panel contribution

Dr. Jennifer Wei 1


1. English Department, Soochow University

We see the use of non-standard Chinese characters for homophonic puns as motivated rudeness on the Facebook
walls of presidential candidates when it involves an attack on the candidate’s social and personal identity. Puns
can be employed as (in)formal terms of address, nicknames, or remarks in a high-stakes presidential election
to gain political points for ingroup cohesion. Atypical humor on social media can be used as an alternative way
to talk about politics. This is made possible by technologies that blur the lines between spoken and written
language and between belonging to a group and not belonging to a group. This contrasts with incongruities,
superiority, and release as motivations for engaging in humor. This presentation investigates how unusual
written characters are used in Facebook wall comments as puns to attack the candidate’s personal and social
identity to get the upper hand and show who is in and who is out of the group. It also looks at how puns can be
used with social and linguistic elements to make a political point about a certain politician or subject.
Data are collected from the Facebook walls of the candidates in the 2016 and 2020 Taiwanese presidential elec-
tions. We use Morgan et al. (1979) taxonomies, which include both social and linguistic traits, to judge comments
that make puns with unusual Chinese characters. There are many important linguistic factors, such as homo-
phones, homonyms, and metonyms. However, personality is the most important social factor. Internet users
can instantly obtain homophones and homonyms at the keyboard and create homophonic puns with sociopolit-
ical variables, citing reported incidences and character faults to criticize a targeted candidate. By using marked
terms of address, nicknames, or comments to create contradictions, a controlled public persona is made. This
controlled public persona is used as a scapegoat by netizens to express conflicting values and challenge ide-
ologies in funny comments. We’ve concluded that the unusual characters used in puns can stay known and
lively because of how social media works. The deliberate incongruities in the linguistic and socio-political vari-
ables enable face attacks on opponents, scoring political points and bolstering ingroup solidarity. The results
will help us learn more about how language-specific features can be used in funny and aggressive ways to talk
about politics on social media.

1150
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Evasive Responses in Chinese and American Political


Interaction: A Speech Act Point of View

Panel contribution

Mrs. Shiyu Liu 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

In the present talk, we examine the phenomenon of evasive response in Chinese and U.S. American political
interaction. Evasive response behaviour is an interactional strategy, adopted by politicians and spokespersons
when they encounter questions which they perceive as ‘threatening’ or unpleasant to answer. We approach
evasive response behaviour through a contrastive pragmatic angle, and by using a finite and interactional ty-
pology of speech acts (Edmondson & House 1981). By so doing, we fill a knowledge gap because the phenomenon
of evasive response in language and politics has not received sufficient attention in contrastive pragmatics in
particular, even though conventions of interactional evasion tend to significantly vary across linguacultures.
Along with a contrastive and speech act-anchored approach, we also use interaction ritual theory to interpret
recurrent pragmatic patterns of the phenomenon under investigation, which also allows us to unearth differ-
ences between realisations of evasion in Chinese and U.S. American political corpora. Our data is based on
transcribed data drawn from press conferences with a total of 23,000 tokens.

1151
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Framing in Chinese and American Media Editorials about the


Sino-US Trade Conflict: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Analysis

Panel contribution

Prof. Lutgard Lams 1 , Ms. Ying Xu 1


1. KU Leuven Campus Brussel

Any exploration of meaning generation in media discourse involves opening the researcher’s gaze not only to the
wider context of the discourse but also to implicit messages, even absent content. A comparative analysis of var-
ious corpora, drawn on the basis of geographical, social, or temporal variation (House & Kádár, 2022), is a superb
methodological approach to reveal the gaps, differences, or convergences, and to distance the researcher from
‘personal political stances and emotions’ (House & Kádár, 2022: 134). This study examines linguistic aspects
of media framing practices, such as presuppositions and lexical or syntactical choice-making, which accumula-
tively generate latent meanings in media discourse. In particular, it is explored how such meaning-generation
strategies are used in Chinese and American editorials about the protracted US-China trade conflict. The cross-
cultural pragmatic approach thus contrastively examines presumed political stances and instantiations of these
in the framing of the issue and the main stakeholders.
In an interdisciplinary venture, we make insights from Communication Science, such as framing theory, meet
with notions from Pragmatics, like presuppositions and lexical/syntactical variability (Verschueren, 1999).
Based on the cumulative effect of linguistic choices on various structural levels of a text or speech, a pattern of
ideologically invested meaning can gradually emerge. It is at this crucial point that Pragmatics meets Commu-
nication Science with the latter’s frequently analyzed concept of framing, which denotes the construction of a
meta-message about an event or actors. Ideological preconceptions can be the source of the framing process
and vice versa. Since national interests play a crucial role in covering foreign news, this comparative analysis
of the linguistic mechanisms underlying the framing process in editorials of the two countries involved in the
US-China trade conflict may uncover frames revealing diverging political and economic interests.
Data were retrieved from the online editorial archives of the Chinese official newspaper Renmin Ribao and
the US economic daily, The Wall Street Journal. The period of analysis ranged from 1 January 2018 to 31 De-
cember 2019, including the most heated discursive moments. With the choice for ‘zhōngměi-màoyì-chōngtū
中美贸易冲突 China-US trade conflict’ as keywords, Renmin Ribao and The Wall Street Journal yielded 18 and
31 editorials respectively. Methodologically, in following the analytical procedures of empirical cross-cultural
pragmatic research (House & Kádár, 2022), the study maps and compares the linguistic devices that lead to the
dominant frame about the conflict and the protagonists in each editorial. Preliminary findings indicate that the
framing practices and their functions are similar in both corpora, but the presupposed messages are powerfully
different. In a sensitive context of geopolitical tension, the nexus of language and politics becomes evident in
media framing practices, which can exert a strong influence on audience uptake.
Keywords: cross-cultural pragmatics; meaning generation; framing; political stance; Sino-US trade conflict
References
House, J., & Kádár, D. Z. (2022). Political Language in Contrast: An Introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 188,
132–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.11.015
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold/New York: Oxford University Press.

1152
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Politeness in Historical Diplomatic Exchanges – A Contrastive


Pragmatic Approach

Panel contribution

Prof. Daniel Kadar 1 , Prof. Juliane House 2


1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 2. University of Hamburg

In this study, we report on the initial results of a large-scale project dedicated to the systematic study of po-
liteness and impoliteness-related phenomena in language and politics. By so doing, we aim to contribute to
this panel through an overview of the methodological challenges the study of politeness and impoliteness trig-
gers when it comes to research on language and politics in general, and diplomatic exchanges representing
intercultural interaction in particular. We argue that traditional interpersonal approaches to politeness and
impoliteness are difficult to apply to the study of language and politics because such data does not allow the re-
search to access various interpersonal features of language use in a rigorous and replicable way. This is why we
suggest the need of relying on strictly language-anchored, bottom–up and corpora-based methodologies. Such
methodologies are typically cross-cultural and contrastive pragmatic in scope (see House and Kadar, 2021). They
are particularly useful for the study of historical diplomatic exchanges representing intercultural interaction
where it is generally problematic to speculate about intentions, motivations, evaluation and other interpersonal
pragmatic factors. As a case study for illustrating the framework proposed in this talk, we investigate historical
diplomatic exchanges between Japan and the US in the 19th century.
Reference
House, Juliane, and Daniel Z. Kadar. 2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1153
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Politics and cyber-activism: mediating law across time, space,


and genres

Panel contribution

Dr. Monika Kopytowska 1


1. University of Lodz

Thanks to its near-instantaneous, decentralized nature and interactivity, the Internet has become an ultra-
attractive site for the socio-political debate and citizen participation. With its potential to foster like-minded
communities (Mazzoleni and Braciale 2018: 3), “affective communication” favouring highly personalized and
emotional content (Khosravinik 2017: 63; Engesser et al. 2017: 1284–1285) as well as “disintermediation” pro-
cess (political actors directly addressing citizens), it has substantially transformed political communication and
the resulting salience of issues on the public agenda. The objective behind the present paper is thus to outline an
integrated cognitive-social-pragmatic approach to these new communication dynamics within “the networked
public sphere” in the Habermasian sense, along with the role of social media in enhancing the dialogic impact
of contemporary political discourse.
We start from the assumption that while language enables attribution of status functions, deontic powers, posi-
tioning of social actors within discourse space, and thus legitimization of political ideas, decisions, and actions
(Berger and Luckmann 1991/1966; Searle 1995, 2005, 2010; Chilton 2005, 2014; Cap 2013, 2017), cyberspace,
with the semiotic affordances it offers, or what KhosraviNik (2017, 2018) refers to as “techno-discursive de-
sign”, creates conducive environment for expanding the dialogue between political figures and their audiences
across time, space and genres, thereby enhancing the impact and visibility of political messages. Following the
tenets of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA, Kopytowska 2013, 2015, 2018, 2022), we assume that key
in this process are distance-related operations on the level of discourse as product and process. Technology-
enabled discursive practices, along with verbal and visual strategies, help to reduce temporal, spatial, axiologi-
cal, epistemic, and emotional dimensions of distance, both between selected aspects of reality and the audience
(representational dimension) and between members of the audience (interpersonal dimension), which in turn
impacts on how social relations are constructed, and how, more generally, certain phenomena, groups or in-
dividuals acquire their axiologically and emotionally imbued representations, often with real-life implications,
within the sphere of collective consciousness.
The data analysed includes online discourses concerning restrictions on the anti-abortion law in Poland
and the ensuing protests in 2020-2021. Proximization triggers, strategies and (possible) outcomes within
discourse as product (texts consisting of verbal and visual elements) and process (practices of prosumption
and distribution) are identified and discussed.

Cap, P. 2017. The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse. London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Chilton, P. 2004. Analysing political discourse: theory and practice. London: Routledge.
KhosraviNik, M. 2017. Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM�CDS).” In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson
(eds.), Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis, 583–596. London: Routledge.

Kopytowska, M. 2013. Blogging as the mediatization of politics and a new form of social interaction. In Pi-
otr Cap & Urszula Okulska (eds.), Analyzing genres in political communication, 379–421. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Kopytowska, M. 2022. Proximization, prosumption and salience in digital discourse: on the interface of
social media communicative dynamics and the spread of populist ideologies. Critical Discourse Studies

1154
18th International Pragmatics Conference

10.1080/17405904.2020.1842774.

Mazzoleni, G. & Bracciale, R. 2018. Socially Mediated Populism: The Communicative Strategies Of Political Lead-
ers On Facebook. Palgrave Communications 4(1).

1155
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Refusing in Chinese and English Political Language Use: A


Contrastive Pragmatic Study

Panel contribution

Mrs. Dan Han 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

Abstract: In this study, we examine the phenomenon of refusing in Chinese and U.S. American political lan-
guage use from a speech act point of view (Edmondson, 1981; Edmondson et al., 2022). By ‘refusing’ we refer
to the interactional move of refusing to answer a question which the speaker interprets as inappropriate or
intrusive. Failure to realise refusing in an acceptable manner in political language use can trigger controver-
sies. Considering that a significant variation tends to exist between how Chinese and U.S. American language
users realise refusing in ordinary interaction, we believe that it is also worth to study this phenomenon from a
contrastive angle in the realm of political language use.
In our study we pursue a bottom-up approach to refusal, by defining it as an interactional move rather than a
speech act. By so doing, we follow a different route from a body of previous studies, which defined refusing as
a speech act. Approaching refusing as an interactional move allows us to capture recurrent pragmatic features
of this complex interactional phenomenon with a finite and replicable set of speech acts. This approach also
allows us to unearth recurrent differences between realisations of refusing in Chinese and U.S. American po-
litical corpora. Our corpora consist of instances of refusing realised by spokespersons is press conferences and
instances of refusing in political debates in the media.

1156
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speaker-audience intercommunication in political speeches:


A contrast of cultures

Panel contribution

Prof. Peter Bull 1 , Dr. Maurice Waddle 1


1. University of York

Speaker-audience interaction needs to be understood in a cross-cultural context. This paper is based on a series
of studies of political speeches conducted in the UK, USA, Japan, South Korea, Norway and France. Whereas
audiences in Japanese political speeches typically responded together (Bull & Feldman, 2011; Feldman & Bull,
2011), in American presidential speeches, there was a constant flurry of asynchronous and uninvited individ-
ual remarks, typically expressing attentiveness, support, or encouragement for the speaking candidate (Bull &
Miskinis, 2015).
In Anglo-American political speeches, implicit rhetorical devices are the norm (e.g., Atkinson, 1984a;Bull &
Miskinis, 2015;Bull & Wells, 2002; Heritage & Greatbatch, 1986). The use of implicit rhetorical devices as ap-
plause invitations is also characteristic of both French (Ledoux & Bull, 2017) and Norwegian speeches (Iversen
& Bull, 2016), suggesting that that the use of such rhetoric is not just a feature of English language use. In
contrast, in Japanese and Korean election speeches, rhetorical devices used for inviting applause are typically
explicit (Bull & Feldman, 2011; Choi & Bull, 2021; Choi et al., 2016; Feldman & Bull, 2012).
Audience responses are culturally variable. In the study of the American 2012 presidential election (Bull &
Miskinis, 2015), the most frequent response was cheering, whereas in Japanese general election speeches, it
was applause (Bull & Feldman, 2011; Feldman & Bull, 2012). Another distinctive feature of presidential speeches
in both the USA (Bull & Miskinis, 2015) and in France (Ledoux & Bull, 2017) was invited booing. This was not
reported in previous analyses of British speeches (Atkinson, 1984a; Heritage & Greatbatch, 1986; Bull, 2006); it
was almost entirely absent from Norwegian general election speeches (Iversen & Bull, 2016). No form of booing
was ever observed in the two analyses of Japanese general election speeches (Bull & Feldman, 2011; Feldman &
Bull, 2012), nor in the analyses of Korean speeches (Choi & Bull, 2021; Choi et al., 2016).
In negative naming, a speaker may ridicule or criticise a political opponent or a rival political group. In the UK,
negative naming is typically used as a rhetorical device to invite applause (Bull & Wells, 2002), whereas in both
the USA and France, it is used as a rhetorical device to invite booing. Negative naming was never observed in
either of two studies of Japanese political speeches (Bull & Feldman, 2011; Feldman & Bull, 2012).
These differences in political speech-making may be explained in relation to the following cultural distinctions
(Bull & Waddle, 2021). In Western nations, a leading politician can enhance their reputation in the eyes of the
electorate by attacking opponents (e.g., Waddle et al., 2019). Such adversarial behaviour is unlikely to generate
the same admiration or support in Japan, where this form of behaviour tends to reflect badly, and could cause
far more reputational damage to the speakers themselves than to their opponents (Bull & Feldman, 2011).

1157
18th International Pragmatics Conference

You lefties, you pickles, you Bibush: The strategic use of


address terms across Hebrew and British discourse genres

Panel contribution

Prof. Elda Weizman 1 , Prof. Anita Fetzer 2


1. Bar Ilan University, 2. University of Augsburg

This paper examines the forms and functions of address terms in two discourse communities – Israeli Hebrew
and British English – and in two sub-genres of mediated political talk – comments on online newspapers, as well
as comments on politicians’ Facebook posts and speeches. The focus of analysis lies on discursive strategies
and their intended perlocutionary effects for the discursive construction of ordinariness as an object of talk in
mediated public talk, through the positioning of self and other speakers as ordinary and non-ordinary.
In line with Brown and Gilman (1960), Bull and Fetzer (2006), Weizman (2008), and Anchimbe (2011), we con-
sider terms of address as indexing power and solidarity. In terms of the construction of ordinariness, com-
menters use terms of address strategically to position themselves, their interlocutors or third parties on a scale
of ordinariness and by doing so refer indexically to the interconnectedness between private and public spheres
of life, and to social, political and communicative accountability. We thus investigate the ways reflexive posi-
tioning is constructed between the parties, focusing on the negotiations of ordinariness and non-ordinariness
through the use of address terms. In particular, we distinguish three super-strategies: (1) references to the
comment’s addressee (e.g. the writer of the article/Post/speech, fellow commenter, specific group and generic
addressee; (2) address type (e.g. family name, tagging, title, role, naming); and (3) co-occurring supportive cues
(e.g. politeness formulae, attention getters, expressions of affiliation, irony).
The analysis relies on dedicated corpora which consist of leading journals for each discourse community
(Ha’aretz, YNET, Calcalist, Globes in Hebrew, and The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph in British English), as
well as the official Facebook pages of four party leaders for each discourse community: Benjamin Netanyahu,
Likud party, Benny Gantz, Kachol Lavan, Yair Lapid, Yesh Atid, and Moshe Kachlon, Kulanu party in Hebrew;
and Theresa May, The Conservatives, Vince Cable and Tim Farron Liberal Democrats, and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour
Party in British English.
Our analysis reveals differences and similarities between the use and functions of these strategies not only as
regards frequency, but also as regards co-occurring supportive cues. These will be discussed and interpreted in
terms of discursive context.
The research has been supported by a grant from the German Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and
Development (GIF Grant I−153-104.3-2018).
References
Anchimbe, Eric. 2011. On not calling people by their names. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1472-1483.
Brown, Roger and Gilman, Albert. 1960. The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity. In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), Style in
Language, 253-276. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Bull, Peter and Fetzer, Anita. 2006. Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in
political interviews. Text & Talk 26(1): 1-36.
Weizman, Elda. 2008. Positioning in Media Dialogue: The Case of News Interviews on Israeli Television. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins.

1158
The feedback society:
Discourses, identities,
modalities (organized by
Sylvia Jaworska, Camilla
Vásquez)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Co-constructed and multifunctional feedback in face-to-face


tandem interactions

Panel contribution

Dr. Céline Horgues 1 , Dr. Sylwia Scheuer 1 , Dr. Loulou Kosmala 1


1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Tandem learning – where two native speakers [NSs] of two languages learn each other’s language and culture
through regular interactions – presents different characteristics from instructed classroom language learning.
It gives a complex perspective on the concept of “hierarchy” as the novice/expert relation is relative, contextual
and reversible (Brammerts & Calvert 2003; Vassallo & Telles 2006). In principle, the NS is expected to be the
provider of feedback to correct their partner’s L2 output (negative evidence, Gass 2003) but also to engage in
smooth communication (backchannelling, Bertrand et. al 2007).
In practice, how does this feedback work in actual spoken tandem interactions? In this paper we explore the
SITAF corpus (Authors 2015) to study feedback in spoken, real-time, face-to face video-recorded conversations
held by 21 French/English tandem pairs. We draw on previous quantitative studies on the corpus (Authors 2020
and 2021), which identified a considerable amount of corrective feedback, especially on the part of the French
NSs. This paper now adopts a qualitative approach, to reveal the defining features of such feedback:

• the two main functions (didactic, discursive) of feedback by the NS are often interdependent (sequential
and/or intertwined)
• feedback provision requires a subtle equilibrium between the NS’s role in supporting the NNS’s linguistic
development but also in saving their partner’s face in the process
• feedback is not just the prerogative of the NS, as its initiation and management are co-constructed
• there is multimodal alignment in feedback strategies within the pairs
• cultural affiliation partly determines feedback patterns in the two language/culture groups concerned.

References
Bertrand, R., Ferré, G., Blache, P., Espesser, R., & Rauzy, S. (2007). Backchannels revisited from a multimodal
perspective. In Auditory-visual Speech Processing (pp. 1-5).
Brammerts, H., & Calvert, M. (2003). Learning by communicating in tandem. In T. Lewis & L. Walker (Eds.),
Autonomous language learning in tandem (pp. 45–59). Sheffield, UK: Academy Electronic Publications.
Gass, S. M. (2003). Input and interaction. In Doughty, C. J., & Long, M. H. (Eds.), The handbook of second language
acquisition (pp. 224–255). Oxford: Blackwell.
Horgues, C. & Scheuer, S. (2015). Why some things are better done in tandem? In J. A. Mompeán & J.
Fouz-González (Eds.), Investigating English pronunciation: Trends and directions (pp. 47–82). Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Scheuer, S. & Horgues, C. (2020). Corrective feedback in English/French spoken tandem interactions. In Tardieu,
C., & Horgues, C. (Eds.), Redefining tandem language and culture learning in higher education (pp. 147–160).
London/New York: Routledge.
Scheuer, S. & Horgues, C. (2021). Corrective feedback and unintelligibility: Do they work in tandem during
tandem interactions? In A. Kirkova-Naskova, A. Henderson & J. Fouz-González (Eds.), English pronunciation
instruction: Research-based insights (pp. 224–251). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vassallo, M. L., & Telles, J. A. (2006). Foreign language learning in-tandem: Theoretical principles and research
perspectives. The ESPecialist, 27(1), 83–118.

1160
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constructing feedback through talk and text in corporate


performance appraisals

Panel contribution

Ms. Fien De Malsche 1


1. Universiteit Antwerpen

In this paper, I examine spoken and written language use at a Belgian company, focusing on the ways in which
feedback is de/recontextualized (Park & Bucholtz, 2009) throughout the company’s performance appraisal pro-
cess as information travels discursively from text to talk and back to text. The interview is a key interaction in
the appraisal process, where the topics of discussion are based on a preparatory document and the discussion
itself is noted down in the form of a report. As such, the full process can be considered a ‘discursive pathway
of linked speech events’ (Wortham & Reyes, 2015) structured around the interview. Previous research on this
type of encounter has shown that written texts permeate and shape the spoken interaction in significant ways
(Van De Mieroop & Carranza, 2018; Van De Mieroop & Vrolix, 2014). However, little is known about the specific
processes of discursive change that occur from text to talk and talk to text throughout the feedback process.
The dataset consists of (i) 15video-recorded performance appraisal interviews between managers and sales
agents, (ii) two versions of the evaluation form for each interview: the filled out version which is used as prepa-
ration for the interview, and the finalized version which is completed after the interview, and (iii) two follow-up
research interviews with the managers about the performance appraisal interviews and process to contextual-
ize the dataset with their emic perspective. The analysis focuses on two things: the transformation of feedback
as it moves from written to spoken mode and spoken to written mode and the discursive changes (e.g. selec-
tion, deletion, summary, addition, substitution) this involves, i.e. the practices of reporting, and the reasons
why the discursive transformations occur, i.e. the norms of reporting. In the latter case, the analysis topical-
izes the (institutional) power and authority of the different interlocutors involved in the appraisal process as
differentiated between the spoken and written discursive events, as well as the ways in which the identity of
the ‘model employee’ (Van De Mieroop & Schnurr, 2017) is interactionally (co-)constructed and subsequently
codified in written form. As such, this paper aims to shed light on the complex discursive mechanisms at play
in the corporate categorization of employee assessment throughout the performance appraisal process.
References
Park, J.S.Y., & Bucholtz, M. (2009). Public transcripts: Entextualization and linguistic representation in institu-
tional contexts. Text & Talk, 29(5), 485-502.
Van De Mieroop, D., & Vrolix, E. (2014). A discourse analytical perspective on the professionalization of the
performance appraisal interview. International Journal of Business Communication, 51(2), 159-182.
Van De Mieroop, D., & Carranza, I.E. (2018). The interactional ventriloquization of written records in the service
of authority. International Review of Pragmatics, 10, 1-28.
Van De Mieroop, D., & Schnurr, S. (2017). ‘Doing evaluation’ in the modern workplace: Negotiating the identity
of ‘model employee’ in performance appraisal interviews. In J. Angouri, M. Marra & J. Holmes (Eds.), Negotiating
Boundaries at Work (pp. 87-109). Edinburgh University Press.
Wortham, S., & Reyes, A. (2015). Discourse analysis beyond the speech event. Routledge.

1161
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constructing heterosexual desire as assessable affect: a


corpus-assisted small stories approach to male clients’
reviews of female sex workers on PunterNet

Panel contribution

Mr. Christos Sagredos 1


1. King’s College London

In this presentation, I examine a corpus of 510 online reviews authored by reviewers of female sex workers on
PunterNet. Drawing on the small stories research paradigm (Georgakopoulou, 2007, 2015), I take such reviews as
a hybrid kind of storytelling that falls between ‘big’ and ‘small’ stories, and such storytelling as an interactional
resource that is rich in (affective) identity work. More specifically, I draw theoretical and analytical insight
from the sociolinguistic theorization of affect-as-desire (Mortensen & Milani, 2020, 2021) as well as the concept
‘affective positioning’ (Giaxoglou, 2020) in its connections with the small stories research paradigm (Giaxoglou &
Georgakopoulou, 2021). From this perspective, I explore how heterosexual desire is constructed as an assessable
kind of affect and how clients-as-reviewers position and legitimize themselves as experts with the authority and
ability to assess themselves and others as subjects and objects of heterosexual desire (Kulick, 2003). Key findings
suggest that clients-as-reviewers often position themselves as the object of sex workers’ desire by orienting to
heteronormative discourses through which hetero-masculinity and male heterosexual desire are constructed
as mutually constitutive.
References
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities (Vol. 8). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.8
Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Small stories research: Methods– Analysis–Outreach. In A. De
Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 255–271). Wiley Blackwell.
https://doi.org/doi:10.1002/9781118458204.ch13
Giaxoglou, K. (2020). A narrative approach to social media mourning: Small stories and affective positioning.
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315268675
Giaxoglou, K., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2021). A narrative practice approach to identities: Small stories and posi-
tioning analysis in digital contexts. In M. Bamberg, C. Demuth, & M. Watzlawik (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook
of identity (pp. 241-261). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108755146.014
Kulick, D. (2003). Language and desire. In J. Holmes & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), The handbook of language and gender
(pp. 119-141). Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942.ch5
Mortensen, K. K., & Milani, T. (2020). Intersectionality, affect and discourse. In A. De Fina & A. Geor-
gakopoulou (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of discourse studies (pp. 417-436). Cambridge University Press.
doi:10.1017/9781108348195.020
Mortensen, K. K., & Milani, T. (2021). Affect in language, gender, and sexuality research: Studying heterosexual
desire. In J. Angouri & J. Baxter (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language, gender, and sexuality (pp. 450-464).
Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315514857-36

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hotel responses to feedback on TripAdvisor: An experimental


study on consumer perceptions of face-work

Panel contribution

Dr. Irene Cenni 1 , Dr. Rebecca Van Herck 2 , Prof. Bernard De Clerck 1 , Dr. Sebastian Sadowski 2
1. Ghent University, 2. Radboud University Nijmegen

Over the last decades, there has been an exponential increase in studies investigating the language and prag-
matic features of consumer reviews and service provider responses posted on business–oriented platforms
such as TripAdvisor, Airbnb or Amazon (e.g., Vásquez, 2014). More recently, some studies have started to fo-
cus on these digital genres from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural point of view revealing different discourse
habits between writers with different linguacultural backgrounds (e.g., Cenni & Goethals, 2020; Morrow & Ya-
manouchi, 2020). In particular, different face-work and pragmatic strategies have been detected across texts
written in different languages.
In the present study, we aim at going beyond the detection and description of discourse-pragmatic features of
businesses’ public responses to consumer feedback written in different languages, linking these genres to audi-
ence perceptions. More specifically, the aim of this study is to examine to what extent the various face-work and
discursive strategies written by hotel employees on TripAdvisor influence users’ pragmatic interpretation and
their perception of politeness. This research objective will be answered through an experimental design, using
participants with two different linguistic backgrounds (L1 Italian, L1 English). Based on previous research on
the perception of politeness and professionalism in business communication (e.g., Decock et al., 2021; Jansen
& Janssen, 2010; Van Herck et al., 2021) participants will be introduced to a managerial response to a negative
review, followed by a series of questions which will assess their perception of face-related discursive strategies
(e.g., politeness) and their intention to book the hotel. Different discourse strategies that are typical of Italian
managerial responses to reviews (based on a previous qualitative corpus study: Cenni & Goethals, 2020) will be
presented to participants. Specifically, the study comprises a between-subjects experiment with a 2 (linguacul-
tures: Italian/English ) x 3 (dismiss the complaint: deny failure/shift responsibility to the guest/control version)
design. The results of the experiment will be obtained in February 2023.
Elaborating on the different discursive preferences detected cross-linguistically in online (responses to) review
feedback (e.g., Cenni & Goethals, 2020; Napolitano, 2018), we expect to find variation in the pragmatic percep-
tions among users of different linguacultures. For example, Italian users might find the defensive style more
appropriate than English speakers. This study will give us a better understanding of the actual impact of dis-
cursive preferences for potential customers with different linguacultural backgrounds.
This type of research is relevant since TripAdvisor does not allow guests or other users to react to hotels’ re-
sponses, preventing us from verifying perceptions of businesses’ responses among consumers on the platform
itself. Second, results will indicate which types of responses to feedback are more appreciated by different
language users, which is relevant considering Tripadvisor’s global and highly multilingual audience. In addi-
tion, these new insights are of particular interest for service providers and social media managers who need to
develop cross-cultural and multilingual communication strategies in digital settings.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the ‘creative’ language of bias in appraisals: metaphors


and gendered identities in corporate performance reviews

Panel contribution

Prof. Sylvia Jaworska 1


1. University of Reading

Taking as the starting point the argument that acts of evaluation are productive sites for the discursive po-
sitioning of selves and others and might therefore involve unexamined biases, this contribution explores the
constructions of professional identity of female and male employees in a large corpus of corporate performance
reviews. It is particularly interested in assessing the extent to which stereotypical gendered expectations around
masculinity and femininity influence the feedback and explores in detail language choices through which that
kind of gendering becomes manifest.
To this end, a specialised corpus of written performance reviews (104,955 words and 1,054 reviews) was col-
lected in a large multinational organisation and from employees who work at the same level of organisational
hierarchy having similar responsibilities and tasks to perform. The corpus was divided into reviews written
about male and female employees following the gender categories specified by the employees themselves. Us-
ing a corpus-assisted discourse analysis supported with WMatrix, the contribution explores the differences and
similarities in the language used to evaluate female and male employees. The results offer unique insights into
the ways in which stereotypical gendered expectations are routinely perpetuated in high stake evaluations;
specifically it shows how through the use of diverse metaphors from the source domains of SPORT, MACHINES,
CRAFT, CLOTHES, and BODY, the gendered differences are constructed in ‘creative’ ways hypermasculinizing
the discourse of while-collar work in a neo-liberal economy, but only for men. The paper finishes with some re-
flections on the ‘complicit’ role of the language of feedback in perpetuating gender biases and how those biases
could potentially be minimised through a more reflective language work.

1164
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Positive and Negative Stance in MOOC Reviews

Panel contribution

Dr. Hatime Çiftçi 1


1. MEF University

Evaluative feedback is one of the commonly practiced social acts in many communicative events in both face-
to-face and online settings. One such form of feedback for evaluation purposes in digital contexts is the Massive
Open Online Course (MOOC) reviews. Even though these online course reviews might seem like traditional
student evaluations, they have the potential as an emerging genre of evaluative feedback because of the nature
of such digital learning platforms as well as the purpose and expectations of users. Thus, being informed by
previous research on online reviews (Vásquez, 2011, 2014), my research aims to examine online course reviews
that are publicly available on the Coursera website. More specifically, I focus on these two research questions:
1) What are the linguistic resources used for positive and negative stance in online course reviews on Coursera?
and 2) What are the other discourse features surrounding (or co-occurring with) positive and negative stance
acts in online course reviews on Coursera? Drawing on and utilizing Biber’s (2006) framework of stance, I have
been analyzing (the most frequent) lexico-grammatical features of positive and negative stance (e.g., modals,
stance verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives, etc.) in a dataset of 200 online course reviews to answer the first
research question. Additionally, I have been examining some discourse-level features or strategies (e.g., speech
acts) that are concurrently taking place with positive and negative stance. To collect data, I chose a specific
domain/discipline on Coursera and then picked the most favorite 2 courses in that domain to obtain a total of 200
online reviews of these two courses. In doing so, I used certain filtering options for my purposeful data collection
process and stored my data both as screenshots in pdf and a copy-paste text on the Word document (Kreis, 2022;
Sayers China, 2018). The dataset in my study equally involves the most recent positive and negative reviews
by having 5-starred as well as 1- and 2-starred course reviews. Drawing on discourse analytic approaches (Gee
& Handford, 2012; Schiffrin, 1994; Schiffrin et al., 2001) and research on digital discourse (Vásquez, 2022), my
preliminary analysis indicates that adjectives and adjectival phrases are one of the predominantly utilized items
for both positive and negative stance in online course reviews. Additionally, online course reviewers use stance
verbs I feel and I believe very often to express their (positive or negative) attitudinal evaluations. Finally, both
positive and negative stance acts co-occur with thanking and gratitude as well as expression of satisfaction,
expectations, and disappointment.

1165
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Self-presentation in the discursive construction of YouTube


“small reviews” through evaluative feedback.

Panel contribution

Prof. Alejandro Parini 1


1. University of Belgrano

Online participatory environments have become saturated spaces in terms of the opportunities that they offer
for the display of different viewpoints and identities. YouTube, as a popular video-sharing and networking site,
constitutes a new media space that invites both individual and collaborative stance-taking by participants who
gather, virtually, to address a particular topic, issue or event depicted visually and discussed textually through
the comments that are posted on the site (Androutsopoulos 2011; Tur-Viñez and Castelló-Martínez 2019). On-
line product reviewing constitutes one of the most popular acts of sharing on YouTube through which users
seek to exchange their personal experiences with a particular product by engaging in both harmonious and
conflictual exchanges that position self and others. YouTube reviews are somehow different from other online
reviews (See Vásquez 2014) as they are co-constructed on the basis of the evaluations expressed and negotiated
through feedback activity in the form of text comments and in a polylogal interactional context In these com-
ments, conceptualised as secondary or small reviews (Parini and Fetzer 2019), participants contribute to the act
of reviewing not only by assessing the product’s technical specifications but also by constructing and maintain-
ing loyalty to the brand or product through identity work involving acts of self-presentation and impression
management. Against this background, and viewing identity as being socially constructed in interaction (de
Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006; Bodinger-deUriarte 2019), this work reports on a case study of the way par-
ticipants foreground different aspects of self in the discursive construction of 50 smartphone reviews posted
on YouTube between January and March 2022. More specifically, the study centres the attention on how small
reviews are constructed in the form of evaluative feedback that includes affective stances towards the products
being reviewed, and that is manifested through discursive work involving acts of self-disclosure in the textual
comments posted in Spanish on the sites.
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2013. “Participatory culture and metalinguistic discourse:
Performing and negotiating German dialects on YouTube”. In Discourse 2.0:
Language and New Media, ed. by Deborah Tanner and Anna Marie Trester, 47-71,
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Benwell, Bethan and Elizabeth Stokoe (2006) Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press
Bodinger-deUriarte, Cristina (2019) Interfacing Ourselves. Living in the digital age.
London: Routledge.
de Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin and Michael Bamberg (eds.) (2006) Discourse and

Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Vásquez, Camila. 2014. The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews. London:
Bloomsbury.
Parini, Alejandro and Fetzer Anita (2019) “Evidentiality and stance in YouTube
comments on smartphone reviews”, Journal Internet Pragmatics - Vol 2 (1), 2019,
pp112-135.
Tur-Viñez, Victoria and Araceli Castelló-Martínez (2019) “Commenting on Top Spanish

1166
18th International Pragmatics Conference

YouTubers: No Comment”, Social Sciences, Vol. 8, pp 266-281Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counter-
publics. New York: Zone Books.

1167
18th International Pragmatics Conference

There is amazing feedback and then there is just feedback:


Exploring discussions of feedback in online corpora

Panel contribution

Dr. Ursula Lutzky 1 , Prof. Andrew Kehoe 2


1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, 2. Birmingham City University

Today, interactions between businesses and their stakeholders take place in the online sphere to a significant
extent. The steady increase in digital business communication has entailed two developments. On the one
hand, these technological changes have triggered an increase in complaint behaviour, with consumers often
voicing their dissatisfaction publicly on social media. On the other hand, companies increasingly take a stance
on socio-political issues, such as diversity and inclusion. While this is partly motivated by stakeholders expecting
businesses to demonstrate engagement with these issues, it also leads to the polarisation and politicisation of
organisations (van de Meer and Jonkman 2021).
In this paper, we aim to address both of these developments by adopting a corpus pragmatic approach. We
begin by exploring companies’ framing of customer dissatisfaction and complaints as feedback by assessing the
use of the term feedback in a large corpus of customer service interactions. Our analysis is based on the Trains
and Airlines Twitter Corpora, comprising almost 25 million words in total. Lutzky (2021) has already shown that
the term feedback is ‘key’ in these corpora (i.e. it appears more frequently than expected) in tweets that British
and Irish train operating companies and airlines addressed to their customers. Building upon this finding, the
present study will carry out an in-depth analysis of how the term is used in corporate tweets, exploring the
specific contexts in which it occurs and the words with which it frequently co-occurs (its collocates) to gain new
insights into the discursive construction of speech acts such as complaints as feedback.
While the first part of our analysis focuses on the framing of customers’ messages as feedback, the second part
examines tweets in which companies take a clear stance on a socio-political issue and customers’ reactions
to and feedback on those tweets. A company that has adopted a highly polarising approach in its external
communication in recent years is the Irish airline Ryanair. As initial analyses have shown, Ryanair successfully
generates user engagement through its controversial tweets on topics such as vaccination and British politics,
but it also alienates parts of its client base in the process. By studying the 2.8-million-word Ryanair Twitter
Corpus, we aim to uncover further insights into users’ feedback on Ryanair’s social media strategy, which they
voice in their replies to the company’s tweets (e.g. Why don’t you focus on becoming a less wank airline rather
than trying to be clever on social media?). Our study thus adopts a dual approach, analysing how companies and
their customers respond to and offer feedback on one another’s discursive practices on social media.
References
Lutzky, U. (2021). The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets. London: Bloomsbury
Van der Meer, T. G. L. A. and J. G. F. Jonkman (2021), ‘Politicization of corporations and their environment:
Corporations’ social license to operate in a polarized and mediatized society’, Public Relations Review, 47 (1).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2020.101988.

1168
18th International Pragmatics Conference

User feedback in response to self-praise on Chinese social


media

Panel contribution

Ms. Yaping Guo 1 , Prof. Wei Ren 1


1. Beihang University

This study investigates a particular genre, internet users’ feedback in response to online self-praise. Self-praise
is a very common practice on social media and has attracted researchers’ attention in recent years (Dayter 2016;
Matley 2018; Ren & Guo 2020, 2021, 2022; Rüdiger & Dayter 2020; Tobback 2019). In contrast, how interlocu-
tors respond to other netizens’ self-praise on social media has rarely been explored, even though a few studies
examined people’s attitudes towards certain translanguaging practices involved in self-praise (Ren, Guo, & Li
2022). This study investigates user feedback to self-praise by examining a dataset of 300 self-praise responses
collected from Chinese social media platforms (e.g., Weibo, WeChat and Little Red Book). In addition, the self-
praising blogger’s responses to interlocutors’ feedback in response to their self-praise are also collected and
analyzed. That is, the study will examine two levels of feedback: users’ feedback in response to bloggers’ self-
praise, and the bloggers’ responses to the users’ feedback. First, the study analyzes the pragmatic strategies
of the feedback posted in response to self-praise. The preliminary analyses showed that netizens comment on
the blogger’s self-praising behaviors with various compliment strategies. Second, the study examines whether
the netizens’ self-praise responses differ with respect to whether the initiating self-praise is explicit or implicit.
Finally, the study also examines the blogger’s response to the interlocutors’ responses to his/her self-praise. The
preliminary analyses showed that the self-praising bloggers employ mainly three major strategies to respond
to the self-praise feedback they have received: that is, accepting, evading and rejecting (in order of decreasing
frequency). By examining the above discursive practices, the study discusses the possible factors motivating
the various strategies, identity construction and relational work involved in self-praises, feedback in response
to self-praise responses, and responses to feedback on self-praise.
References
Dayter, D. 2016. Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech acts, stories and self-praise. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Matley, D. 2018. “‘This is NOT a #humblebrag, this is just a #brag”: The pragmatics of self-praise, hashtags and
politeness in Instagram posts’, Discourse, Context and Media 22: 30-38
Ren, W., & Y. Guo. 2020. ‘Self-praise on Chinese social networking sites’, Journal of Pragmatics 169: 179-189
Ren, W., & Y. Guo. 2021. ‘What is “Versailles Literature”?: Humblebrags on Chinese social networking sites’,
Journal of Pragmatics 184: 185-195
Ren, W., & Y. Guo. 2022. ‘Translanguaging in self-praise on Chinese social media’, Applied Linguistics Review:
1-22
Ren, W., Y. Guo, & W. Li. 2022. ‘Chinese young people’s attitudes towards translanguaging in self-praise on social
media’, Journal of Pragmatics 198: 93-103
Rüdiger, S., & D. Dayter. 2020. ‘Manbragging online: Self-praise on pick-up artists’ forums’, Journal of Pragmatics
161: 16-27
Tobback, E. 2019. ‘Telling the world how skilful you are: Self-praise strategies on LinkedIn’, Discourse & Com-
munication 13/6: 647-668

1169
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Verbal feedback in the workplace : Observations on forms and


functions within team meetings

Panel contribution

Ms. Céline Goussey 1 , Dr. Ludivine Crible 1


1. Ghent University

Speech is never a solitary act; it is rather the result of collaborative creation. Hence, verbal interactions are
marked by the constant adjusting of speakers to the context of communication (Hymes, 1972) and to the var-
ious outputs of their interlocutors. It has been shown that listeners play an important role in conversations
(e.g., Bavelas et al., 2000; Bavelas et al., 1995; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Schober & Clark, 1989). These Lis-
tener’s outputs have been termed “feedback” (Fox Tree, 1999) or “commentaries” (Pickering & Garrod, 2021).
Verbal feedback is not only a trace of collaboration between participants, it also is a linguistic cue enabling this
collaboration.
In this paper, we focus on feedback in its capacity to contribute to conversational alignment. Alignment is a cog-
nitive process through which the speaker’s mental models align during an interaction (Clark, 1996; Pickering &
Garrod, 2004). This happens through information sharing and meaning negotiation. In this context, feedback
plays an important role as it can communicate a mismatch in conversational alignment (“negative” feedback)
and therefore helps speakers bring the dialogue “back on track” (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) by asking questions
(e.g. what project are you talking about?) or expressing misunderstanding (huh? I don’t follow). Alternatively,
feedback can also confirm alignment of mental models and converging opinions (“positive” feedback, e.g. mhm,
okay, I agree, etc.). Thus, feedback can take on many forms (repetitions, questions, discourse markers, disfluen-
cies) and many functions. This study explores the various feedback devices that are used in the specific context
of business meetings and investigates the factors that may explain their formal and functional variation.
For this study, we use Divoux’s (2020) corpus of fourteen hour-long team meetings collected in the carpentry
section of a French company. The speakers differ in profession and status, with 8 managers and 7 labour work-
ers (all male). In this data, we identify and code all instances of feedback in terms of positive vs. negative
and generic vs. specific (cf. Bavelas et al., 2000; Crible et al., forthc.) under EXMARaLDA annotation software
(Schmidt & Wörner, 2012). The speaker’s hierarchical status will also be taken into account.
With this dataset, we address the following research questions: How is feedback used in team meetings? Is there
an effect of power and hierarchy? Preliminary observations suggest that verbal feedback is directly linked to
defusing tensions, strengthening the feeling of belonging to a group, reinforcing cohesion and carrying out work
tasks. Feedback thus performs both social and operational functions. Complete findings are pending and will
reveal whether specific types of verbal feedback are systematically associated with different functions of feed-
back, different interactional activities and different speakers statuses. We will compare our results to previous
findings on feedback in everyday conversation (Põldvere et al., 2021) and in task-oriented non-professional
interaction (Crible et al., forthc.).

1170
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Tell Us Everything!”: Online and offline solicitations for


customer feedback

Panel contribution

Prof. Camilla Vasquez 1


1. University of South Florida

We are inundated with requests for feedback in nearly every realm of our daily lives. Businesses solicit con-
sumer feedback using a variety of media ranging from email messages asking for ratings or reviews, public signs
prompting a response, store receipts with links to customer satisfaction surveys, and “send feedback” messages
embedded into mobile device apps or pop-up windows on websites. While such requests for feedback are often
framed as essential to improving products or services (In order to improve our offer…) – or in more altruistic
terms (Your feedback helps fellow travelers…) – these banal, yet ubiquitous, texts ask us to invest our time and
to engage in free labor that is intended, above all, to benefit the businesses who solicit such data.
The aim of this study is to describe the pragmatic variation that exists in diverse forms of feedback solicitations,
by taking into account their textual structure, their linguistic formulations, and their use of modal resources.
Via opportunistic sampling, 300 instances of consumer feedback solicitation were collected from the residents
of one household and its closest social network for a period of 6 months. The primary focus of the analysis ad-
dresses the persuasive tactics used to by businesses as they try to gain users’ compliance with their requests, for
instance by exploiting strategies of relational work – conceptualized, depending on one’s perspective, as either
“synthetic personalization” (Fairclough, 2001) or as “conversational human voice” (Kelleher, 2009) – to appeal to
the consumers on the receiving end of their messages. The analysis considers the larger communicative moves
as well as the pragmalinguistic strategies used in the formulation of these requests (Blum-Kulka, 1984). In ad-
dition, the analysis further considers what modalities and materialities are involved in the construction and
distribution of these texts, as well as the different ways in which consumers are positioned by them. Finally,
the analysis reveals that these texts are “doing” much more than merely gathering user’s evaluations of expe-
rience, with the ostensible solicitation of feedback serving as a pretext for collecting a wealth of other types of
information from consumers.

1171
The impact of
participants’ orientation
in space on the functions
of gaze in interaction
(organized by Barbara
Laner, Elisabeth Zima)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From divergent to joint foci of visual attention

Panel contribution

Prof. Anja Stukenbrock 1 , Dr. Angeliki Balantani 2


1. University of Heidelberg, 2. University of Lausanne

This study investigates the achievement of joint attention in the face of potential “conflicts of interest”. When
participants summon their co-participants’ attention on a phenomenon or object, the preferred response is to
reorient themselves and share their visual attention on the phenomenon. However, addressees may not follow
the invitation to jointly attend to an object that their co-participant wants to share – for various reasons. One
of the instances in which addressees do not (immediately) respond to the summoning speaker by reorienting,
is when they are themselves perceptually and cognitively involved with something and disprefer to give it up
for the sake of attention sharing. We will present a collection of cases where participants are not attending
to the same objects and one of them invites the other to share attention on a phenomenon they find interest-
ing. Using the methodological principles of Conversation Analysis and a corpus recorded with external video
cameras and mobile eye-tracking glasses (Tobii Pro Glasses 2) worn by the participants in naturally occurring
interaction, the study investigates the achievement of joint attention in cases of divergent foci of attention. In
particular, it focuses on how deictic and embodied practices are deployed when participants are in an open
state of talk and attempt to (re-)focus their co-participants’ divergent attention on an object or activity they are
currently involved in. The purpose of the current study is therefore twofold; firstly, to uncover the practices,
verbal and embodied, that participants resort to when intending to direct another participant’s visual attention
to an activity or entity in the face of divergent foci of attention, and, secondly, to examine how the choice of
different attention-summoning practices shapes the way in which participants collaborate in the joint action
of attention-sharing. Preliminary observations suggest that there are different verbal and embodied practices
that participants employ in order to resolve divergent foci of attention that range on a continuum from less to
more response mobilising.

1173
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gaze and its functions in atypical f-formations

Panel contribution

Dr. Elisabeth Zima 1 , Ms. Barbara Laner 1


1. University of Freiburg

This paper introduces the panel’s topic and discusses recent studies in interactional gaze research which have
focussed on the role of gaze in atypical spatial formations such as side-by-side or mobile settings. In these set-
tings, the bodies of the participants are prototypically directed into the space before them and unless they turn
their heads, their gaze is averted from each other. Thus, their transactional segments usually only peripherally
overlap, or at times, there is no shared o-space (Kendon 1990: 233ff) at all, i.e. whenever the participants gaze
to their sides. As a consequence, gazing to the other participant in a side-by-side constellation, and even more
so mutual gaze is rather infrequent (as compared to vis-à-vis setting or other typical F-formations, cf. Auer &
Zima 2021).
This raises the question as to when and for which interactional purposes, participants in atypical F-formations
and mobile settings such as walking or cooking together do indeed gaze at each other. More specifically, we
focus on the functions of gaze in question-answer sequences, word searches, and during laughables (Auer &
Laner, submitted), etc. We show that the functionality of gaze as a resource to mobilize response (cf. Goodwin
& Goodwin 1986, Stivers & Rossano 2010, etc.) is in fact highly dependent on participants’ spatial arrangement
and the average frequency of gaze shifts and mutual gaze (as argued by Auer & Zima 2021). This is due to
the fact that gaze shifts can only be interpreted as interactionally meaningful cues if they constitute marked
activities that deviate from the default gaze constellation. We aim to encourage an in-depth discussion on
the functions of gaze in atypical f-formations to enhance further research of other f-formations: One major
question in this regard is whether we can and need to differentiate between gazes that are used to mobilize
responses and gazing at the other person to monitor the other one’s reaction to some prior talk.

References
Auer, P. & Zima, E. (2021). On word searches, gaze, and coparticipation. Gesprächsforschung Online 22, 390-425.
Auer P. & Laner, B. (submitted.). Laughter and gaze among talkers on a walk. In: Zima, E. & Stukenbrock, A.,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goodwin, M. & Goodwin, C. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica
62(1-2), 51-75.
Kendon, A. (1990). Conducting interaction: Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Conducting interaction:
Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, T., & Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Research on Language and social interaction 43(1), 3-31.

1174
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gaze in music making: functions of gaze in orchestra


rehearsals and chamber music lessons

Panel contribution

Dr. Monika Messner 1


1. University of Innsbruck

This contribution investigates the role and functions of gaze in two different musical settings: orchestra re-
hearsals and chamber music lessons. The focus is on the link between the (institutional) setting, the partici-
pants’ orientation in space, the presence of objects (score, instruments) and specific functions of gaze. In or-
chestra rehearsals, the conductor stands in front of the musicians, faces them and alternately looks at the score
for upcoming instructions; the musicians sit in a semicircular arrangement around the conductor. The musi-
cians’ gaze is directed at the conductor and the score, they rarely look at each other. The musicians orient their
gaze behavior towards the conductor’s instructions: when the conductor addresses them (verbally, gesturally
or also by gazing in the direction of a specific musicians’ group, e.g. the strings) for an upcoming instruction,
they display engagement by gazing at him/her and by looking at the score to compare the conductor’s instruc-
tions with what is written in there. Here, different types of gazes (conductor: at the orchestra, at the score:
musicians: at the conductor, at the score) come into play and manage interpersonal rapport and address (cf.
Stöckl/Messner 2021: 205). Stöckl & Messner (2021: 206) also refer to gaze as an “independent transitioning
device” between actions (e.g., from evaluating to justifying), i.e. gaze facilitates a smooth transition between
(instructional) actions.
Gaze shifts between participants and the score are also constitutive for the interaction in chamber music lessons.
In this second musical setting, the participants enter in a circular, but static spatial arrangement and divide a
joint transactional space (Kendon 1990: 211). Part of this o-space (cf. Kendon 1990) is also the score as it be-
comes the object of interpretation and interaction between the professor and the musicians. The professor,
for instance, shifts their gaze from the score to the musicians for addressing a participant and/or for commu-
nicating to another participant which musical part is important for understanding the instruction. Similar to
the musicians in orchestra rehearsals, the music students in chamber music lessons display their readiness and
cooperation by directing their gaze at the professor when addressed. Gaze, thus, functions as a social activity
(cf. Rossano 2012), i.e. gaze is used to achieve joint attention and simultaneously attention is drawn by gaze to
specific objects (e.g., the score, cf. also Stukenbrock 2018).
The aim of the present paper is to examine also other types and functions of gaze when used during instruc-
tional activities in orchestra rehearsals and chamber music lessons. The following questions will be considered:
How strong is the role of gaze as a contextualization resource for participation roles (conductor vs. musicians,
professor vs. music students)? Can gaze also be employed to demand feedback signals from the recipient and
to monitor the recipient’s reactions (cf. also Rossano 2012)? Is there a default gaze pattern (e.g., gazing at the
score)? Are some gaze shifts more salient than others? And what impact does the epistemic constellation (cf.
Heritage 2012, Auer/Zima 2021) have on the ways in which gaze can be (functionally) used?

1175
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interactional space and gaze: an overview

Panel contribution

Ms. Barbara Laner 1 , Prof. Peter Auer 1


1. University of Freiburg

This paper gives an overview of how the spatial orientation of the co-participants results in the joint construc-
tion of an interactional space. We discuss in particular how Kendon’s notion of the F-formation contributes
to the construction of interactional spaces and their on-going transformations in the course of an interaction
encounter, and how this approach has inspired, but also differs from later approaches to interactional space in
conversation analysis, for instance in the work of L. Mondada. A special focus will be on the relevance of gaze
in interactional settings in which the interactional space is constantly reshaped or in which its boundaries are
vague and fluid.
Kendon, A. 1990, Conducting Interaction. Cambridge: CUP.
Mondada, L. 2013, Interactiona space and the study of embodied talk-in-interaction. In: P. Auer et al. (eds.),
Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin/Bosten: de Gruyter, pp 247-76.

1176
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The relationship between gaze and hm_hm in dyadic and


triadic interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Johanna Masuch 1 , Dr. Elisabeth Zima 1


1. University of Freiburg

This contribution investigates the relationship between gaze and the recipient token hm_hm in German dyadic
and triadic interactions. Bavelas et al. (2002) report a statistically significant relation between recipient
feedback and the so-called gaze window pattern in dyadic interactions. This specific gaze pattern consists
of three phases: while speaking, the speaker shifts gaze to a recipient, entering a brief period of mutual
gaze. During this eye contact, feedback is given by the recipient. Soon after the elicited response is produced,
the speaker closes the gaze window by looking away and continuing to speak. However, studying triadic
interactions, Zima (2020) contests the prevalence of this pattern and shows that the picture is much more
complex there.

Both studies took a broad view on feedback behavior, studying verbal and nonverbal feedback tokens such as
continuers, acknowledgement tokens, change of state tokens and nods. In contrast, this contribution focuses
specifically on hm_hm, which is often considered a continuer (Schegloff 1982, Gardner 2011). Although we can
confirm that speaker gaze plays a role in mobilizing recipients’ hm_hm in both dyadic and triadic constella-
tions, our mobile eye tracking study reveals that the temporal relationship between the two elements is more
complicated than anticipated. We show that the occurrence of hm_hm as recipient tokens is indeed related to a
preceding phase of eye contact between speaker and recipient. However, hm_hm is most often not embedded
in a mutual gaze phase but gazed-at recipients wait until a ‘backchannel relevance space’ (Heldner et al. 2013)
is reached, i.e. the end of the ongoing intonation phrase, to deliver the feedback token. The temporal relation-
ship between a phase of mutual gaze and the feedback token hm_hm is thus looser than previously claimed.
Nonetheless there is evidence that gaze does elicit or at least invite feedback, most notably in side-by-side con-
stellations where mutual gaze is rather infrequent. Therefore, gaze shifts towards the recipient are more likely
to get interpreted as an interactionally meaningful signal, i.e. a request to give feedback (cf. Auer & Zima 2021)
whereas in triadic interactions, the power of gaze shifts to elicit feedback is more limited.

1177
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of gaze in everyday multiparty interactions: Building


participation framework during dinners in signing and
speaking families

Panel contribution

Prof. Diane Bedoin 1 , Dr. Stéphanie Caët 2 , Dr. Christophe Parisse 3 , Mrs. Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel 4 ,
Dr. Claire Danet 1 , Mrs. Sophie de Pontonx 5 , Prof. Aliyah Morgenstern 6
1. University of Rouen, 2. University of Lille, 3. INSERM-CNRS-Paris Nanterre Université, 4. INSPE-Sorbonne University, 5.
CNRS-Paris Nanterre University, 6. Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Family dinners constitute ritualized and ideal loci for the study of F-formation (Kendon, 1990).
Different arrangements may be observed in the kitchen and in the dining room. Within a family some partic-
ipants may face each other, others may sit side-by-side and they also may move during diners. Despite these
variations, family members orient themselves for an amount of time both towards a space and towards each
other.
Family dinners involve several simultaneous activities, among which eating and languaging are central. In this
multi-activity setting (Haddington et al., 2014), the different body parts and the gaze of the participants can be
oriented either towards objects or towards others. In family dinners particularly, participants call on those very
same resources to conduct multiparty interactions and dynamically build various participation frameworks
(Goffman, 1981). Among verbal and non-verbal resources, gaze plays an important role to (dis)engage others or
oneself in a conversation. This study aims at investigating the functions of gaze in such a challenging context
in both signing and speaking families.
We analyzed data from dinners in four families composed of two adults and two children. Two families used
French and two families used French Sign Language (LSF). The participants often switch to discourse that spans
beyond the dinner time and talk more specifically about school (Morgenstern et al. 2021). The data was system-
atically coded for 1) audible or visible languaging or acting produced by all participants, 2) which participants
the acting or languaging was oriented to, and 3) gaze orientation of all participants (towards participants or
objects).
We focused on talk about school which is characterized by question and answer sequences and the emergence
of word searches. Children bring to the table topics and related notions that can be new to them, and parents
actively participate in the construction of the discourse about past events. In this context, gaze interactions fully
participate in the parent-child interactions.
Our quantitative and qualitative analyses underline differences in gaze distribution patterns according to the
varying status of the participants, as they conduct eating actions that require moving objects and bodies. We
highlight differences according to whether the participants use a spoken or a signed language and we show how
parents adapt to and scaffold their children’s management of gaze as they need to orient their visual attention.
We discuss the impact of spatial and social arrangements as well as children’s age and discursive topics on the
distribution and functions of gaze in family dinners.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Haddington, P., Keisanen, T., Mondada, L., & Nevile, M. (2014). Multiactivity in social interaction: Beyond multi-
tasking. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kendon, A. (1990). Conducting interaction : Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Cambridge University
Press.
Morgenstern, A., Caët, S., Debras, C., Beaupoil�Hourdel, P., & Le Mené, M. (2021). Children’s socialization to
multi�party interactive practices: Who talks to whom about what in family dinners. In L. Caronia (Ed.), Lan-
guage and social interaction at home and in school (pp. 46–85). John Benjamins.

1178
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When gaze is not available – The role of the avatar in gauging


partner’s orientation during interaction in Virtual Reality

Panel contribution

Ms. Liliana Lovallo 1


1. University of Heidelberg

As digital technologies become more and more present in our everyday lives, so too grows the impact they have
in shaping the way people communicate with one another. The latest developments in the creation of digital
spaces connected in a Metaverse accessed through a Virtual Reality headset, made specifically with the aim of
providing digital experiences analogous to the real world, suggest even more ambitious directions for the future
of communication technologies. Studies focusing on interaction practices are beginning to address these new
developments and engage with the questions arising from them.
Although one the goals of VR is to create immersive experiences that allow users to engage with each other and
the environment in ways that simulate behaviour in the real world, it is evident that many of the resources par-
ticipants rely on in face-to-face communication are in fact not available in VR. The most obvious of these is access
to gaze direction: most VR headsets don’t allow eye-tracking and thus make the gaze conduct of the participants
unavailable to each other. The functions of gaze in managing different aspects of interaction have been studied
extensively (Auer 2018, Brône/Oben 2018; Stukenbrock 2018; Stukenbrock/Dao 2019, Rossano 2012). Nonethe-
less, participants still have visual means at their disposal that help them gauge where their interaction partner
is looking and, specifically, to determine whether they are oriented towards them (i.e., towards their avatar) at
a given time.
The participants’ VR avatars move and act in accordance with the users’ bodily movements, captured through
the sensors on the VR devices the participants wear. The avatar thus functions as a proxy for embodied action
(Goodwin 2000) in VR and allows the users to not only navigate the digital world and interact with the elements
it contains. The reproduction of the participants’ bodily conduct on the VR avatar provides the participants
with useful resources for interaction as well. The goal of this contribution is to show the specific ways in which
participants orient to the bodily conduct of the avatar and its positioning in space while interacting in VR. The
analysis aims at showing the role of the avatar in VR interaction, focusing especially on the orientation of the
head of the avatar as a resource which allows participants to draw conclusions about what the interaction
partner is looking at. This allows for moments of “visual contact” between the participants’ avatars, during
which the avatars “look” at each other. Different types of F-formations (Kendon 1990) in mobile as well as static
side-by-side settings will be taken into consideration.
The data used for this study stems from recordings of multiplayer gaming sessions at VR-arcades in Germany.
Participants were recruited on the premises. The players’ first-person perspective in VR was captured directly
from the computer feed generated by the VR headsets. Two external cameras placed in the gaming area allowed
to monitor the participants’ bodily conduct in the real world. The transcription and analysis of the data follows
a multimodal conversation analysis approach.

1179
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Kannst Du ja mal ausprobieren”: How space, object


manipulation, and participation role influence the role and
function of gaze and gestures*

Panel contribution

Dr. Jana Bressem 1 , Prof. Ellen Fricke 1 , Prof. Wolfgang Einhäuser 1 , Mrs. Inka Schmitz 1
1. Chemnitz University of Technology

* This work was funded by the German Research Foundation – Project-ID 416228727
Behavioral cues such as gestures and gaze are a “gateway to understanding a person’s mental states, including
attention, intentions, and goals” (Huang et al., 2015, p.2) and thus are important devices for coordinating in-
teraction and constructing joint attention. Speakers design their gestures in reference to the listener’s location,
gaze direction, and shared space (Furuyama, 2000; Özyürek, 2002). Pointing gestures are regularly accompa-
nied by gaze in the same direction (Fricke, 2007). During collaborative tasks, gaze may help to coordinate actions
between participants (Tomasello, 1995), mark areas as the focus of next actions (Metzloff & Brookes, 2001), and
may signal planned and intended actions leading to particular movements (Johannson et al., 2001). Sequences
of gaze pattern and displays of interleaving gaze (e.g., gaze toward the target, then partner, and back to target)
may serve as an intentional signaling strategy, highlighting the relevance of the intended object of reference
and directing the partner’s attention (Huang et al., 2015; Stukenbrock & Dao, 2019).
Using video and eye-tracking data from an experiment, in which 15 dyads of participants interacted with differ-
ent exhibits in a museum in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, it is shown that the use and function of gestures and gaze
are influenced by a variety of aspects. In one of the experimental settings, participants interacted in groups of
two with an interactive wooden labyrinth. Interactant A, who was familiar with the handling of the labyrinth,
had the task to explain its use to interactant B. Interactant B then freely explored and played with the exhibit.
First, our data show that the interactional setting and the F-formation influences gaze patterns and the percep-
tion of gestures. Secondly, the task at hand has an effect: Even the use of verbal deictics along with a pointing
gesture by interactant A might be disregarded by B because of the more pressing task of object manipulation.
However, there are examples in which the head is oriented in such a way that the task-relevant device can be
fixated and the gestures can be attended to in the periphery of the field of view. This incongruence of gaze
and head direction might be an indicator for multiple attentional targets. Thirdly, the participation role shapes
the use of gaze and gestures: A, for instance, often visualizes the use of the exhibit through representational
gestures, even if B is oriented towards and focusing on the exhibit. Fourthly, our data corroborate previous
results showing that the combined use of gaze and gestures depends on the position: Standing configurations
lead to more local deictic expressions, less feature-based description of objects, and less gaze overlap because
referential domains shift and movement in space can be used as a coordination mechanism (Gergle & Clark,
2011). Similar effects can be seen in our data.
With this focus, our research underlines the manifold ways by which task and setting influence how and when
speakers use bodily resources to construct joint attention and provide quantitative means for their description.

1180
The pragmatics of body,
mind and technology –
different approaches to
theorizing and analyzing
digitally mediated
interaction (organized by
Andreas Candefors
Stæhr, Lian Malai
Madsen)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Blended Origo – Deixis in Virtual Reality

Panel contribution

Dr. Karsten Senkbeil 1


1. University of Hildesheim

Pragmatic studies on communication in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) have shown that the immersive qualities of
VR technology – the sense of presence and a sense of embodiment through increasingly realistic motion tracking
and avatars (Kilteni et al 2012) – have a strong impact on verbal interactions in this new medium (Stukenbrock
& Auer 2022). While using VR, our minds experience a virtual space as (almost) real, while our bodies remain in
the physical world, which instantaneously doubles our possibilities for communicative and bodily interactions
with people in our virtual and physical vicinities. Misunderstandings and moments of linguistic creativity are
observable, and many of them revolve around ambivalent locations, doubled ‘bodies’, and issues while coordi-
nating attention. In other words: they concern deixis.
This paper presents the analysis of the usage of deictic terms in authentic communication recorded in SVR
(in English and German) by speakers involved in a multilingual ‘escape-the-room’-style multiplayer game. It
demonstrates that the unusual communicative circumstances in immersive VR directly affect a speaker’s origo,
the deictic zero-point of orientation in space and time (Bühler 2011, Stukenbrock 2014). While existing deixis
theories have implied that a person’s mind and body are naturally and always present in the same location
in space-time, VR technology undermines this default case originally observed in analogue settings (Meyer &
Jucker 2022). The data shows that hybrid and blended forms of deictic referents are observable regularly.
As speakers adapt to new communicative circumstances in a new medium, the pragmalinguist’s methodological
toolbox needs to do the same, so this paper concludes in proposing the term blended origo to understand the cog-
nitive state brought forward by communicatively interacting in two ‘realities’ simultaneously. It unites the the-
ory of embodied cognition with current pragmalinguistic perspectives on deixis in multimodal and technology-
mediated communication (Turner 2019; Auer & Stukenbrock 2022).
Beyond the concrete use case of (Social) VR, this conceptualization is intended to contribute to the discussion
on the intersection of cognition, body, and increasingly immersive technologies, particularly concerning the
growing impact of the (digitized) body as an authentic and potent substrate of communication in the digital
realm.
References
Auer, Peter & Anja Stukenbrock. 2022. Deictic reference in space. In Andreas H. Jucker & Heiko Hausendorf
(eds.), Pragmatics of Space, 23–62. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110693713-002.
Bühler, Karl. 2011. Theory of language: the representational function of language. (Trans.) Donald Fraser Good-
win & Achim Eschbach. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.164.
Kilteni, Konstantina, Raphaela Groten & Mel Slater. 2012. The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Presence:
Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 21(4). 373–387. https://doi.org/10.1162/PRES_a_00124.
Meyer, Nathalie & Andreas H. Jucker. 2022. Co-presence and beyond: Spatial configurations of communication
in virtual environments. In Andreas H. Jucker & Heiko Hausendorf (eds.), Pragmatics of Space, 579–608. De
Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110693713-018.
Stukenbrock, Anja. 2014. Pointing to an ‘empty’ space: Deixis am Phantasma in face-to-face interaction. Journal
of Pragmatics 74. 70–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.08.001.
Turner, Mark. 2019. Blending in language and communication. In Ewa Dąbrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.),
Cognitive linguistics, 245–270: De Gruyter Mouton.

1182
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Human, smartphone and territories of the self

Panel contribution

Dr. Andreas Candefors Stæhr 1 , Prof. Lian Malai Madsen 1


1. University of Copenhagen

In this paper, we approach the pragmatics of body, mind and technology through an investigation of the scope
and explanatory power of existing theoretical perspectives. Our focus is how the social psychological perspec-
tive of territories of the self (Goffman 1972) can be applied and possibly – still – enlighten and explain the
impact of the smartphone on human social life. According to Goffman, some of the aspects of individuals’ be-
havior in social and public life relate to how we claim, patrol and defend territories. The smartphone creates
new conditions for, in particular, egocentric territoriality. Based on empirical observations in data from a lin-
guistic ethnographic study of language and social media in family life (SoMeFamily, e.g. Stæhr & Nørreby 2021;
Madsen 2022; Ag 2022), we argue that the smartphone involves intersections of the possessional territory, the
information and conversational preserves. The smartphone is not merely a physical object we carry along to
occasionally use for making contacts. Since it contains personal information, it also involves concerns of the in-
dividual’s control over the content of mind accessible through the artefact of the smartphone with, for example,
saved communications, contacts, pictures and notes. Finally, the smartphone, in principle, makes it possible to
control and guard the conversational preserve, but it can also be the medium of its violation.
Taking into consideration reflections in informal interviews and well as recordings of everyday interactions,
we illustrate how Goffman’s thoughts about the territories of the self, are useful to apply to explain the concerns
and experiences of violation and preservation of egocentric territoriality articulated and enacted by the partic-
ipants in our study. Based on this, we argue that to a large extend the occupation with territorial preservation
involves human agency and how individuals (choose to) act in relation to another’s smartphone or relate to
their own smartphone – with all its associated territorial concerns. But what is new is that the device itself –
with its technological affordances – plays an active part in the preservation and violation of territories of the
self: Since 1) It is an information and conversational preserve in a material form; 2) It makes available new
ways of crossing territorial borders (through e.g. tracking apps); and 3) It violates conversational preserves
through its technology (e.g. through appearance of notifications and news feeds, which sometimes leads to in-
dividuals unwillingly receiving particular information or becoming conversationally involved without active
human agency). We discuss these insights in relation to the more recent theoretical ‘posthuman’ perspective
with its emphasis on the intersection of body, mind, technology and materiality, which deconstructs the divide
between human and machine in various ways (e.g. Pennycook 2018; Clark 2008), and we reflect on the relation-
ship between impact, mediation and agency.

1183
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediating social and informational serendipity

Panel contribution

Dr. Jackie Militello 1


1. School of English, University of Hong Kong

During the more socially isolated, work-from-home period of COVID-19, people were compelled to become ac-
quainted and network in a digitally mediated manner. This change has perdured as face-to-face acquaintanc-
ing and networking have declined with remote work and online conferences, so that professional life for many
has become a much greater digitally mediatized sphere. While a degree of strategic goal orientation and in-
tentionality have always existed in acquaintancing and acquiring information (seeking to meet a particular
person for a particular reason or intentionally eliciting particular information), there has also been a degree of
serendipity—an unintentional beneficial meeting of a person or information, premised on embodied proximity.
And serendipity has been seen as a social good – decreasing echo chambers, bursting filter bubbles, leading to
fruitful collaborations, and engendering important innovations. Serendipity has been theorized as having three
broad affordances (Björneborn, 2017): (1) diversifiability, the ability to meet heterogeneity; (2) traversability,
the ability to explore; and (3) sensoriability, the ability to perceive through the senses. Face-to-face networking
at events like conferences or after-work drinks are stereotypical serendipitous acquaintancing and informa-
tion gathering events that have these affordances. Multiple individuals from diverse industries, organizations,
professional roles, or hierarchical levels provide the diversifiability; self-determined movement (‘mingling’)
the traversability; and haptically perceivable handshakes, audibly perceptible speech, and visually perceptible
physical performance the sensoriability.
Building on previous research of professional acquaintancing during COVID-19 (Militello, 2021), this study ex-
plores the question: How has social serendipity developed, transformed, or been discarded in professional
networking communicative practices that were once in person and are now digitally mediated? Using screen
recordings, interviews, and field observation, a linguistic ethnographic approach is applied to study the role
of serendipity in participating professionals’ digitally mediated acquaintancing communications. Findings in-
clude 1) new, atypical ways of pursuing serendipity that are not digital iterations of in-person ways; 2) the
adoption (or lack thereof) of new platforms or new features developed during COVID-19 that incorporate the
traversability and sensoriability affordances of serendipity; and 3) (de) emphasis of serendipity as a beneficial
trait. These findings are then considered and discussed for how they intersect with previous theorizations of
serendipity in acquaintancing and information gathering.
Björneborn, L. (2017). Three key affordances for serendipity: Toward a framework connecting environmental
and personal factors in serendipitous encounters. Journal of Documentation 73: 1053–81. doi:10.1108/JD-07-
2016-0097
Militello, J. (2021). Networking in the Time of COVID. Languages, 6(2), 92.

1184
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Post-digital pragmatics: the conversational rhythm of situated


mobile interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Caroline Tagg 1


1. The Open University

This talk explores an approach to theorizing and analyzing interactions in a post-digital world in which digital
technologies are ceasing to be a salient or disruptive element of social life but are instead an inherent part of
being human (Tagg and Lyons 2022). Existing pragmatic perspectives on language and communication tend
to assume a ‘focused encounter’ between interlocutors with a shared understanding of the situational context
(Jones 2013) who cooperate in a rhythmic ensemble (Scollon 1982), sharing the same beat as they respond to each
other and take turns (Tannen 2007). Digital and mobile communication technologies challenge established con-
cepts such as physical co-presence, shared communicative resources, and joint focus of attention. Post-digital
communication involves what Blommaert (2005: 126) calls ‘layered simultaneity’ – the combining of resources
with different historicities and speeds of change, and thus different indexicalities, into one set of synchronic
meanings. Jones (2013), for example, shows how participants in a gay chat room participate simultaneously in
multiple chat threads, with different conversational partners, which unfold at varying speeds: what he calls
‘polychronicity’. Understanding the pragmatics of post-digital communication thus involves an appreciation of
the polychronous conversational rhythms of multiple simultaneous encounters and activities across online and
offline spaces.
In this talk, I explore the intertwining of mobile conversations and offline interactions by expanding the con-
cept of conversational rhythm to encompass the layered simultaneity of post-digital communication. I draw on
a new approach to digitally mediated interaction by analysing how individuals’ conversations unfold through
multiple messaging apps including WhatsApp, SMS and Facebook Messenger within the immediate context of
the physical settings in which they take place. This innovative approach to digital pragmatics combines mo-
bile messaging data with interviews and time-use diaries to explore how mobile conversations shape, and are
shaped by, the offline activities and encounters in which interlocutors are engaged. Participants aged 18+ were
interviewed before and after keeping a three-day diary and submitting all mobile messages sent and received
during that period. Quantitative analysis of the mobile messaging and diary data of each individual focused
on plotting the conversational rhythms of multiple simultaneous threads against the individual’s reported daily
schedule. This was complemented by interactional analysis of key moments which drew also on reflections by
the participants elicited through interview. The findings point to the importance of relational concerns in shap-
ing the conversational rhythm of intertwining mobile conversations, and the importance of timing and pace in
signalling attentiveness, intimacy and distance. The study highlights the insights that can be gained through the
adaptation of existing analytical concepts to new forms of interaction transformed by digital technologies.

1185
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Texting in Time: Approaching temporalities of


smartphone-based interactions

Panel contribution

Prof. Florian Busch 1


1. Universität Bern

By the rise of the smartphone as central communicative device in everyday life, linguistics has developed a
growing interest in text-based mobile communication (cf. Baron 2020; Tagg/Lyons 2021). Until now, most of
this research has focused primarily on static text log files, although this comes with two methodological limi-
tations: First, log files obscure the temporal dynamics of the production of individual text messages as well as
the sequential unfolding of message exchanges as perceived by participants on their screens. Second, log files
do not provide any information about the ways in which participants are simultaneously involved in interac-
tions with different interlocutors (probably using different software applications). However, both aspects seem
crucial to the everyday practices of smartphone communication, which characteristically features overlapping
of simultaneous interactions—and thus overlapping of interactional temporalities and rhythms in which these
various interactions unfold (cf. Prommer 2019).
The paper addresses this desideratum by focusing on temporalities of smartphone interactions based on authen-
tic screen capturing data. In doing so, it builds centrally on the studies of “digital CA” (cf. Meredith/Potter 2014),
which have already methodically adapted screen captures of computer-based chat interactions. By opening up
this data type for smartphone communication, the proposed approach aims to reconstruct the sequential orga-
nization of simultaneous interactions through the “eyes” of the participant, thus accounting for the everyday
experience of smartphone communication and illuminating blind spots in previous research.
To this end, the paper draws on data collected in the early course of the Bernese “Texting in Time” project. Ger-
man and Swiss participants documented their own smartphone communication during a period of 14 days. Ad-
ditionally, interviews were conducted with all these participants. Grounded in this empirical basis, the findings
are presented at two levels: On a macro level, the paper illustrates how participants establish different interac-
tional rhythms with various interlocutors during their two-week capturing period and how this rhythmization
is also linked to the temporal distribution of linguistic resources. On a micro level, the study outlines how
screen captured data can be used to analytically uncover moments of interactional multiactivity and achieve a
deeper understanding of communicative practices in simultaneously unfolding interactions. Accordingly, the
paper argues for a new methodological approach to smartphone-based interaction that adopts the temporality
of mediatized everyday life the pivot of analysis.
Baron, Naomi (2020): Talking, reading, and writing on smartphones. In: Ling, Richard et al. (eds.). The Oxford
Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. 408–421.
Meredith, Joanne; Potter, Jonathan (2014): Conversation analysis and electronic interactions. Methodological,
analytic and technical considerations. In: Lim, Hwee Ling; Sudweeks, Fay (eds.). Innovative Methods and Tech-
nologies for Electronic Discourse Analysis. IGI Global: Pennsylvania. 370–391.
Prommer, Elizabeth (2019): Polychronicity during simultaneity. Mediated time and mobile media. In: Hart-
mann, Maren et al. (eds.). Mediated time. Perspectives in time in a digital age. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. 299–319.
Tagg, Caroline; Lyons, Agnieszka (2021): Repertoires on the move. Exploiting technological affordances and
contexts in mobile messaging interactions. International Journal of Multilingualism 8 (2): 244–266.

1186
The pragmatics of digital
disinformation
(organized by Zhuo
Jing-Schmidt)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Digital Disinformation and Rumor-Busting: Diverse


Interpretations of ‘Beiou Feng’ (Nordic Style) on Chinese
Social Media.

Panel contribution

Dr. Heidi Hui Shi 1


1. University of Turku

Social media platforms have evolved into a significant conduit for propagating consumerist values and boosting
consumption (Linden & Linden, 2016; Milner, 2015). Media language plays a crucial effect in enabling and in-
hibiting consumer behavior (Lee et al., 2014; Pezzuti et al., 2021; Stephen, 2016). This study employs the notion
of “contradictory digital narratives” to investigate how excessive, inaccurate misrepresentations of ‘beiou feng’
(Nordic style) are continually generated and debunked in Chinese cyberspace. We studied corpus data extracted
from 11,978 WeChat subscription account posts with ‘beiou feng’ in the headlines and found inconsistent seman-
tics regarding Nordic style in Chinese social media. On the one side, the Nordic style is typically defined with
positive language, with an emphasis on promoting its simple, monochromatic, and eco-friendly qualities. This
quasi-worship dissemination even includes eye-catching phrases that appear to be negative, such as ‘xing leng
dan’ (sexually apathetic). On the other side, the widespread consumer-oriented narrative has been repeatedly
clarified and discredited online by other parties. They aim to facilitate internet users’ comprehension of the
authentic presentation of the Nordic style through art-based introductions. We address the findings in the con-
text of the discrepancy between Chinese commercial media (shangye meiti) and self-published media (zi meiti)
in terms of their distinct communication methods and operational objectives. We suggest that the cycle of de-
ception and refutation is generated by two media-based online practices: digital narratives aiming to influence
consumer perceptions and dialogues intended to attract online attention.
Selected References:
Pezzuti, T., Leonhardt, J. M., & Warren, C. (2021). Certainty in language increases consumer engagement on
social media. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 53, 32-46.
Stephen, A. T. (2016). The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior. Current opinión in
Psychology, 10, 17-21.
Linden, H., & Linden, S. (2016). Fans and fan cultures: Tourism, consumerism and social media. Springer.
Lee, D., Hosanagar, K., & Nair, H. S. (2014). The effect of social media marketing content on consumer engage-
ment: Evidence from Facebook (pp. 1-51). Stanford, CA: Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Milner, M. (2015). Freaks, geeks, and cool kids: Teenagers in an era of consumerism, standardized tests, and
social media. Routledge.

1188
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Telling (about) the same: Quoting practices in Spanish


political hoaxes

Panel contribution

Ms. Anastasia-Ioana Pop 1 , Dr. Agnese Sampietro 2


1. University of Valencia, 2. University Jaume I

The spread of false or misleading stories through social media is a widespread concern for modern societies
(see, for example, Lewandowsky et al., 2017), as social media have facilitated the spread of rumours, spam, and
misinformation (Freelon and Wells, 2020). This phenomenon is especially salient in political communication.
Indeed, according to Freelon and Wells (2020, p. 145), disinformation ”is the defining political communication
topic of our time” (original emphasis) and, therefore, an essential topic for political communication research in
the latest years.
Spreading false or inaccurate claims is one of the social media’s most common forms of mis- and disinformation.
This phenomenon can be considered a form of quoting. As Kirner-Ludwig (2020, p. 103) explains, the practice
of quoting stretches along a continuum “from truthfully intended references […] to intentionally misleading
references.” The present contribution aims to study the types of quoting practices (excluding simple retweets)
used in fact-checked hoaxed that have circulated both in mainstream and lay political discourse on social media
in Spain in 2021 and 2022. To do so, it draws on a corpus of debunked false claims concerning politicians
or spread by political organisations, associations, and affiliates, on social media (primarily Twitter, but also
Telegram and WhatsApp), retrieved from trustable Spanish fact-checking sites. The analysis follows Kirner-
Ludwig’s (2020) classification of referring and pseudo-referring practices.
Preliminary results show that one of the most common quoting practices that give origin to hoaxes is fake
quoting, i.e., “presenting what someone else supposedly said as genuinely theirs and doing so with the intent to
deceive” (Kirner-Ludwig, 2020, p. 104). Another common form of referring was misquoting, i.e., unintentionally
misrepresenting original utterances.
The results of this study can have important implications for the study of mis- and disinformation. Research on
fake news detection can especially benefit from identifying quoting practices involved in spreading false claims
different from simple retweets.
References
Freelon, D. & Wells, C. (2020) Disinformation as Political Communication. Political Communication, 37(2), 145-
156. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1723755
Kirner-Ludwig, M. (2020). Creation, dissemination and uptake of fake quotes in lay political discourse on Face-
book and Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics, 157, 101-118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.07.009
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U.K.H., & Cook, J. (2017). Beyond misinformation: understanding and cop-
ing with the “Post-Truth” era. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 353-369.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.07.008

1189
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘I did my research’: The role of celebrities in disinformation


dissemination and the performance of a public apology

Panel contribution

Ms. Dominika Beneš Kováčová 1


1. The University of Ostrava

While the impact of digital media on the way (dis)information is produced, distributed and consumed is now
largely uncontested, the research into the role of internet users in its dissemination still deserves closer atten-
tion. This particularly concerns the spread of disinformation by celebrity users of social media who – as recent
research shows (Bruns et al., 2019) – have the capacity to act as ‘super-spreaders’ of disinformation and thereby
expose a large group of people to fake news websites and accounts. In response to the public outcry that often
accompanies such incidents, celebrities typically resort to deleting their social media content promoting dis-
information, which makes this data difficult to analyse. What may, however, remain accessible is the public
apology issued by the celebrity to make amends for having shared false information; the analysis of such apolo-
gies is thus expected to represent one of a few ways to learn about the celebrities’ own understanding of and
attitude towards their role in disinformation dissemination.
With this in mind, the aim of the present paper is twofold: 1) to examine the performance of celebrity apolo-
gies on social media through the lens of speech act theory; 2) to investigate their audience’s perception of the
apology. To achieve this, firstly, a small-scale dataset of apologies shared by celebrities (e.g. Joe Rogan, Kyrie
Irving) on Twitter and Instagram as a reaction to the accusations of disinformation dissemination by the given
celebrity was collected. Given the fact that apologies – from the perspective of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) the-
ory of politeness – represent face-threatening speech acts that directly damage the speaker’s positive face, the
analysis demonstrates that the performance of the apologies in the dataset is accompanied by certain mitigation
strategies oriented towards saving the celebrity’s face. These strategies include, for instance, the re-definition of
certain terms (e.g. liberal, antisemitism, research) and the act of positioning oneself as ‘the seeker of truth’, the
adoption of which nevertheless questions the authenticity of the apology issued by the celebrity. Secondly, to
ascertain the public perception of such apologies, this study further explores the user comments/replies which
accompany the collected apologies and examines the users’ responses to the positionings the celebrities engage
in. The preliminary results of this analysis show that affirmations defending the celebrity’s conduct and dismiss-
ing the need for any apology in the first place prevail in this data. This arguably results in the enhancement of
the celebrity’s positive face and may, in some cases, serve to re-distribute the original disinformation.
References:
Brown, P., & Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Bruns, A., Hurcombe, E., Harrington, S., & Jude, N. (2021, July 9). From the fringes to the mainstream:
How COVID-19 conspiracy theories spread across social and mainstream media. ANZCA, 2021, online.
https://snurb.info/node/2616

1190
The pragmatics of
human-machine
interaction (organized by
Rita Vallentin, Miriam
Lind, Britta Schneider)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Alexa in multilingual polymedia environments: A case study


on the role of smartphones in speech assistant interactions

Panel contribution

Ms. Didem Leblebici 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

Current pragmatic research mostly rely on transcribed interactions to analyze engagement with speech assis-
tants (e.g. Mavrina et al., 2022) with some exceptions (e.g., Alač et al., 2020). In this presentation, I argue that such
approaches do not allow to investigate human-machine interaction comprehensively. Thus, rather than study-
ing speakers’ engagement with voice assistants in isolation, I propose a holistic approach that takes a speaker’s
lived experience (Busch, 2015) as a starting point of the analysis.
In an ethnographic case study of a multilingual speech assistant user who has recently migrated from Turkey
to Germany, I show how social meaning in interaction with speech assistants also emerges through the en-
tanglement of practices with smartphones. The data consists of a techno-biographical interview (Lee, 2014),
transcriptions of a week’s interactions with Alexa, participant observation and social media video produced by
the participant. Based on Tagg’s and Lyon’s (2021, p. 728) conceptualization of smartphones as “an integrated
environment of communicative opportunities – a polymedia environment”, I show how the participant engages
with his smartphone to connect various activities with the voice assistants across different platforms. Thus, he
uses the possibility of “fluid” navigation between platforms and apps (Madianou, 2014).
The findings allow me to argue that the language biography of the individual structures the multi-layered multi-
lingual environment in the smartphone. I trace the techno-biography of the participant through the interfaces,
where different language settings come together to form a personal multilingual polymedia environment. The
user not only navigates through the social media apps, Alexa app and the embedded speech assistant but also
engages these different interfaces in different languages on the same device. This case study is particularly
interesting for the pragmatics of human-machine interactions, because the findings implicate that the role of
social relationships, techno-biographies, language biographies and media ideologies (Gershon, 2010) are crucial
in engagement with conversational agents and therefore must be considered in pragmatic research.
References
Alač, M., Gluzman, Y., Aflatoun, T., Bari, A., Jing, B., & Mozqueda, G. (2020). Talking to a Toaster: How Everyday
Interactions with Digital Voice Assistants Resist a Return to the Individual. Evental Aesthetics, 9(1), 3–53.
Busch, B. (2015). Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic Repertoire: On the Concept of Spracherleben —The
Lived Experience of Language. Applied Linguistics, amv030. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv030
Gershon, I. (2010). Media Ideologies: An Introduction: Media Ideologies: An Introduction. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology, 20(2), 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01070.x
Lee, C. (2014). Language choice and self-presentation in social media: The case of university students in Hong
Kong. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (Eds.), The Language of Social Media (pp. 91–111). Palgrave Macmillan UK.
https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029317_5
Madianou, M. (2014). Smartphones as Polymedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 667–680.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12069
Mavrina, L., Szczuka, J., Strathmann, C., Bohnenkamp, L. M., Krämer, N., & Kopp, S. (2022). “Alexa, You’re Really
Stupid”: A Longitudinal Field Study on Communication Breakdowns Between Family Members and a Voice
Assistant. Frontiers in Computer Science, 4, 791704. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2022.791704
Tagg, C., & Lyons, A. (2021). Polymedia repertoires of networked individuals: A day-in-the-life approach. Prag-
matics and Society, 12(5), 725–755. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.20051.tag

1192
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Old wine in new bottles – politeness and affectivity in voice


assistant use as co-constructing traditional forms of
personhood, family and gender roles

Panel contribution

Prof. Britta Schneider 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

In this talk, I give insight into pragmatic strategies of users of digital voice assistants with a particular focus on
how these engage in polite and affective forms of talk. The data on which I ground my discussion stems from
a collection of qualitative interviews with German-speaking users of Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. In these,
the interviewees describe their experiences with using voice assistants in the private spaces of their home. They
partly also engage in talking to the device during the interviews.
While the devices have been mainly (but not only) designed for referential communication, the interview data
brings to the fore that the human interlocutor frequently engages in forms of phatic talk. These phatic, non-
referential types of communication include, for example, markers of politeness, greeting rituals, naming prac-
tices or intonation patterns that index social closeness.
I argue that these pragmatic strategies show that users construct social relationships to the devices and attribute
agency to them. At the same time, the respondents thus perform their private and personal construction of self,
including their gendered and family identities. Even though the data set is too small to draw general conclusions,
it shows that engaging in a friendly and sociable tone with digital assistants may be part of family language poli-
cies and educational, child-rearing practices in performing oneself as a particular type of mother or father. In
addition, there seem to be gendered patterns, as female respondents showing stronger tendencies of engaging in
polite and affective talk. Male respondents often emphasize their understanding of human-machine interaction
as ‘merely technical’ in meta-talk but nevertheless display forms of phatic communication in practice.
Taken together, the presentation aims at discussing human-machine interaction as a continuation of traditional,
‘typical’ cultural patterns of identity performance and gender orientation, which are reproduced in rather novel
media-technological culture.

1193
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Robot mediation: facilitating participation in multiparty


interaction

Panel contribution

Mr. Ali Asadi 1 , Prof. Kerstin Fischer 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

Previous research shows that participation and engagement in communicative activities have a positive effect
on learning (see, for example, [1] – [3]). However, in multiparty situations that involve co-present and telep-
resent participants, the remote person is more likely to participate less than collocated members, and, worse,
they may be considered less trustworthy [4]. In this study, we examine whether mediations from a social robot
can facilitate engagement of collocated and telepresent participants in a communicative activity and whether it
can encourage equal amount of participation for all members. In our experiment, groups of three participants
– i.e., two collocated and one using a telepresence robot – are instructed to interact with each other to complete
a language-related task. In one condition (C1), the participants do the task on their own, whereas in the second
condition (C2), a social robot mediator facilitates communication and participation of participants via verbal
and nonverbal cues in a between-subject experimental design. We use the wizard-of-Oz technique [5] to oper-
ate the robot and make interventions such as head turning, pointing, selecting addressee, and asking directed
questions. After the activity, each participant fills out a questionnaire on co-participants’ trustworthiness and
suspected personality traits. Our results suggest that robot mediation has an effect on participation of telep-
resence robot and/or less vocal participants. Furthermore, we collected data on what kinds of cues were most
effective in facilitating engagement and equal participation and when the robot should intervene. To conclude,
robot mediation evens out participation of all members and prevents a participant from holding the floor for
an extended period of time.
References
[1] Howe, C., Hennessy, S., Mercer, N., Vrikki, M., & Wheatley, L. (2019). Teacher-student dialogue during class-
room teaching: Does it really impact on student outcomes? Journal of the Learning Sciences, 28(4–5), 462–512.
DOI:10.1080/10508406.2019.1573730
[2] O’Connor, M. C., Michaels, S., & Chapin, S. (2015). “Scaling down” to explore the role of talk in learning:
From district intervention to controlled classroom study. In L. B. Resnick, C. S. C. Asterhan, & S. N. Clarke (Eds.),
Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue (pp. 111–126). AERA.
[3] Sedova, K. & Navratilova, Jana. (2020). Silent students and the patterns of their participation in classroom
talk. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 29(4-5), 681-716, DOI:10.1080/10508406.2020.1794878
[4] Stoll, B., Reig, S., He, L., Kaplan, I., Jung, M. F., & Fussell, S. R. (2018). “Wait, can you move the robot?”:
Examining telepresence robot use in collaborative teams. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International
Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI ’18). ACM, Chicago. USA, 9 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3171221.3171243
[5] Riek, L. D. (2012). Wizard of oz studies in hri: a systematic review and new reporting guidelines. Journal of
Human-Robot Interaction, 1(1), 119-136.

1194
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Semantic coherence and topic continuity in multi-turn HCI

Panel contribution

Dr. Netaya Lotze 1 , Mrs. Anna Greilich 1


1. WWU Münster

System-, chatbot-, robot-, computer, or machine-directed speech has left the laboratory settings and entered
humans’ daily life. However, voice user interfaces and chatbots still usually do not expect more than a short
command, e.g. “Alexa, turn the lights on,” or the keywords, e.g. “Zucchini pesto recipe”, to perform a specific
action the user requests. Since conversational A.I. is blooming and natural language understanding technology
is bringing new potential to the systems’ capacities, multi-turn HCI can soon become more widespread.
In the present talk, we aim to shed more light on multi-turn HCI, focusing on semantic coherence and topic
continuity which are among the key characteristic aspects of multi-turn communication in humans. We base
our analysis on the data sets providing users’ interactions with chatbots and Amazon Alexa in the German
language. In our mixed-methods studies, including corpus analysis, conversational analysis, and production
experiments, we cover the following research questions:

1. To what extent are dialogues between humans and chatbots coherent?


2. Are topic continuity features in multi-turn HCI follow patterns similar to human-human communication?

The data of the user-chatbot interactions show that users are likely to change their behaviour throughout the
interaction with the chatbots because of the interplay between dialogue-external factors (user type, system ar-
chitecture, system Persona, pragmatic context) and dialogue-internal factors (dialogue design, dialogue phase).
For HCI, we distinguish between the following types of coherence:

• Actual logical coherence in user’s utterances: Users, following the human-human communication
patterns, aim at coherent linguistic behaviour in HCI, in case the system allows it.
• The successfully created illusion of topic continuity in the system’s utterances: These are the in-
stances when keyword parsing was successful, and the system provided an adequate response.
• A relatively recent phenomenon, which we exclusively find in HCI, namely ”quasi-coherence ”: The
system uses cohesive markers in its utterances, but they are no cohesive or relevant reaction to the users’
previous turn (e.g. default-answers, failed anaphoric reference, repetition of a user’s keyword without
successful parsing of the utterance as a whole).

The data of the Amazon Alexa-directed speech, where we analyzed the topic continuity features in users’
utterances on the level of referring expressions, syntax, and prosody, shows that users formulate utterances
belonging to one discourse situation as isolated requests for information. Users anticipate a lack of shared
knowledge accumulation from the side of the system and prefer to keep the utterances explicit, e.g. avoid
pronominalisation or deaccenting of previously mentioned referents.

Lack of logical coherence and inconsistency in the system’s/chatbot’s utterances directly influences users’ lin-
guistic behaviour. In the talk, we will provide a comprehensive overview of possible user linguistic behaviour
in multi-turn HCI which can be beneficial for dialogue-design practices. Establishing logical coherence through-
out the interaction presupposes access to world knowledge and context and the ability to trace logical relations
between dialogue turns. While that is still not possible from a technical perspective, dialogue design for con-
versational A.I. remains a necessary solution.

1195
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Synthetic voice: Can sympathy be constituted? Vocal


attractiveness and its utility for human-machine interaction

Panel contribution

Ms. Florina Zülli 1


1. Department of German Studies University of Zurich

Initial sympathies are formed within a short moment. Based on only a few pieces of information, we form a first
impression about our counterpart and evaluate them as likeable or not. A potent information carrier in this
process is the voice: even without additional visual stimuli, it can convey internal and external characteristics
about a person, such as sex or indications of the other person’s mood (Zheng et al. 2020, Weiss/Möller 2011). A
person’s voice even allows us to draw reliable conclusions about the appearance and character of the person
speaking (Stern et al. 2021, Neutze/Beier 2006). Thus, the voice is not only an individual means of expression
but also a social tool that significantly influences our daily interactions with others. This makes it an attractive
area of research for robotics.
Especially for robots used in social contexts, such as nursing, sympathy is an important criterion. Studies have
shown that the human-machine interaction benefits significantly if the robot is perceived as likable, an effect
that can be achieved, for instance, by adding a smiling face to the robot’s face (Trouvain/Weiss 2020, Fink 2012).
Additionally, if sympathy could also be constituted or enhanced by a modified synthetic voice, this would have
a positive effect on the interaction with non-humanoid machines, such as voice assistants, as well.
In order to construct sympathetic synthetic voices for robots and voice assistants, it must first be investigated
which types of voices are perceived as sympathetic. Current research indicates that there is a first preference
for female voices and a second one regarding their pitch. To test this, I designed an exploratory study (N=105)
to investigate whether female voices with high frequency (F0 >220 Hz) are perceived as more sympathetic than
female voices with lower frequency (H1 ). In a next step, it will be tested whether this hypothesis can also be
verified for synthetic voices (H2 ). For this purpose, the fundamental frequencies (F0 ) of three female synthetic
voices with different pitch (low pitch 173 Hz, average pitch 200 Hz, high pitch 278 Hz) are increased by 25 Hz
each, resulting in the two variations SVnorm and SVhigh for the respective voice, which are then judged by subjects
in an A/B test for likability. The leading hypothesis is that both human and synthetic female voices are perceived
as more sympathetic at a frequency of >220 Hz, but that this effect is not linear and regresses from an inflection
point at 280 Hz (H3 ).
The discussion concludes by summarizing the findings of this study and projecting potential areas where the
pragmatic utilization of a congenial synthetic voice could enhance human-machine interaction. Nevertheless,
additional research is necessary for practical examination and a more thorough understanding of the charac-
teristics of sympathetic synthetic voices.
Keywords: vocal attractiveness, voice perception, synthetic voice, human-machine interaction, voice assistants

1196
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The heterogeneity of the speaker: How context is distributed


in human engagement with smart speakers

Panel contribution

Dr. Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger 1


1. Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

What enables ‘communication’ with speech-enabled AI-systems? Often compared to human-human commu-
nication, some scholars treat a speaking device as a communication partner and foreground the establishing
of ‘mutual understanding’ (e.g., Beneteau et al. 2019). Bender and Koller (2021), however, clarify how big lan-
guage models do not perform understanding but urge to view such models as only manipulating linguistic form.
Adopting their position, I argue that engagement with smart speakers needs to be understood as human coor-
dination with statistical patterns based on data produced by real living people.
In this talk, then, I am concerned with “heterogeneous spheres of human activity and life (Bakhtin, 1986:72) –
from the side of the user and the ‘machine.’ Following Mey’s (1993) understanding of pragmatics as “the science
of language in relation to its users,” I consider users of smart speakers as well as the people who label training
data and create such language models as “real, live people” with “their own purposes” (p. 5).
Concerned with what enables meaning-making, I present a case where a person demonstrates to his partner
the translation function of their smart speaker (Google home nest mini). Using a detailed multimodal analysis,
I investigate how the participant through changes in gaze, speech and body posture draws on their immediate
environment, their own lived experience and their engagement with other people when in the meaning-making
process of ‘talking’ to a machine.
Introducing the language model MINTAKA (Sen et al., 2022), I emphasise how such models depend on workers
who label and create data on which speech-enabled AI systems are trained. Here, I give importance to the
diverse linguistic communities and situations in which the speakers ‘in’ the machine are embedded (Shotter,
2017).
Viewing context as “an environment that is in steady development, prompted by the continuous interaction of
the people engaged in language use” (Mey, 1993: 10), I argue the engagement with speaking machines cannot be
taking place in the same ‘context.’ The prompting of interaction between people is distributed across different
situations and immediate environments in which the speaker in front of and ‘in’ the machine is embedded.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986 /2013). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.; V.W. McGee,
Trans.). University of Texas Press.
Beneteau, E., Richards, O. K., Zhang, M., Kientz, J. A., Yip, J., & Hiniker, A. (2019). Communication break-
downs between families and alexa. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1–13.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300473
Bender, E. M., & Koller, A. (2020). Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of
Data. 2, 5185–5198. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.463
Mey, J.L. (1993). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sen, P., Aji, A. F., & Saffari, A. (2022). Mintaka: A Complex, Natural, and Multilingual Dataset for End-to-End
Question Answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.01613.
Shotter, J. (2017). Why being dialogical must come before being logical: the need for a hermeneutical-dialogical
approach to robotic activities. AI and Society, 0(0), 1–7.

1197
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of human-machine interaction: how


traditional methods and approaches from cross-cultural
pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics help?

Panel contribution

Dr. Doris Dippold 1


1. University of Surrey

Cross-cultural, interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics are long established research traditions within prag-
matics research, as indexed for example through relevant journals dedicated to the field (e.g. Intercultural Prag-
matics, ed. by Istvan Kecskes), recent handbooks (e.g. Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics, 2022), or mono-
graphs (e.g. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, 2021, ed. by Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár). Yet, except for Fischer’s
(2020) work using robots to simulate a conversational partner in different politeness conditions, there is no
sign yet of these research traditions being used to systematically investigate the pragmatics of human-machine
interaction, in particular with an emphasis on the user’s production of speech acts.
This is surprising, given that there is a rising awareness of linguistic and cultural bias in these systems which
have the potential to systematically disadvantage specific user groups (see e.g., Sun et al., 2020). These have
been attributed to a lack of adequate training data for AI-based systems, with training data often based on
written records, or on data originating from inner circle English varieties (Shearer et al., 2019). Moreover,
many minority languages are under-resourced with respect to their coverage through AI systems (Besacier et
al., 2014). In addition, recent research on second language speakers with spoken dialogue systems has shown
that L2 speakers experience additional challenges in interactions with intelligent personal assistants due to
differences as compared to native speakers due to differences in language use (Wu et al., 2022).
In this presentation, I will ask whether and how the established methods and approaches from cross-cultural,
interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics can be mapped across to research on the pragmatics of human
machine interaction. The central questions I will pose are:

1. To what extent, and how, does existing research on human-machine interaction already draw on cross-
cultural, intercultural and interlanguage pragmatics research?
2. To what extent can existing data collection methods (e.g., role-plays, discourse completion tasks) fill gaps
in developing training data for conversational AI systems (e.g., to improve intent recognition)? How do
these methods have to be changed to make them (more) suitable?
3. To what extent can coding schemes, such as the CCSARP (Blum-Kulka, 1989) be applied in human-
machine interaction research, e.g., to code user turns for improved intent recognition?

The presentation will start with a short overview of cross-cultural, interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics
research and its established methodologies, as well as an overview of the challenges of developing speech- and
text-based spoken dialogue systems. By drawing on the example of a current project focusing on the develop-
ment of a medical appointment chatbot for GP surgeries a linguistically and culturally diverse area of London,
I will further illustrate these central ideas and questions. This presentation is not designed to provide all the
answers to the above questions, but to gather ideas, further develop this set of central questions and pave the
ground for future research.

1198
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Walking with Robi

Panel contribution

Dr. Jakub Mlynář 1 , Dr. Déborah Gaudin 1 , Mr. Benjamin Nanchen 1 , Mr. Randolf Ramseyer 1
1. HES-SO Valais/Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

In summer 2022, a mobile robot “Robi” was tested in “street trials” [1] in a mountain ski resort as a means
for transportation of tourists’ luggage. For most of the time, Robi was operating in the “follow-me” mode, i.e.,
the user/client walks the street and Robi follows her or him along the path. This paper is grounded in video-
ethnographic materials collected on five occasions and systematically analyzed from the perspective of eth-
nomethodology and conversation analysis [3]. The analysis allows us to explore how novice users learn to walk
with Robi – in other words, how they adjust the everyday practices of walking (e.g., [2]). In part, this adjustment
consists of following instructions, given in advance as a written text (an instruction sheet), as well as spoken
advice and guidance provided during the course of the journey by the operator (e.g., “You are too fast”).
In our findings, we identify and describe in detail three main features of walking with Robi that users have
to master to use the mobile robot properly and efficiently. Each of these features can be seen as a digression
from the taken-for-granted, ordinary praxis of walking (i.e., walking without Robi). First, users must learn the
proper pace of walking, which has to be such that the robot can “keep up”, and the user does not disappear
from the sensor-able field of the machine. Second, they need to learn the positioning of their walk trajectory
in space with regard to potential obstacles that could disrupt Robi’s movement. Third, they have to establish
visual and/or auditory monitoring practices to continuously ensure that Robi is moving forward with them in
a proper pace, distance, and position (e.g., check by looking back over one’s shoulder).
In sum, competent users embody in their walk a particular understanding of the environment, based on as-
sumption of a version of Robi’s machinic practical perception of the world. For a nonproblematic operation
and use of the service, the user and Robi must establish a mobile gestalt that is also possibly recognizable as
one unit by other members of the traffic system. The results presented in this paper contribute to the growing
field of research in mobile social interaction, as well as research on AI-based vehicles tested “in the wild”, and
they provide grounds for examination of further pragmatic implications, impacts and effects of the use of novel
technology. The paper also details the nature and extent of human involvement required for a proper operation
of automatic and semi-automatic machines.
[1] Marres, N. (2020). What if nothing happens? Street trials of intelligent cars as experiments in participation.
In S. Maassen, S. Dickel & C. Schneider (Eds.), TechnoScienceSociety: Technological Reconfigurations of Science
and Society (pp. 111–130). Springer.
[2] Ryave, A.L., & Schenkein, J.N. (1974). Notes on the art of walking. In R. Turner (ed.), Ethnomethodology:
Selected Readings (pp. 265–274). Penguin.
[3] Sormani, P. (2019). Ethnomethodological analysis. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont,
A. Cernat, J.W. Sakshaug & R.A. Williams (Eds.), SAGE Research Methods Foundations.
https://methods.sagepub.com/foundations/ethnomethodological-analysis

1199
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What’s wrong with Alexa? Analyzing the narratives of users


in a discussion forum

Panel contribution

Dr. Nadia Gauducheau 1 , Dr. Michel Marcoccia 1


1. University of Technology of Troyes

This study aims to analyze the narratives of users about their interactions with the voice assistant Alexa. Voice
assistants, such as Alexa or Siri, have penetrated people’s everyday lives, and the opportunity to interact with
such devices is growing. Such voice-based human–machine interaction devices ask specific questions about
communication and the relationship to machines. Indeed, the accompanying advertising discourse describes
a relationship between the user and the voice assistant marked by a social and intimate dimension playing on
the illusion of interpersonal communication.
This study has two objectives. (1) The first one is to investigate users’ perceptions of the voice assistant Alexa.
How do users categorize the system? Do they perceive the voice assistant as a machine or a humanoid entity?
(2) The second one is to define the type of communication problems that users report having with Alexa. This
makes it possible to identify the rules and principles of communication that seem necessary to users for sat-
isfactory communication.These questions are addressed by analyzing the comments and narratives produced
by the users of Alexa in a discussion forum. The analysis focuses on a sample of 496 messages posted in the
forum of the French-speaking website Journal de la voix [Voice Journal] (https://www.journaldelavoix.com/), in
the “Alexa and Echo speakers” section, “Alexa & Echo discussion” sub-section.
The messages are analyzed using methods of discourse analysis and content analysis. We analyzed the terms
used by people when designating Alexa and the terms used to refer to Alexa in their discourse. In addition, a
content analysis allows identifying the statements in which the users discuss a communication problem posed
by Alexa. People’s comments about poor communication with Alexa are indicative of their perceptions of satis-
factory communication.
Results indicate that users of the voice assistant Alexa employ, as expected, the model of interpersonal com-
munication to interact with the system. In particular, they expect the system to adhere to different principles
that facilitate mutual intelligibility and mutual adjustment: rules of politeness, Gricean cooperative principles,
intelligibility of the participation framework, contextual appropriation, etc. However, these principles are in-
congruent with the real abilities of the system, resulting in user dissatisfaction.
References:
Beneteau, E., Richards, O., Zhang, M., Kientz, J., Yip, J., & Hiniker, A. (2019). Communication Breakdowns Be-
tween Families and Alexa. Proceedings of 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300473
Fischer, K. (2010). Why it is interesting to investigate how people talk to computers and robots: Introduction to
the special issue. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2349–2354.
Guzman, A., & Lewis, S. (2020). Artificial intelligence and communication: A human–machine communication
research agenda, New Media & Society, 22(1),70–86.
Velkovska, J. & Zouinar, M. (2020). Les relations aux machines « conversationnelles » : Vivre avec les assistants
vocaux à la maison. Réseaux, 220-221(2), 47-79.

1200
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Alexa, please now stop, I want to ask you something else” –


Questions and requests in natural interactions with a voice
assistant

Panel contribution

Dr. Miriam Lind 1


1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Voice-based interaction happens increasingly not just between human interlocutors but also between humans
and artificial entities such as voice user interfaces (VUIs). Even though these interactions are becoming more
and more common in everyday life, research on them largely takes place in experimental lab settings and only
rarely focuses on naturally occurring communication sequences (exceptions are e.g. Porcheron et al. 2018,
Siegert 2020). According to experimental and questionnaire studies, politeness strategies such as indirectness,
greetings, and expressions like thank you and please are used significantly less often than in human-human
interactions (e.g. Bonfert et al. 2018, Burton/Gaskin 2019). Beyond these findings, relatively little is known
about the actual ways users of VUIs phrase their questions, requests, and orders to these devices and about the
similarities and differences between them and the according speech events between humans.
This paper provides an analysis of approximately 30.000 natural utterances directed at a voice assistant that
were recorded at an interactive science exhibition on board the ‘floating science center’ “MS Wissenschaft”
in Germany and Austria in 2019. The aim is to provide an overview on the pragmatics of human-machine
interaction by investigating how human interlocutors engage linguistically with VUIs, which topics are raised,
and whether we can establish specific form-function relations in VUI-directed speech.
References
Bonfert, M. et al. (2018): If you ask nicely. A digital assistant rebuking impolite voice commancs. In: ICMI’ 18.
Boulder/USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3242969.3242995.
Burton, N./Gaskin, J. (2019): „Thank You, Siri“: Politeness and Intelligent Digital Assistants. In: In Proceedings
of the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS). Cancun, Mexico, 1-10.
Porcheron, M. et al. (2018): Voice User Interfaces in Everyday Life. In: In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174214.
Siegert, I. (2020): „Alexa in the Wild“ – Collecting Unconstrained Conversations with a Modern Voice Assistant
in a Public Environment. In: Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 615-618.

1201
The pragmatics of the
referential process and
its interpretation
(organized by Carmela
Sammarco, Alfonsina
Buoniconto, Debora
Vena)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Evaluative anaphoric encapsulators as manipulative


presuppositions in political discourse

Panel contribution

Ms. Claudia Coppola 1 , Dr. Federica Cominetti 2


1. Università Roma Tre; La Sapienza Università di Roma, 2. Università dell’Aquila

Presuppositions serve the primary purpose of sparing the addressee’s cognitive effort on processing already
shared or marginal information. Among the presupposition triggers, definite descriptions and anaphoric in-
definite descriptions (Lombardi Vallauri et al. 2021) presuppose the univocal identifiability of a referent. This
primary function can be manipulatively exploited to convey non bona fide true (e.g. false or not agreed upon)
contents, decreasing the addressee’s epistemic vigilance and, therefore, their critical judgment (Givón 1982;
Sbisà 2007; Sperber et al. 2010; Reboul 2011; Schwarz 2015, 2016; Maillat-Oswald 2016; Lombardi Vallauri 2016,
2019).
Anaphoric encapsulators (D’Addio 1988; Simone 1990; Conte 1996) represent a particular case of presupposi-
tions by (in)definite descriptions that refer back to a previously introduced longer portion of text which was
nevertheless not established as a referent, thus creating de facto a new referent. It has been shown (D’Addio
1988; Caffi 2009) that this can be done not only through neutral encapsulators (e.g. this situation), but also by
means of evaluative NPs (e.g. this scandal). This textual device is therefore prone to manipulative uses, because
subjective or even tendentious contents can be smuggled as identifiable and agreed upon information through
a presuppositional encoding. This manipulative effect can be even enhanced when occurring in anaphoric
chains, where evaluative content is increased (Pecorari 2015, 2017).
In this contribution we investigate the frequency of the manipulative use of presuppositions by definite descrip-
tions and anaphoric indefinite descriptions as evaluative anaphoric encapsulators in the currently available
section of the IMPAQTS corpus of Italian political discourse (846 speeches, 3.205.433 tokens). This diachronic,
multimodal corpus is representative of the Italian Republican political discourse (1946 to present) and is anno-
tated per implicitly conveyed non bona fide true contents, including presuppositions (Cominetti et al. 2022).
In the following example, the speaker refers to the possibility of two parties forming the new government as il
patto della poltrona (’the seat pact’, referring to the two parties only trying to secure the best seats of power):
1) Per Fratelli d’Italia, l’unico sbocco possibile di questa crisi di governo è […] il ritorno alle urne. Abbiamo
chiesto al Presidente Mattarella di valutare questa eventualità, anche nel caso in cui M5S e PD confermassero
la loro volontà di procedere verso il patto della poltrona, che stanno trattando in queste ore.
‘Fratelli d’Italia believes that the only possible solution to this government crisis is […] new elections. We have
asked President Mattarella to consider this possibility, even in case M5S and PD should confirm their willingness
to go forward with the seat pact they are discussing in these hours’.
In the remainder of the speech, the speaker builds an anaphoric chain in which the evaluative content is pro-
gressively increased (e.g. questo osceno baratto di poltrone ’this obscene barter of seats’).
The analysis shows the high frequency of the phenomenon in the Italian political discourse and proposes a
classification of the examples according to textual and pragmatic parameters, including the type of encapsulator
and the communicative function performed by the presupposition (Garassino et al. 2019, 2022).

1203
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Inferring gaps of knowledge from anaphoric expressions in


detective stories

Panel contribution

Prof. Anna Bonifazi 1 , Ms. Pinelopi Ioannidou 1 , Ms. Zala Salarzai 1


1. University of Cologne

Anaphoric choices may reflect different degrees of referent activation in one’s consciousness (e.g. Chafe 1996),
continuity or discontinuity in narrative structure (e.g. Van Vliet 2002), conversational recipient-design choices
(e.g. Betz 2015), and sociolinguistic norms (Allerton 1996). All these accounts assume a receiver-friendly attitude
of speakers or narrators, which facilitates anaphora comprehension: a referent that is already in focus gets a
lexically light recall; the beginning of a new narrative episode hosts lexically heavier co-references; the co-
presence of multiple conversation participants invite anaphoric choices that are interactionally efficient.
Our contribution spotlights anaphoric expressions countering this cooperative attitude by communicators, at
least partially. We hypothesize that a gap of knowledge inferable from an anaphoric expression – that is, an
asymmetry in the epistemic standpoint of one or more characters, or of readers, about a certain referent –
hinders or misleads anaphora resolution.
Data come from a study considering 3.842 anaphoric expressions with individuals as referents in 6 short de-
tective stories (by Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and Christie), and Webanno annotations regarding, among other
information, the referent, the type of anaphora (whether regular or associative), the grammatical form, the
utterer, and if a specific viewpoint seems to be conveyed. The genre favors a large spectrum of possibilities re-
garding anaphora comprehension: on the one hand, understanding who is who without efforts is a key factor
of the reading process; on the other hand, coreferences can generate implicatures advancing the characters’
and the readers’ knowledge about referents, and even misleading them (in line with the rhetorical strategies
shown by Emmott and Alexander 2019).
Our research questions are: which anaphoric expressions in which contexts do imply gaps of knowledge be-
tween characters about a certain referent? In which of these cases do writers make readers align with (some
of) the characters?
Instances to look at include, for example, “that amazing target” used by Conan Doyle in The Adventure of the
Empty House to refer to what the murderer (wrongly) believes is Sherlock Holmes in person, whereas Watson,
Sherlock Holmes and the readers know it is a bust in wax resembling the detective; “the criminals” uttered by
Miss Marple in The Bloodstained Pavement at a moment where characters and readers have no clue about the
referents, whereas Miss Marple does.
Allerton, David J., 1996. Proper names and definite descriptions with the same reference: a pragmatic choice
for language users. J. Pragmat. 25, 621-633.
Betz, Emma, 2015. Recipient design in reference choice: negotiating knowledge, access, and sequential
trajectories. Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion 16, 137-173.

Chafe, Wallace, 1996. Inferring identifiability and accessibility. In: Fretheim, T., Gundel, J. (Eds.), Reference and
Referent Accessibility. Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 37-46.
Emmott, Catherine, Alexander, Marc G., 2019. Manipulation in Agatha Christie’s detective stories: rhetorical
control and cognitive misdirection in creating and solving crime puzzles. In: Sorlin, S. (Ed.), Stylistic Manipula-
tion of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction. Bloomsbury, London, 195-214.
van Vliet, Sarah, 2002. Overspecified NPs marking conceptual shifts in narrative discourse. Ling. Neth. 19,
187-198.

1204
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reference and reflexivity: the metafunctions of the discourse


marker ‟in other words” in written English discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Milica Radulović 1


1. University of Niš

The paper examines the metalinguistic and metapragmatic functioning of the discourse marker in other words
in written English discourse. Discourse markers, which belong to the explicit level of metapragmatic awareness
(Mey 2001:198), demonstrate ‟how speakers and hearers jointly integrate forms, meanings, and actions to make
overall sense out of what is said (Schiffrin 1987:49)”. Furthermore, these forms indicate reflexive awareness,
which can be defined as ‟the capacity of the mind to bend back upon itself, to be aware of its own experiences as
residing in a self that is situated in a social context of interaction (Verschueren and Brisard 2009:33)”. Discourse
markers can be found in various planes of talk: exchange structures, action structures, idea structures, partic-
ipation frameworks and information states (Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen 2011:224-225, Schiffrin 1987:315).
Specifically, the marker in other words is a metalinguistic form which demonstrates that the speaker is aware
that comprehension may misfire. Therefore, by adapting some sections of the speech, the speaker attempts
to avoid wrong reference and inference and to improve salience in discourse. Following Schiffrin’s (1980:202)
assertion that ‟Meta-linguistic referents, operators, and verbs are all embedded in a linguistic context that pro-
vides them with talk on which to focus,” the research aims to determine the boundaries of the focal context
of the marker in other words in written English discourse. This qualitative corpus-driven analysis includes 50
examples from the corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Also, the research highlights the relevance of
the relation between reflexivity, salience, and clarity in presenting ideas and propositions.
Aijmer, Karin. 2015. “Pragmatic Markers.” In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, ed. by Karin
Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann, 195-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aijmer, Karin, and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen. 2011. “Pragmatic Markers” In Discursive Pragmatics,
ed. by Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren, 223- 247. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.

Mey 2001.Pragmatics: An Introduction, Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Schiffrin, Deborah. 1980. “Meta-Talk: Organizational and Evaluative Brackets in Discourse.” Sociological In-
quiry 50 (3/4): 199-236.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 2006. In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Verschueren, Jef. 2009. “Introduction: The Pragmatic Perspective”. In Key Notions for Pragmatics, ed. By Jef
Verschueren and Jan-Ola Östman, 1-27. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Verschueren, Jef, and Frank Brisard. 2009. “Adaptability”. In Key Notions for Pragmatics, ed. by Jef Verschueren
and Jan-Ola Östman, 28-47. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

1205
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Reference construction in German regulatory signs in public


spaces. An exploratory study

Panel contribution

Ms. Charlotte Eisenrauch 1 , Prof. Rita Finkbeiner 1


1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Pragmatic approaches to reference pursue the question “how speakers – by using a particular expression […]
– succeed in picking out their intended referent […], and how the use of different types of expressions in dif-
ferent contexts affects addressee interpretations” (Gundel & Abbott 2019: 2). Under this view, the process of
reference construction is a highly context-dependent matter. While this insight has been at the center of many
interactional studies on reference (Sidnell & Enfield 2017), other discourse domains and modalities are still
underrepresented in pragmatic work on reference.
A pertinent, but widely neglected case is reference construction in public signs regulating people’s behavior. In
this discourse domain, text producers heavily rely on the ability of recipients to include perceptive knowledge
of the physical situation, alongside assumptions about the absent text producer’s intentions, into their interpre-
tation.
(1) Ausfahrt freihalten
gateway free-keep
‘Keep gateway free’
(2) Privatgrundstück
private lot
‘Private lot’
(3) Plakate ankleben verboten
bills prt-glue forbidden
‘Do not post bills’
In (1), by using the bare singular count noun Ausfahrt, the text producer intends to refer to a particular gateway
which can be visually perceived in close proximity to the sign (roughly ‘Keep this gateway free’). Obviously, bare
singular count nouns are not typical referring expressions. Still, recipients are likely to be able to understand
the reference in context. In (2), in contrast, the bare singular count noun Privatgrundstück is not used to refer to
a particular private lot, but to assign to a particular, visually perceivable area the property of being of a certain
kind (roughly ‘This area is a private lot’). In order to understand the difference in the referential potential
between the bare nouns in (1) and (2), recipients need to grasp the meaning of the linguistic constructions and
enrich the expressions by appropriate situational knowledge. Finally, in (3), the text producer also refers to an
area in proximity to the sign, but not by using a noun denoting this area but by using a particle verb (an+kleben)
selecting a local argument which has to be saturated in context (roughly ‘Do not glue bills on this wall’).
In this talk, we present the results of a pilot study investigating the linguistic and pragmatic factors that deter-
mine reference comprehension in German public signs of verbal and verbal-iconic modality with regulatory
function. Based on a corpus of signs documented in the city of Mainz, we systematize the linguistic expressions
used by the text producer to refer to various elements of the extralinguistic situation and relate the findings to
current pragmatic models of deixis and reference. We argue that regulatory discourse in public spaces can pro-
vide valuable new insights into the interplay between linguistic expressions, contextual factors, and pragmatic
inference in reference construction.
References:
Gundel, J. & B. Abbott. 2019. Introduction. In J. Gundel & B. Abbott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Reference,
1-8. Oxford.

1206
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sidnell, J. & N. Enfield. 2017. Deixis and the Interactional Foundations of Reference. In Y. Huang (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, 217-239. Oxford.

1207
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Referring as a joint-action in natural discourse

Panel contribution

Ms. Emilia Calaresu 1


1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

In this presentation I would like to discuss the interactional process of reference in real discourses. Reference
is a context-dependent notion and a negotiated process between speakers (e.g., S1, S2, etc.) (Auer 1984; Brennan
& Clark 1996; Jucker et al. 2003; Clark & Bangerter 2004; Schegloff 2007; Calaresu 2019, 2022). Not only all
knowledge deemed already shared but also style, related to different discourse genres, plays a role in choosing
one referential expression over another (Hedberg et al. 2019; Scott 2020).
Reference is in primis an act of the speaker: “it is the speaker who refers (by using some appropriate expres-
sion): he invests the expression with reference by the act of referring” (Lyons 1977: 177). This means that when
faced with a referential expression Y in spoken or written discourse, the most appropriate question is not ‘What
does expression Y refer to?’ but ‘What does S1 refer to by using expression Y while addressing S2?’ (cf. Lyons,
1977: 177, 180). Another crucial aspect is that, on the basis of her knowledge, her memory of previous interac-
tions, of contextual clues, etc., S2 will often have to choose a referent resolution of Y among a range of possible
interpretations (Wilson & Sperber 2012: 263-264).
Only by working on real discourse data (and not on short, isolated, or invented examples) is it possible to see
that the whole process of referrring usually consists of three main stages: i) S1 introduces a referent X in dis-
course by means of an expression Y; ii) S2 acknowledges or does not acknowledge X, providing tacit or verbal
acknowledgement, or asking for further explanation; iii) reference to X is maintained (not necessarily by means
of the same expression Y) or is dropped in the subsequent turns of speech.
Each act of reference therefore calls into play many variables: a linguistic expression Y, used by S1 addressing
S2, in a specific kind of discourse D, in order to refer to a certain entity X (the referent). In traditional semantic
accounts, referring is often regarded as a relation with only two variables, i.e. a two places- relation (Y, X). In
more pragmatically oriented studies, they amount to three (Y, X, S1) or, at best, four (Y, X, S1, S2) (cf. Abbott,
2010: 2-3). However, partly because of well-known characteristics of natural languages and real speech (se-
mantic indeterminacy, vagueness, arbitrariness, etc.), partly because of specific context conditions, referential
resolutions of the same expression Y made by two different human interactors can never a priori be called
identical. This is more likely to happen if S1 refers to referents which are not contextually present, or already
familiar to S2, or deemed universally known. Or, viceversa, if S1 uses unexpected expressions to refer to an
otherwise easily identifiable referent.
To conclude, we should consider at least six variables: 1 linguistic expression, 2 (or more) human interpreters,
2 (or more) referential resolutions that are not necessarily identical, and, lastly, the important variable of the
discourse genre.

1208
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Situational definites and inference from stereotypical


situations in languages with definiteness splits

Panel contribution

Dr. Ulrike Albers 1


1. Structures Formelles du Langage

It is usually assumed that general stereotypical knowledge, shared by both speaker and receiver, is the base
for weak definites such as the train in I took the train (Carlson & all 2013; Beyssade 2013; Zwarts 2014). One
defining feature of definite descriptions like these is that they do not denote a particular referent: the speaker
might have taken several trains; and the addressee is not aware of any particular train. So-called “situational
definites”, on the other hand, are assumed to denote a referent that is unique in the situation; it is proposed that
they might rely on knowledge of the situation but cannot rely on stereotypical knowledge (Zwarts 2014; Lyons
1999).
This talk deals with different kinds of situational definites in typologically distinct languages with definite-
ness splits, i.e., languages displaying different expressions encoding different types of definiteness[1]. Such
languages usually have a weak form and a strong form. The strong form is used for context-dependent types of
definites (mostly anaphoric and deictic reference); the weak form has other uses, including reference to globally
unique entities such as the sun or weak definites such as the train in I took the train above.
Ebert (1971) showed that the split in Fering is operated between what Hawkins (1978) later called the “visible sit-
uation” use of definites (deictic reference) and all other situational uses. We will show that other languages also
distinguish reference retrieval based on deixis, expressed by strong forms, from reference retrieval involving
inference from stereotypical situations, expressed by the weak form.
1.Out of the blue:
{Doktér / #Doktér-la / #Lo doktér} la di amwin ou asiz tro ba.
‘The doctor told me you sit too low.’ Reunion Creole, bare noun phrase (weak form)
b. {Da / #Dea} Dokta hot ma gsogt i soi mi auskurian. Austro-Bavarian[2], reduced article (weak form)
‘The doctor told me to take care.’
c. Ich habe {vom / #von dem } Arzt einen Tipp bekommen: ich soll mich nicht so niedrig hinsetzen. Central
German, contracted form of article (weak form)
‘I was given an advice by the doctor: I should not sit so low.’
We will also suggest that these kinds of situational uses of definite NPs (partially) rely on cognitive frames[3],
on a par with weak definites; that they may receive sloppy readings even when they figure in subject position;
and that they cannot be contrasted.
[1] We will use data from existing analyses (Fering and other languages) as well as new data from Reunion
Creole, Austro-Bavarian, and Central German. Our own data mostly consist of examples based on utterances
found in oral corpora and judged for felicity by native speakers.
[2] The variety used here concerns a local dialect from Saigahans (Austria).
[3] Approaches in terms of frames have been proposed for weak definites (Zwarts 2014, Löbner 2015, Oda 2015).
A frame is a stereotypical situation abstracting away from particular situations.

1209
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The recalibration of the referent through the reformulation


in spontaneous spoken Italian

Panel contribution

Ms. Roberta Cicchirillo 1


1. Department of Humanities (DipSUm), University of Salerno

The aim of this paper is to explore in a corpus-based study the role of the recalibration of the reference (1)
(Lerner et al. 2012) through the reformulation in the Italian spontaneous spoken language. The reference re-
calibration reformulation (RRR) highlights the multi-step dimension of the introduction of the referent (Shor
2019), thereof intended as “a semantic relation between linguistic expressions and things, abstracting away
from speakers and addressees” (Abbott 2010:3). From a syntactic point of view, reformulation is considered as
a syntagmatic concatenation constituted by at least two elements of the same kind on the same level, from the
semantic-functional side, instead, the reformulation accumulates several suitable denotations among different
possibilities for a unique referent (Pietrandrea & Kahane 2012); in this sense RRR causes a delay in the progres-
sion of the turn due to the substitution, in a lexical searching practice. In (1), in bold, the RRR introduces the
referent something, related to what it has been eaten, then, it is recalibrated along a direction that improves
the specification, namely a sandwich. Something and sandwich lay on the same syntactic level depending on we
stopped on the way to eat.
(1) ci siamo fermati pure per strada a mangiare qualcosa ho capito
B: qualcosa
A: ah
B: insomma un panino e quindi il tempo non era tanto
(1) we stopped even on the way to eat something I understood
B: something
A: ah
B: in short a sandwich and so the time was not so much
RRR may be considered a multi-step process that permits to integrate interactional and functional aspects and
semantic and trajectory features of the conjuncts, which express a reinforcement or a decrease of the referent.
Hence, the referent may occur not only with a single linguistic contribution (Clark & Bangerter 2004), but it
may be realized by different stages, composed of functional and interactional factors, to support the activity in
which the speaker is engaged (Lerner et al. 2012; Calaresu 2018).
The current paper aims to analyze 50 RRR, taken from spoken corpora, VoLip (De Mauro et al. 1993) and KiParla
(Mauri et al. 2018). It intends to explore the functional features relating to clarification, conceived as the expan-
sion or the explanation of a referent, to paraphrase which expresses the equivalence among the items involved
in the reformulation, and to correction, intended as the lack of the equivalence between the reformulation
elements (Bazzanella 1986; Fiorentini & Sansò 2017).
At first glance the recalibration reveals that RRR is related to nominal items, which may be a word or a phrase,
expressing primarily a clarification function. Further, in the referentiality practice, at least two trajectories
are deployed revolving around the precision of the formulation, which in one direction allows the gain of the
referential specificity and on the contrary in the other, the speaker expresses a well-suit formulation but then,
due to the recalibration, it occurs a referential downgrade that reduces the certainty about the referent (Lerner
et al. 2012; Bonvino et al. 2018).

1210
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Viewpoint building and referential interpretation with three


defocusing constructions in Spanish digital news discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Miguel A. Aijón Oliva 1


1. Universidad de Salamanca

The grammatical constructions usually characterized as impersonal (e.g. Siewierska & Papastathi 2011) have the
intuitive function of leaving the identity of certain human participants underspecified, either because the events
described are irrealis and applicable to a collectivity, or because of an intention not to attribute realis facts to
specific people. The pragmatic defocusing of a referent is often correlative with its syntactic-semantic demotion
(Solstad & Lyngfelt 2006). It is however interesting to observe that defocusing constructions tend to co-occur
with contextual elements apparently aimed at enabling referential identification. These can be approached
as mental space builders (Fauconnier’s 2014) and include locative and temporal adjuncts with a demarcating
function (e.g. De Cock 2014: 213-215). To them we can add verbal semantics and aspect, as well as the contextual
presence of other referential elements, all of which entail the configuration of discourse viewpoints (Serrano
2022) and can have important pragmatic repercussions.
The present study aims at investigating the connections between viewpoint building and referential interpre-
tation with three defocusing constructions in Spanish news discourse. The analysis will be based on a corpus
collected during the years 2021 and 2022 from three digital newspapers based on the Peninsular city of Sala-
manca. We will quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the co-occurrence of different space builders with
non-phoric plural third persons (3PL), passive and impersonal reflexives (SE) and the impersonal modal con-
struction formed with haber-que plus an infinitive (HQ).
The results show that 3PL is mostly restricted to specific references in news headlines, where it helps the writer
put the focus on the facts rather than their actors. SE and HQ display wider contextual possibilities and refer-
ential readings, specific ones usually requiring perfective verbal aspect. All this contrasts with the findings of
a different investigation on digital opinion pieces (Aijón Oliva, forthcoming) where 3PL is typically associated
with institutional references as opposed to the citizenry, while SE promotes an integrated view. This suggests
that the very mechanisms aimed at guiding referential interpretation constitute a matter of sociopragmatic
variation across textual sequences and communicative situations.
References
Aijón Oliva, M.A. (forthcoming). Defocusing constructions and the discursive shaping of institutional references
in digital opinion pieces. In Serrano, M.J. & Aijón Oliva, M.A. (Eds.), Studies of grammatical variation in Spanish.
De Cock, B. (2014). Profiling discourse participants: Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates.
Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fauconnier, G. (2014). Mental spaces, language modalities, and conceptual integration. In Tomasello, M. (Ed.),
The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure (vol. I, pp. 230‒258).
New York / London: Psychology Press.
Serrano, M.J. (2022). Defocusing and the third-person viewpoint: The pronoun uno and its covariation with
clitic se in Spanish. Lingua, 280, 1‒22.
Siewierska, A. & Papastathi, M. (2011). Towards a typology of third person plural impersonals. Linguistics, 49,
575–610.
Solstad, T. & Lyngfelt, B. (2006). Perspectives on demotion: Introduction to the volume. In Lyngfelt, B. & Solstad,
T. (Eds.), Demoting the agent: Passive, middle and other voice phenomena (pp. 1‒20). Amsterdam / Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.

1211
The pragmatics of
trusting (artificial) others
(organized by Kerstin
Fischer)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An Event Approach for the Analysis of Interpersonal Trust in


HRI

Panel contribution

Dr. Glenda Hannibal 1


1. Ulm University

Trust in robots and their perceived trustworthiness has been studied and promoted in human-robot interaction
(HRI) research as an essential factor for how willing people are to interact and collaborate with them (Lewis
et al., 2018). Deliberately designing robots to have apparent agency, have also motivated HRI researchers to go
beyond an understanding and analysis of trust as mere reliance to that of interpersonal trust (Law and Scheutz,
2021). However, speaking about interpersonal trust in the specific context of HRI requires careful discussions
about the metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings, which are often left unchallenged in the HRI com-
munity. By using the philosophical method of conceptual analysis, I will first show that the standard paradigm
for studying interpersonal trust in HRI rest on its conceptualization as either a property of the human or the
robot counterpart. Rooted in this property approach, human-centered studies tend to focus on identifying the
factors influencing human trust attitudes towards robots, while robot-centered work often aim to determine
the factors influencing what makes robots appear trustworthy (Hancock et al., 2020). Drawing on insights from
philosophical discussions about the nature of trust (Faulkner and Simpson, 2017), I argue that studies on in-
terpersonal trust in HRI must extend the analysis of trust by adapting an event approach. By conceptualizing
interpersonal trust in HRI as an event it is now possible to highlight how trust between humans and robots
result from the situated and dynamic interaction. Moreover, embracing this shift from a property to an event
approach also calls for fundamental methodological discussions about how to study interpersonal trust in HRI. I
will conclude by considering in which way it might be possible to empirically study the situation of interpersonal
trust in HRI by taking into account human experience of vulnerability as one of its preconditions (Hannibal et
al. 2021). As such, my overall aim is to present how theory-driven research is beneficial to future research on
interpersonal trust in HRI.
________________
- Lewis, M., Sycara, K., and Walker, P. (2018). The Role of Trust in Human-Robot Interaction. In Abbass, H. A.,
Reid, D. J., and Scholz, J., editors, Foundations of Trusted Autonomy (Studies in Systems, Decision and Control,
Vol. 177), chap. 8, pages 135–159. Springer Open, Cham, Switzerland.
- Law, T. and Scheutz, M. (2021). Trust: Recent concepts and evaluations in human-robot interaction. In Nam,
C. S. and Lyons, J. B., editors, Trust in Human-Robot Interaction: Research and Application, chap. 2, pages 27–57.
Academic Press, London, UK.
- Hancock, P. A., Kessler, T. T., Kaplan, A. D., Brill, J. C., and Szalma, J. L. (2020). Evolving Trust in Robots: Speci-
fication Through Sequential and Comparative Meta-Analyses. Human Factors, pages 1–34.
- Faulkner, P. and Simpson, T. (2017). The Philosophy of Trust. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
- Hannibal, G., Weiss, A., and Charisi, V. (2021). “The robot may not notice my discomfort”- Examining the
experience of vulnerability for trust in human-robot interaction. In 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot
and Human Interactive Communication (pages 704–711). Vancouver, Canada: IEEE.

1213
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Being Transparent about Competence: Using Transparency in


Trust Calibration

Panel contribution

Mr. Matous Jelinek 1 , Prof. Kerstin Fischer 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

Being Transparent about Competence: Using Transparency in Trust Calibration


Trust is an essential part of human-robot interaction. For smooth and safe interactions, a calibrated level of
trust – a state in which a human’s level of trust matches their robotic counterpart’s level of capabilities – is
needed. While an obvious way to correct possible miscalibration is transparency about the system’s capabilities,
previous studies are inconclusive: In some cases, the use of transparency led to an increased level of trust,
in other situations, the level of trust dropped significantly. Our approach aims at creating a framework for
regulating various forms of perceived trust. Our assumption is that the degree of downward evidence (Clark,
1996) for a capability of the robot influences the effectiveness of transparency as a trust regulating strategy.
In an online experiment, we tested three different verbal approaches toward trust calibration. Conditions differ
regarding different aspects of capability the robot is transparent about: One condition uses transparency about
low level of capability, another condition uses transparency about high level of capability. The baseline condi-
tion tested a robot demonstrating a higher level of capability with no additional transparency. The experiment
was conducted as an online survey, with participants evaluating videos of three different robots, each in one of
the three different conditions. We used the Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust scale (Ullman & Malle, 2020)to
capture the perceived level of trust and its effects on different trust factors. Altogether 100 subjects, approached
using Prolific, participated in the experiment.
The experiment confirmed our assumption that it matters whether the robot is transparent about its capabil-
ities. Further, we confirmed that the perceived level of robots’ competence is affected by the transparency
strategies used. In addition, our results open new possibilities for implementing the strategies outlined in real-
life scenarios: for both trust-dampening and trust-repair.
References:
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge university press.
Ullman, D., & Malle, B. F. (2020). MDMT: Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust. 3.

1214
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Believe you me, I’m a button: Nonverbal and verbal


affordances of trust in artificial others

Panel contribution

Ms. Michal Pauzner 1 , Dr. Bracha Nir 2


1. SHENKAR Engineering. Design. Art., 2. University of Haifa

This presentation examines the ways trust may be negotiated through the concept of affordance as a relational
notion (Gaver, 1991), highlighting the interaction between human and non-human entities. Employing perspec-
tives from two disciplines, design and linguistics, we analyze the concept of affordance for trust building in the
context of digital environments. Specifically, we look into how both nonverbal and verbal clues can be related
to building trust and how change of context influences trust dynamics as we are more and more detached from
the natural world and engage in mediated, artificial environments.
The concept of affordance describes the action possibilities provided to the actor by the environment (Gibson,
1986). Gibson’s non-dualistic theorizing of affordances argues, for example, that every object has specific ma-
terial properties offering possibilities and constraints for actions, but those are relative for the observer and
the situation (Stendal et al., 2016). In the context of design this can be illustrated by the use of a button: for
most people a button affords fastening together two sides of a garment. Still, it does not offer the same action
possibilities to children that might use it for playing, or to people who may use it for decoration or art. From
the point of view of social theory, affordances are the action possibilities and constraints provided to people
by other people: for example, when a mother talks to her child, the child talks back. In terms of the use of
technology, each technology provides the user with different affordances (Hutchby, 2001), among other things
those affordances related to interaction design when interaction involves artificial others (Kaptelinin, 2014).
The concept of affordances is critical for trust, particularly in the context of digital environments. People mostly
trust things they immediately recognize and know how to use. However, in digital environments our percep-
tual understating of affordance becomes blurry, and our understanding of language is at risk, since it is highly
decontextualized. In a digital environment trust is not inherently established but communicated through clues,
which are embedded in the interface design and other modes of communication, such as choosing a metaphor
for a particular function – as in the case of the interface button in a digital application.
We inquire into how change of context - from physical to artificial environments - influences the opportunities
to build trust and highlight gaps that influence trust-building between humans and other-than-human actors.
We follow Norman (1999) in emphasizing the role of designers as presenting affordances as well as their con-
straints appropriately and explore the difference between an affordance and the way it is visually and linguisti-
cally represented and perceived by people. We follow Gaver (1991) in considering also the hidden and even false
affordances of digital environments, particularly in terms of language use. We conclude by highlighting the im-
portance of the interaction between the perceived physical properties of an affordance and its communicative
power over the user.
Kaptelinin, V. (2014). Affordances. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (2nd ed.)

1215
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Building e-Trust: Effects of Reciprocity and Social Cues on


Online Self-disclosure and Trust

Panel contribution

Dr. Jaap Ham 1 , Mr. Zhenyu Zhu 1 , Dr. Jettie Hoonhout 2


1. Eindhoven University of Technology, 2. Philips Research

Equipping technology (e.g., websites) with social influencing strategies (e.g., reciprocity) and social cues (e.g.,
a virtual face) to influence user behavior is becoming increasingly prevalent in e-commerce. Based on earlier
literature of artificial social agents and persuasive technology, we argue that a social influencing strategy will
be effective especially when the technology displays social cues and the user experiences the technology that
uses the influencing strategy as a (an artificial) social entity. More specifically, in the current research, we inves-
tigated whether a website that uses reciprocity to entice users to disclose information about themselves by first
disclosing some information about itself will be effective especially when that the website displays a human
face as the agent it represents (and which discloses the information). To study this question, we conducted a 2
(website agent’s social cue presentation: human-like face vs company logo) by 2 (reciprocity vs. no reciprocity)
factorial between subject study (N = 200). The dependent variables were individual’s self-disclosure and per-
ceived trust towards the website company. Confirming our hypothesis, results showed the expected interaction
of agent’s social cue presentation and use of reciprocity on user’s self-disclosure: When the website used reci-
procity by first disclosing some information about itself, participants disclosed information about themselves
more often only when the website displayed a human face (to represent itself as an agent that discloses the infor-
mation). Additionally, results showed a main effect of reciprocity on trust: When the website used reciprocity,
the participant trusted the website company more than when it did not use reciprocity. Results provided no
evidence that an agent’s social cue presentation (i.e., presenting a human-like face) independently influenced
user self-disclosure or trust. Limitations of the study, implications for theory and e-marketing, and suggestions
for further studies are discussed.

1216
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Designing Trustworthy Chatbots for Eating Disorders

Panel contribution

Ms. Xin Shen 1 , Prof. Kenny Chow 1


1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Eating Disorders (EDs) are mental illnesses which result in various negative consequences. However, many
individuals who suffer from EDs are not receiving valid help. Some of them refer to the internet for relevant
information and/or advice. From our online observational study, one of the major reasons why people do not
reach out for professional help is their lack of trust towards in-person communications with therapists. In order
to deliver efficient and effective interventions for this population, we aim to establish a framework for designing
text-based chatbots for ED patients.
Specifically, an identity-informed approach is adopted in this study to analyze user needs and explore design
possibilities. This is based on previous research in the field of EDs which has indicated that patients’ multiple
identities interact with one another which crucially impacts the risk, diagnosis, and treatment of EDs. By taking
an identity-informed approach, we intend to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the association between
individuals’ ED-related needs and their three types of identities (group identity, role identity, ED identity). We
have applied this approach in case studies and conducted identity analysis on participants. Based on the results
of the analysis, chatbot prototypes with different chatbot personas have been created for user testing to explore
how to transform user needs into design elements. As a result, a preliminary design framework for chatbots
delivering ED interventions has been built. The framework is composed of four dimensions, including content,
persona cues, conversational cues and structure. We further investigate how these dimensions and factors
under these dimensions influence users’ trust towards chatbots with different personas. Based on quantitative
and qualitative analysis of user feedback, the framework is enriched with components which improve user trust
in chatbots. The final design framework draws implications for creating trustworthy chatbots in healthcare.

1217
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Distrusting self-driving cars, trusting Alexa. A discourse


linguistic investigation of trust in Artificial Intelligence

Panel contribution

Dr. Monika Hanauska 1 , Prof. Annette Leßmöllmann 1 , Dr. Nina Kalwa 1


1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

In the public discussion about Artificial Intelligence in German press texts, trust is often addressed literally,
i.g.: EU wants to strengthen people’s trust in artificial intelligence (Darmstädter Echo, 2021/04/27), Why Artificial
Intelligence (AI) has a trust problem (WELT Online, 2020/12/24) or Moreover, generally available AI that does
not reveal itself could increase people’s distrust in technology (SPIEGEL Online, 2018/05/11) [Translation: NK].
These headlines and the respective articles seem to suggest that trust in AI appears to be the prerequisite for
self-learning systems to be accepted by people in a wide variety of contexts. But is this the case for every kind
of self-learning (i.e., AI) system?
Using a discourse-analytical approach, we examine the question of which AI systems in German public media
discourse address trust and mistrust. We identify sub-discourses in which trust is overtly thematized in connec-
tion with AI and those in which this is not the case. Does the thematization of trust, e.g., in relation to machine
translation play as big a role as in relation to self-driving cars? In which AI sub-discourses is trust often ad-
dressed? In addition, we are interested in the question of whether certain keywords such as black box reinforce
trust/mistrust in connection with AI. The lexeme blackbox has negative connotations in public discourse, while
the term responsible AI in turn acquires positive connotations through the positive-deontic adjective. In our
contribution to the panel, we thus aim to map the discourse on AI regarding its thematization of trust/mistrust
and at the same time pursue the question of which key words are involved in the linguistic constitution of
trust/mistrust.

1218
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Do we really perceive and react differently to Embodied


Artificial Intelligence than to “any other” technology?

Panel contribution

Dr. Astrid Weiss 1


1. TU Wien

Kiesler and Hinds (2004) noted in their Introduction to the Special Issue of Human-Robot Interaction in the
Journal of Human-Computer Interaction that people seem to perceive autonomous robots differently than most
other computer technologies. Similarly, Dautenhahn (2018) argued that human-robot interaction is very differ-
ent from human-human interaction, human-computer interaction, and human-animal interaction. What was
then primarily an assumption has since been substantiated with empirical evidence. Much research also tried
to figure out what exactly makes the difference: is it the autonomy, the expectations, and narrations about
robots, the “lifelikeness“? Especially in social robotics, the embodiment has received much attention. Deng and
colleagues (2019) identified different notions of embodiment, with physical and social embodiment being the
most relevant for socially interactive robots. In their review of 57 experiments where different embodiment
aspects were investigated, they identified 43 that provide evidence to the assumption that “using a physically
embodied agent is superior in improving user perceptions of the agent.” One of my recent works (Weiss et al.,
2020) also points in this direction. We compared anthropomorphic language use in online forums about the
Amazon Echo Show, Q.bo One, and Anki Vector. We expected to find the highest amount of anthropomorphism
for Q.bo One due to its humanoid shape; however, findings suggested that the lifelikeness of the artifact was
not pre-dominantly linked to the appearance but to its interactivity and attributed agency and gender. There is
a high impact of perceived agency and voice design (instead of, what we expected, appearance). In this Panel,
I want to share my recent thoughts on “trust” as a quality criterion to assess human-agent interaction and our
lack of understanding of why people might react differently towards robots. As a physical object/ technological
artifact, embodied AI is often only characterized by its function. As a result, the relationships humans hold
with such artifacts are typically described in terms of usability and functionality. However, for human-robot
interactions, parasocial interaction can be defined as a tendency to behave as if participating in a two-way
conversation with a robot with cognitive and affective components present on the human side. The paraso-
cial dimension of the interaction is typically studied as the human response towards robots addressing quality
criteria, such as acceptance, affect, and trust. While these studies are relevant, they mainly reflect just one per-
spective on parasociality and fail to account for the inter-and intrasubjective variability in how people perceive
and relate to robots; Shifting emphasis from the design of things (i.e. a robot with a specific embodiment, with a
fixed set of design features and behaviors) to design of meaningful human-technology-world relations requires
that we also adopt appropriate concepts that aid in the investigation of the structure and dynamics of such re-
lations. Therefore, I suggest a more interactionist and process-oriented stance that focuses less on acceptance
and trustworthiness as characteristics, but instead adopts the concept of “authenticity” as co-construed and en-
acted in different configurations of human, technological, and other non-human factors (e.g., physical space of
participants’ home).

1219
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Does lexical coordination affect epistemic and interpersonal


trust? The role of conceptual pacts

Panel contribution

Ms. Mélinda Pozzi 1 , Prof. Adrian Bangerter 1 , Prof. Diana Mazzarella 1


1. University of Neuchâtel

The present study investigates whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them.
We examine a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment based on the elaboration of “con-
ceptual pacts”, or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we ma-
nipulate lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measure the effect of this manipulation
on epistemic trust (trusting agents as sources of information) and interpersonal trust (trusting agents as in-
teraction partners). Our results show that participants are more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an
uncoordinated one, but only when the latter breaks previously established conceptual pacts.
We designed a computer-mediated referential communication task in which participants thought they were
playing with two “partners” (in fact played by a computer), a coordinated partner and an uncoordinated one,
and were then confronted with epistemic or interpersonal trust choices/judgements. In Experiment 1, we com-
pared a lexically coordinated partner, programmed to establish 12/12 conceptual pacts with the participant,
with a lexically uncoordinated partner, whose referential expressions differed at times from those of the par-
ticipant (thus failing to establish 3/12 conceptual pacts). In Experiment 2, we created an iterative version of the
same referential communication task (participants played two rounds with each partner) where we manipu-
lated the breaking of conceptual pacts: both partners were coordinated in the first round (establishing 10/10
conceptual pacts), but one of them was uncoordinated in the second round. This allowed us to compare a lex-
ically coordinated partner keeping all previously established conceptual pacts with an uncoordinated partner
breaking 3/10 of them.
In Experiment 1, where the uncoordinated partner failed to establish some conceptual pacts, we did not find any
effect of lexical coordination on binary measures of epistemic trust (51% coordinated partner, 26/51, binomial
p = 1.00, Cohen’s g = .01) and interpersonal trust (53% coordinated partner, 27/51, binomial p = .78, Cohen’s g
= .03). However, in Experiment 2, where the uncoordinated partner broke some of the previously established
conceptual pacts, we found a positive effect of lexical coordination on the binary measure of interpersonal trust
(69% coordinated partner, 34/49, binomial p = .009, Cohen’s g = .19), and on the continuous measures of both
epistemic (M = 3.90, Md = 4, SD = 0.96 for the coordinated partner, M = 3.37, Md = 4, SD = 1.03 for the uncoordinated
partner, Z = 512.5, p = .013, r = .48) and interpersonal trust (M = 4.22, Md = 5, SD = 1.14 for the coordinated partner,
M = 3.33, Md = 4, SD = 1.36 for the uncoordinated partner, Z = 461, p = .005, r = .55). Although not significant,
the results of the binary measure of epistemic trust also go in the expected direction (55% coordinated partner,
27/49, binomial p = .57, Cohen’s g = .05).
This study sheds light on the role of verbal coordination in trust and on how trust is shaped through verbal
interactions with other (artificial) agents.

1220
18th International Pragmatics Conference

In disinformation we trust. Why we trust strangers online

Panel contribution

Dr. Lorella Viola 1


1. University of Luxembourg

Social media have democratised information but in their war for attention, they have confused news with enter-
tainment. Spreading virally, ever more shocking content produces enormous amounts of disinformation which
challenge our relationships of trust and represent a profound disruption of the information space, including
institutional. Despite a rapidly growing body of scholarship in both areas, however, very little research has
examined the link between online disinformation and trust, and to date, it is precisely the connection between
the two phenomena that remains unclear. In this presentation, I introduce “networks of trust”, a notion that
challenges the predominant view that disinformation is primarily believed by unwell or paranoid individuals
within self-contained processes exasperated by mechanisms of echo chambers and filter bubbles (Alava et al.
2017; Johnson 2018; Reicher and Haslam 2016; Conway 2017; Mølmen and Ravndal 2021). Whereas filter bub-
bles and echo chambers are believed to leverage on a self-reinforcing, confirmation bias mechanisms which
dislocate the agency from users to algorithms, I theorise Networks of trust as processes involving shared identi-
ties and social relations, humans, algorithms, compelling disinformation narratives, and networking processes
that enhance a sense of community, normalise paranoia and even legitimise violence as necessary. Combining
methods of data mining, network analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative network analysis, I first
map the mechanisms of interaction between social media disinformation (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Reddit) and trust. I then unpack the micro-mechanisms of the online disinformation-trust process by zooming
in on both the hyper-connecting nature of the Internet and the cognitive dimension of disinformation. Specif-
ically, using CDA I analyse the narratives of disinformation in the accounts of the actors themselves helping
unveil the assumptions and ideologies embedded in and circulated through these stories and the role of lan-
guage, rhetoric, communicative strategies, psychological dynamics, and technology in establishing trust. The
results will show that disinformation is a powerful cognitive force which first disrupts established relationships
of trust; it then leverages on group dynamics to create new networks of trust. Across networks of trust, disin-
formation exploits the hyper-connecting nature of the Internet, and it uses compelling narratives to normalise
paranoia.
This triple focus on trust, algorithms, and language adds a more nuanced and novel perspective to the range
of representational strategies used to understand the endorsing of disinformation, for example as a response
to a crisis of identity that reflect genuine concerns rather than isolated, pathological acts.

1221
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Prosodic cornerstones for building trust: Phrase-final pitch


and tempo dynamics

Panel contribution

Prof. Oliver Niebuhr 1 , Mrs. Hilla Goren-Barnea 2 , Dr. Vered Silber-Varod 3


1. Centre for Industrial Electronics, University of Southern Denmark, 2. Computer Science Dept., Open University of Israel, 3.
TAD Center for AI and Data Science, Tel Aviv University

The relationship between prosody and trust is far from being straightforward. For one thing, this is because
the communicative functions conveyed by the voice are always encoded as bundles of prosodic features. For
another thing, this is because trust itself is not a monolithic concept. For example, trusting another person not
to harm us materially, emotionally or physically is a different kind of trust than trusting in another person’s
capability to push through specific activities or goals. The latter form of trust is one based on the attribution of
competence, self-confidence, and power.
It is this charisma-related type of trust that we address here. Our starting point was an analysis of Barack
Obama’s acoustic charisma. A particular prosodic pattern emerged in this analysis: the absence of phrase-final
lengthening before silent pauses in combination with a short but steep and extensive drop in voice pitch at the
end of the phrase. In our ears, these abrupt endings with their change to low pitch constituted a central trigger
of trust in Obama’s way of speaking.
Examining this assumption, we performed a perception experiment in which we manipulated three phrase-
final prosody features via PSOLA re-synthesis: (1) how low the pitch drop reached at the end of the phrase; (2)
how steep the fall was at the end of the phrase (convex vs. concave fall as well as early vs. late fall onset); (3) how
pronounced the final lengthening was, i.e. how much the speaking rate decreased over the last 3 syllables of the
phrase. Each manipulation included three steps, and all manipulation steps of (1)-(3) were cross-combined. The
base stimuli were simple one-sentence statements ending in the largely voiced target sequence “our country”,
extracted in the same setting from farewell speeches of US senators, one male, one female. A total of 108 stimuli
were rated along five 7-point scales that concerned trust as well as charisma and its building blocks competence,
self-confidence, and power. The experiment was carried out online with 50 participants. They formed two
roughly equal samples: native and non-native listeners.
Results show that all manipulated prosodic features significantly influence the listeners’ ratings. The degree
of final lengthening is negatively correlated with trust and has the strongest effect on that speaker attribute.
Among the pitch features, it is the steepness of the pitch drop that most strongly determined trust ratings, with
shallower falls meaning lower trust. However, pitch features generally seem to have greater effects on self-
confidence and power than on trust ratings. Trust ratings themselves correlated strongest with ratings of com-
petency and weakest with ratings of self-confidence. As regards the two covariates of speakers and listeners, it
seems that the effects of prosody on ratings were more pronounced for the female than for the male speaker,
and that non-native listeners’ rating levels were overall higher than those of native listeners.
We discuss our results in terms of their potential to resolve previous contradictions in prosody-trust relation-
ships and their implications for public-speaker training, machine-voice design, and the framework of prosodic
constructions.

1222
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Trusting robots throughout the technology acceptance process

Panel contribution

Dr. Maartje de Graaf 1


1. Utrecht University

A significant focus area in Human-robot interaction (HRI) examines the circumstances in which people do or
should (not) trust robots. The trust-relationship is based on how the trustor perceives the trustee’s competence,
dependability, and morality[13] . A similar trust dilemma has been used in HRI research discussions (e.g., func-
tional savvy versus social savvy[10] , capacity trust vs moral trust[21] ). This abstract highlights research on the
role of trust at different stages throughout the technology acceptance process.
Technology acceptance begins with users gaining initial knowledge of a technology, forming an attitude towards
that technology, and making the adoption-decision[4,6] . Trust had a significant role for initial acceptance (espe-
cially before exposure to the robot) in our 6-month’s study involving 70 households[4] . When people speculate
about robots, beliefs about the robot’s trustworthiness increases beliefs about its ability to interact socially[7] .
Robot use entails the implementation of the technology and adapting it to daily use routines[4,6] . HRI research
concentrates on first impressions during short interactions (e.g., lab experiments) or even hypothetical interac-
tions (e.g., online surveys). A video-based online study[unpublished] revealed that a virtual robot that uses affiliative
non-verbal behavior was regarded as being more courteous, dependable, and trustworthy.
First impressions are affected by physical cues, which triggers social categorization[1] and prompt stereotyp-
ing processes[14,20] . An online study[15] shows that trusting robots strongly correlates with its capacity (not its
morality) and with the task it performs (not its gender). Regardless of gender, people believe robots are more
capable of executing analytical (than social) tasks. Such predominant effects for task type, eliminating potential
effects of gender cues[2,9] , are not necessarily surprising given that people hold more utilitarian perceptions of
robots[5,8,11,23] indicating a preference for executing instrumental tasks.
[22]
A lab study surprisingly found that people have higher trust in and are more willing to collaborate with
a robot when it incorrectly blames itself for collaborative failures. This result contradicts previous HRI re-
search showing that erroneous robot behaviors negatively influence trust[12,16,17,19] which decreases willingness
to collaborate[24] . Our peculiar findings might be caused by a potential fun element when a robot blames the
wrong target for losing the game, similar to a study in which a robot cheated during a competitive game[18] .
Future research on robot blame attribution should further explore the effect of task-type on trust assessments.
Eventually, people continue the use of the robot and use routines have been created with a functional
dependency[4,6] . Our longitudinal home study[4] shows that trust was relatively unimportant for the functional
acceptance of that robot as most participant blindly trusted the information the robot provided. However, trust
was one of the most crucial factors for emotional attachment since it led to self-disclosing more personal events
to the robot.
Opposite findings were obtained in an exploratory study with older adults using a robot for three 10-day
periods[3] . Trust was a serious issue for them, especially when the robot raised privacy concerns or was be-
having erratically. Yet, even these older participants ha complete trust in the robot’s integrity as well as the
messages’ content.

1223
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Why Overtrust in Social Robots Is Inevitable

Panel contribution

Prof. Kerstin Fischer 1


1. University of Southern Denmark

Trust is the glue of social communities, which is reflected in many pragmatic principles and mechanisms, like
Grice’s (1975) quality maxim, Cialdini’s (2010) principle of reciprocity or Goffman’s (1978) predictability. That
is, for societies to work, people have to be able to rely on that what others tell them is probably true, that they
give something back when they have taken something, and that they attend to social norms of the community
in a predictable way.
When robots enter our social spaces, we may view them from three different perspectives (Clark & Fischer
2022): as machines, as artefacts with specific affordances (like ‘seeing’, ‘speaking’, ‘dancing’), or as nonstandard
characters, which people construct based on the features of the robot depicted, the way it is framed by others,
and based on people’s own needs and dispositions. People can switch seamlessly between the three perspec-
tives (Fischer 2021), for example, offering polite assistance in one minute and turning it off for cleaning in the
next. However, when they are construed as characters, robots become social actors, and with this sociality, also
expectations concerning trust apply.
Even though robots generally depict nonstandard characters (i.e. it is clear that they are not real dogs, seals or
people), there are just many aspects about social beings we take for granted, and hence we are very likely to
assume them of robot characters. For instance, Cialdini (2010) argues that the principles of influence rest on
subconscious shortcuts that are appropriate (from an evolutionary perspective) most of the time. For instance,
according to the principle of consistency, if someone does something at one point in time, they are likely to do it
at another point in time as well. This, unfortunately, does not apply to robots; they may not be able to recognize
your face the third time, even though they recognized you correctly twice before. This is hard to imagine from
a human perspective.
Similarly, all natural beings follow a developmental trajectory, which requires, for instance, the acquisition of
simple actions before the complex ones. For robots, their capabilities do not develop, but are rather imple-
mented by engineers; that a robot can exhibit complex capabilities while not being able to carry out simple
ones is inconceivable for humans. A third example is norm violation: In humans, one can be quite certain that
a person who recognizes another will not run into this person; this is by no means guaranteed in the case of
robots. Lastly, while humans can switch roles easily – they can be a shop assistant in one moment and a mother
in the next – this does not apply to robots, which are specialists for the role they are deployed.
All of these assumptions are likely to lead to overtrust in robots, simply because it is inconceivable to people
that those mechanisms are not in place in the nonstandard characters that robots represent, and it will be very
difficult to develop strategies to avoid overtrust in social robots.

1224
The roles of new speakers
in the revitalization of
endangered languages
(organized by Yumiko
Ohara)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

From Collective to Individual Memories: Linguistic


implications for Preserving and Revitalising Runyankore

Panel contribution

Dr. Levis Mugumya 1


1. Makerere University

Folklore has since time immemorial formed part of the oral tradition and a means of learning and transmitting
language. The community collective memory has been the core repository and natural safeguard of culture and
tradition. Among the Banyankore of South-western Uganda, legends, folktales, fairy tales, oral poetry (proverbs
and recitations), folksongs, riddles, and tongue-twisters were recreated and transmitted from one generation
to another via the oral tradition by community elders, parents, relatives, siblings or griots at the fire place or at
marriage ceremonies. However, such narratives have been eroded by intercultural contact, modern religious
practices, fast-sweeping wave of ‘modernisation’ information and communication highways. The new ways of
living and practices have eroded the collective memory spaces, thus endangering the language, Runyankore
[1] through which folklore was preserved and transmitted. Nonetheless, the demand for ‘usage’ of folklore at
social functions and celebrations and the need for traditional performances as part of extra curricula activities
in schools nowadays have prompted an enterprising re-imagination of collective memories by individuals of
groups of individuals. Driven by a commercial sense, these individuals re-imagine and re-compose folklore and
perform at social, religious, or political functions for a fee. Others are often hired to impart the intangible knowl-
edge and skills to learners in different schools. Thus, the preservation and transmission of folklore has changed
from being of a collective nature to an undertaking by individuals or ‘cultural groups’. Because these individ-
uals aim to entertain their audiences, their compositions often entail a mixture of Western and other Ugandan
cultures. Therefore, arguments that the individual performances are conducted in a perfunctory manner and
removed from the cultural context prevail. Thus, there is an impression that the folklore has been invaded by
neighbouring languages endangering further Runyankore. This paper, which is drawn from a research project,
From Collective and Individual Memories: An exploration of Methods of Preserving and Transmitting Banyankore
folklore, examines a corpus of archival material on Runyankore folklore focusing on folksongs and recitations
to explicate the nature of linguistic trends in the collective and individual memories. It also explores the linguis-
tic value entailed in the current folklore and what it implies for preserving Runyankore. It argues that despite
the threat to the Runyankore folklore, the young and future generations can learn from the individual memo-
ries, which reflect the current themes and topics that normally impact the linguistic trends. The current forms
of folklore equally provide a window into other cultures that allow young speakers/learners of Runyankore to
reflect more clearly on aspects of their own culture and language. The paper demonstrate how the new genres
of folksongs and recitations entailed in the individual memories exhibit the dynamism that is associated with
culture, which ultimately impact language use.
[1] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/nyn

1226
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Learning an Indigenous language as a political statement in


Canada: new speakers of Inuktitut

Panel contribution

Dr. Jennifer Hartog 1


1. Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact, York University, Toronto, Canada

Particularly since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report was published in 2015, decendants of
settlers have asked what they could do “to help”. Murray Sinclair, the former chairman of the TRC, always an-
swers “educate yourself”. This education ought not only to include history but also the acquisition of Indigenous
languages.
In Hartog (2021) I suggested that settlers learn an Indigenous language, preferably the one of the Indigenous
community closest to them, as a matter of “education” and as a political statement.
As the aim of the Indian Act (1876) was “to kill the Indian in the child” particularly by preventing children from
speaking their language, many Indigenous people are now making the effort to reclaim their language.
This means that we have two kinds of new speakers, Indigenous ones and non-Indigenous ones.
I am interested in the situation of the Inuit in Canada and am a non-Indigenous new learner of Inuktitut. In
my presentation I shall argue that new speakers have a role to play in strengthening the language although the
situation is highly complex which I shall talk about.
At the moment, Inuktitut is not an endangered language and it is taught in school.
However, forced sedentarisation and increased contact with English due to media and fly-in services of various
institutions are leaving their mark on Inuktitut.
Elders often find that the changes in Inuktitut sound unnatural and are not keen on non-Indigenous people
trying to learn their language. They argue that language is more than a code and is a whole way of living. This
is precisely what a theory of language as action takes into account as it reconstructs culture, not added on but
inscribed in the very language. However, Inuktitut is very difficult to learn for a non-Inuit.
Young Inuit may also find it trendy to sprinkle in some English while being proud of their language.
All in all, I shall argue that trying to keep language in a purist cage, ends up stifling it.
In the efforts to strengthen Inuktitut and increase its prestige, there is an interesting tension between upholding
a “pure” minority language and embracing language contact, inventing new words for new things or concepts
and encouraging multilingualism between unequally powerful languages. Yet, this is the tension that will keep
the language alive and furthermore open up space for creative uses of language such as literature.
Hartog, J (2021) Analysing practices of communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in
Canada: the key role of language in creating change. Lecture, IPrA conference Winterthur

1227
18th International Pragmatics Conference

New Speakers of Hawaiian in an English Dominant Society

Panel contribution

Mr. Sebastian Ohara-Saft 1 , Dr. Scott Saft 2


1. University of Hawaii at Mānoa, 2. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

The movement in Hawaiʻi to revitalize the indigenous Hawaiian language has been praised as one of the most
successful cases of language revitalization throughout the world. Despite an estimate of no more than 30 speak-
ers of Hawaiian below the age of eighteen in the early 1980s (Kimura, Kamanā, and Wilson 2003), the subsequent
establishment of a network of Hawaiian medium schools has led to a rise in overall number of speakers that
has reached and possibly surpassed 15,000 in number (McCarty 2008, based on personal communication with
William Wilson). Employing categories such as “young fluent speakers,” “new speakers,” “neo-speakers,” and
“new native speakers,” researchers attribute this growth to the use of schooling, from pre-school through the
university level, to focus specifically on children and younger speakers of Hawaiian (Brenzinger and Heinreich
2013; NeSmith 2005, 2019).
However, while this increase in speakers suggests optimism for the future, the language of newer speakers of
Hawaiian has been scrutinized for being different from “traditional Hawaiian.” Making the observation that
children in Hawaiian medium schools are influenced not only by the dominant societal language of English,but
also by the speech of teachers who learned Hawaiian as a second language, some have suggested that the emerg-
ing Hawaiian language is closer to a “hybrid” (with English) than it is to the “traditional” language spoken by
the Hawaiian ancestors of the children (NeSmith 2005, 2019). In particular, “neo-Hawaiian” is supposed to con-
sist of differences in phonology, vocabulary (particularly neologisms), and grammar that set it apart from the
language as it was traditionally used.
In light of these claims about new Hawaiian speakers, this presentation examines the participation of young
Hawaiian speakers in a public theatrical performance of a play entitled Hoʻoulu (“Growing Up”). These young
speakers were all students at a Hawaiian medium high school at the time of the performance, and the play
was written and performed by the students themselves. The play focuses on how students navigate various
social issues, including bullying, lying, and stealing, that are faced as part of growing up in a complex, modern
society. The analysis first notes the students’ code-switching between Hawaiian and English within the play,
particularly when the dialogue mentions modern American events such as the “Super Bowl” and when the stu-
dents employ English emotive expressions like “aw brah” and “yessah.” At the same time, though, the analysis
also emphasizes the depth and complexity of the students’ Hawaiian grammar and vocabulary and describes
how the students demonstrate and display their command of the Hawaiian language in the public context of
the play. In concluding the presentation, the point is made that the students, by combining a strong Hawaiian
competence with instances of English code-switching, are able to express their identities as fluent new speakers
of Hawaiian living in a modern society dominated by English.

1228
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The roles of new speakers in the revitalization of”


Uchinaaguchi”

Panel contribution

Ms. Seira Machida 1


1. University of Hawaii at Hilo

Uchinaaguchi has long been recognized as an endangered language, but efforts to revive the language in Oki-
nawa have yet to succeed. Most of the native speakers of Uchinaaguchi are elderly people who were born before
WW�, and the domain of usage has become extremely limited. Uchinaaguchi was prohibited in pre and post-
war education, and its psychological impact extends not only to native speakers but also to their children who
are semi-speakers. There seems to be two major factors contributing to the reluctance to speak Uchinaaguchi
in public for both types of speakers; one is that the language was previously “forbidden” to be used and another
is that there is a great societal pressure for “using correct Japanese”.
Under these circumstances, the emergence of “new speakers” is extremely important not only because it in-
creases the number of speakers of endangered languages, but also because it serves as an opportunity to recon-
sider the social recognition of Uchinaaguchi. The existence of “new speakers” who want to learn a language that
is no longer functional in society leads to the question “Why do we need to learn the endangered language?”
in a way that is easily understood by the general public. This presentation will focus on the recent efforts of
the “Umui�Project”, a language revitalization activity by “new speakers”, to which the presenter belongs. This
project has just started activities with the aim of “passing on to the next generation the ‘umui’ (feelings or
thoughts) that our ancestors have cherished in their language.” It began with project members sharing their
feelings and thoughts and has expanded in recent years to assist in language transmission activities in the vil-
lages where the members are from. Then, after sorting out the achievements and issues so far, we consider the
role of new speakers in the future of Uchinaaguchi and Okinawa.

1229
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The roles played by new speakers of the Ainu language: the


case of Urespa Project

Panel contribution

Dr. Yumiko Ohara 1


1. University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

Ainu people are indigenous to areas from Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Honshu, and Hokkaido crossing the cur-
rent national boundary of Japan and Russia. The contact with wajin ʻJapanese’ began around the 13th century
(Weiner 1997) and the oppression by the Japanese rule can be said to continue to this day. The most recent
large-scale survey on life conditions of Ainu people (Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2017) indicates that dis-
parities still exist in various areas between Ainu and non-Ainu residents. For example, despite reaching com-
parable achievement in secondary education, there is still a 12.5% gap concerning college enrollment rate even
though a large percent of the parents, 63.5%, want their children to continue on to tertiary education. Likewise,
discrimination has not seen much improvement since the survey conducted in 2006. 23.2% of the respondants
indicated that they “have been discriminated against” and 13.1% answered “not against me, but I know oth-
ers who have such experiences.” The most frequent place of discrimination is school, with most believing that
education is the key to eliminating discrimination.
This presentation focuses on the Urespa Project which aims to counter discrimination and assist Ainu in achiev-
ing higher levels of education. It is housed at Sapporo University which is located in Hokkaido and provides
scholarships for Ainu students to study the Ainu language and culture in order to foster new speakers of the
language and practitioners of their cultural tradition. Additionally, the project brings Urespa students together
with other students and community members for activities focusing on Ainu traditional knowledge. It is sup-
ported by various enterprises that donate money and time to interact with the students and also possibly to
hire them after graduation. Utilizing data obtained by the semi-structured interviews with the Urespa pro-
gram participants concerning their experience, the presentation focuses on two of the observations made by
the participants, namely that the Urespa Project provides 1) a safe place to be Ainu and 2) experience to explore
and cultivate Ainu identity. After analysis of the interview data, the presentation concludes with the summary
of what is working and what might be lacking in the project and at the same time, the need to rethink about
revitalization from a local political and social perspective.
References
Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2006, 2013, 2017.
https://www.pref.hokkaido.lg.jp/ks/ass/new_jittai.html
Weiner, Michael. ed. 1997. Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London: Routledge.

1230
The shapes of the
interaction between
social cognition and
language use:
Socio-cognitive processes
in different discourse
activities (organized by
Edwiges Morato, Rafahel
Lima, Erik Martins,
Vezali, Nathália Freitas)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Covid-19 in Brazil: how were war metaphors useful?

Panel contribution

Dr. Heronides Moura 1


1. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

In this presentation, I intend to show that war metaphors are not necessarily bad for health communication.
The meaning of this kind of metaphors depends on interactional and contextual factors. Metaphors of war may
be useful, if they emphasize social bonds within a community and if they are inclusive and not divisive.
My aim is to show that war metaphors were useful both for experts and non-experts as a response to Covid-
19 in Brazil. In a political context highly polarized, the war metaphors framed a united nation against the
virus. This conceptualization worked as an instigation to appropriate behaviours, such as social distance and
vaccination. Such Covid-19 metaphors can only be understood considering the larger social context in Brazil,
in which various political voices, including the President Bolsonaro, tried to minimize the pandemic, and acted
against the campaigns for vaccination and social distance.
My corpus is formed by metaphors about coronavirus from Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. Metaphoric
sentences were extracted and codified manually. The results presented are from May 10 to Jun 10, 2020. 527
metaphors were found and analyzed.
Sontag (1979) famously pointed out the dangers of treating illness as metaphors and war metaphors particularly
were regarded as pernicious. Hendriks et al. (2018) argued that framing a person’s cancer situation within the
war metaphor has the consequence of making the patient feel guilty. As an alternative to ‘dangerous’ war
metaphors, Semino (2021) proposed supposedly more ‘beneficial’ frames to represent the Covid-19 pandemic.
Studying a large corpus of tweets in English language about the Covid-19, Wicke and Bolognesi presented a more
nuanced view of war metaphors, showing that this kind of metaphors may co-occur with words such as ‘help’,
‘home’ and ‘people’.
In a similar vein, my conclusion is that words, emotions, and social values linked to war metaphors may atten-
uate the possible dangers of this kind of metaphors, making them a useful tool in health communication.
References
Hendricks R. K., Demjén Z., Semino E. and Boroditsky L. Emotional implications of metaphor: Consequences of
metaphor framing for mindset about cancer. Metaphor and Symbol. 33:4. 267–279, 2018.
Semino, E. “Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters – Metaphors and Covid-19”. Health Communication. 36 (1): 50-58, 2021.
Sontag, S. Illness as Metaphor. Allen Lane, London. 1979
Wicke, P. & Bolognesi, M. Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter. PLoS
ONE. 15(9), 2020.

1232
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Embedding the Covid-19 pandemic in the Universal Church of


the Kingdom of God’s rhetoric

Panel contribution

Dr. Erik Miletta Martins 1


1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

In this communication, our objective is to ascertain how the Covid-19 pandemic impacts the Universal Church
of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) rhetoric. In this atipical context, in which church members had restricted access
to its temples and, therefore, its presential cults and meetings, our hypothesis is that the social impacts of this
sanitary and economic crisis rescale the rhetorical projective pathos (Meyer, 2017), that is, the speaker’s reading
of this church target audience’s interests and values. Given Michel Meyer’s definition of rhetoric as the ”negoti-
ation of the distance between individuals, ethos and pathos, on a question (logos) which is more or less divisive,
or more or less reductive of the distance between them” (2017: 225), we seek how UCKG leader, Bishop Edir
Macedo, frames the questions surrounding the life risks of the Covid-19 with economic conspiracy theories as a
way to infringe the imposed social distancing among the churches devotees. Our theoretical framework settles
on the sociocognitive studies of the text, in which the reference, that is, the way we make the world known
through language, is the central notion and organizer of the epistemological field. Thus, considering metaphor
as an essential element of religious rhetoric, we pursue our objective by examining how this church’s found-
ing leader conceptualizes via metaphor references about the pandemic, embedding it to the rhetoric. In this
path, we selected three audiovisual records, spaced approximately thirty days since the declaration of Covid-19
pandemic by the WHO, and raised thematically relevant metaphorical referential processes. In our analysis
we have applied the dynamic notion of context brought to us by William Hanks (2006) to observe how relevant
social, cultural, and political events to the church’s life are embedded in the emerging referential processes. In
our conclusions, we point how the data confirms our hypothesis. We also exploit the meanings of the Universal
Church’s reaction to the pandemic inside the neoliberal rationality (Laval, Dardot, 2013) spectrum.
Dardot, P. Laval, C. The New Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society. Verso, 2013.
Hanks, W. Context. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second edition,
Elsevier. 2006.

Meyer, M. What Is Rhetoric? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

1233
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Fake News in the Brazilian context of Covid-19 pandemic:


textual construction of lethal knowledge

Panel contribution

Dr. Anna Bentes 1 , Mr. José Elderson de Souza Santos 1


1. University of Campinas

In Brazil, as in other countries, the political sphere has been strongly influenced by digital practices and actions
of different economic agents and stakeholders. Among such practices, fake news has gained prominence in
recent years. In our perspective, fake news are texts that are born and circulate in a context of dispute (BOUR-
DIEU, 1989) and negotiation (AZEVEDO, 2008) for the construction of an also disputed knowledge (ANTOS, 2005;
2015) about the social world. For political agents, fake news are important because regulating the knowledge
that people share is also regulating how they interpret the world and act on it. In this communication, we dis-
cuss fake news about Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, understanding that these texts contributed to the country’s
accumulating of more than 700.000 officially registered deaths by Covid-19. We analyze that even evaluated as
false, these texts try to embody socially valid knowledge and values (BOURDIEU, 1983; HANKS, 2008; BENTES,
2017). The set of these texts, together with other discursive actions, enabled “[…] the anchoring and emergence
of a common ground about the Covid-19 pandemic […] assimilated by a large part of the Brazilian population
[…]” (BENTES; MORATO, 2021: 24), which had the potential to support the formulation of context models (VAN
DIJK, 2020). Considering these modeling processes, the virus had low or no lethality, the measures to combat
the virus should not be followed and there were drugs capable of protecting people from SARS-Cov-2. In sum-
mary, these texts, when guiding agents’ interpretations and actions, increased their chances of death during the
pandemic. We will be presenting data collection and delimitation of our research about fake news produced
and disseminated in Brazil, from June to November 2020. We also analyze a set of textual procedures that help
to construct legitimate and valid knowledge about the pandemic and the social world in which it emerges.
References
ANTOS, Gerd. Os textos como formas constitutivas do saber. Sobre algumas hipóteses para uma fundamentação
da lingüística de texto à base de uma teoria evolucionária. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, v. 13, n. 1, p.
93-127, 2005.
ANTOS, Gerd. Textos: Modelos da Produção de conhecimento. Revista da ABRALIN, v. 14, n. 3, p. 25-51, 2015.
AZEVEDO, Karina Falcone de. (Des)legitimação: ações discursivo-cognitivas para o processo de categorização
social. 2008. Tese (Doutorado). Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco,
Recife, 2008.
BENTES, Anna Christina. Temáticas como estratégias discursivas de legitimação social em programas televisivos
brasileiros. Letras, v. 27, n. 54, p. 101-112, 2017.
BENTES, Anna Christina; MORATO, Edwiges Maria. Expressões de violência verbal e reflexividade face ao mod-
elamento sociocognitivo e discursivo da pandemia de Covid-19. Calidoscópio, v. 19, n. 1, p. 18-31, 2021.
BOURDIEU, Pierre. O poder simbólico. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil S.A. 1989.
BOURDIEU, Pierre. A economia das trocas simbólicas. São Paulo: perspectiva, 2007.
HANKS, William F. Língua como prática social: das relações entre língua, cultura e sociedade a partir de
Bourdieu e Bakhtin. São Paulo: Cortez, 2008.
VAN DIJK, Teun A. Discurso e contexto. 1. ed. São Paulo: Contexto, 2020.

1234
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Frames in political texts in favour of racial quotas at the


University of Campinas (Brazil) in 2016

Panel contribution

Dr. Rafahel Parintins 1


1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

The aim of this preliminary study is to analyse the mobilisation of frames in political, public, institutional, ar-
gumentative texts supporting racial quotas at the University of Campinas (Unicamp, Brazil) in 2016, collecting
initial cues about what is typical in terms of frames in those texts. In 2016, Black and anti-racist movements at
Unicamp fought for the implementation of racial quotas in the University’s selection process. The theoretical
perspective of the study is the dynamic and text/discursive approach of frames (Croft; Cruse, 2004; Miranda;
Bernardo, 2013; Morato et al., 2017; inter alia). This research comprises initial frame analyses of 4 (four) texts
(03 public statements and 01 speech) that appear in the debate over racial quotas for undergraduate degrees at
Unicamp. 03 (three) anti-racist and Black movements and 01 (one) Black politician produced the texts. The qual-
itative and quantitative analysis focuses on how referential expressions in the collected texts mobilise frames
in the defence of racial quotas in Unicamp. Preliminary findings suggest that the texts tend to argue for racial
quotas by mobilising frames associated with social equality meanings, such as Social Equality, Racial Categorisa-
tion, Social Inclusion, Diversity, and Racism frames. These findings lead to a better understanding of how social
actors/text producers frame the debate for racial quotas in Unicamp not only as a matter of racial hierarchy,
but also of the quantity and representativeness of Black people in legitimised social spaces.
References
Croft, W.; Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miranda, N. S.; Bernardo, F. (2013). Frames, discurso e valores. Caderno de Estudos Linguísticos, 59(1): 81-98.
Morato, E. M. et al (2017). O papel dos frames na organização do tópico discursivo e na coesividade comunica-
cional na interação entre afásicos e não afásicos. Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos, 59: 91-110.

1235
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interpersonal cognition in simultaneous interpreters’


discourse processing

Panel contribution

Prof. Hiroyuki Ishizuka 1


1. Hiroshima Shudo University

This study highlights the interpersonal cognition required by interpreters to establish communication in si-
multaneous interpreting from English into Japanese. Interpreting is bilingual communication between three
parties: speaker, interpreter, and audience. Interpreters participate in this communicative setting as both lis-
teners and speakers. Due to the nature of the task, their utterances in the target language are an instantaneous
response to their understanding of the source language, demonstrating what content they have in mind at what
juncture.
Since the onset of interpreting education at universities, interpreting trainers have emphasised the importance
of grasping the source speaker’s intentions. In her seminal study, Seleskovitch (1978/1998) maintains that dis-
sociating the speaker’s intentions from the corresponding verbal expressions is key to successful interpreting.
Researchers have tried to give a theorised or scientific cognitive model of interpreting based on cognitive psy-
chology (e.g. Kohn & Kalina, 1996) or cognitive pragmatics (e.g. Setton, 1999). Apart from few exceptions (e.g.
Funayama, 2020), however, most have focused on the process taking place in individual interpreters’ minds,
while neglecting the role of the other participants’ minds and the interactive nature of human communication.
Recorded simultaneous interpreting performances provide empirical data useful for exploring the cognitive
mechanisms at play during online discourse processing in actual settings. This study analyses authentic inter-
preting performances from the Japan National Press Club (JNPC) Corpus recorded at press conferences held at
the JNPC between 2010 and 2017 (Matsushita, Yamada & Ishizuka, 2020). As a compilation of recorded press
conference videos, the corpus includes multimodal data that can be analysed on ELAN, an annotation tool for
audio and video recordings. For this study, the annotation layers of source and target language have been
re-processed to visualise the temporal correspondence of delivery timing between source and target language.
Interpreting is not simply code-switching between two languages: interpreters’ utterances reflect their compre-
hension of the source language discourse. Superficial linguistic shifts between source and target language reveal
their grasp of information implicit in the source language speech. These shifts are clues to the way interpreters
apply interpersonal cognitive abilities when constructing the concepts needed to achieve successful communi-
cation in the given setting. Influenced by Grice’s Cooperative principles (1975), Relevance theory (Sperber &
Wilson, 1986/1995) has emphasised that comprehending a person’s utterances requires the cognitive ability to
infer what is going on in their mind. Tomasello’s Theory of mind (Tomasello, 1999) suggests that a vital pre-
requisite for social interaction is the ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and others. Joint attention is
one of the fundamental elements of social cognition required in an interpreting setting (Tomasello, 2019). This
study uses interpreting as an example to analyse the role of interpersonal cognition in communication, and
looks at linguistic shifts in referential expressions between source and target language: deictic expressions,
points of view, and benefactives. From this perspective, the study traces the cognitive operations taking place
in interpreters’ minds beneath the surface of their linguistic transfer, focusing on the interpersonal cognition
that enables them to communicate in their role as simultaneous interpreters.

1236
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metaphorical conceptualization of aphasia and Alzheimer’s


disease: trends observed in neurolinguistic studies

Panel contribution

Prof. Edwiges Morato 1 , Dr. Nathália Freitas 1


1. Universidade Estadual de Campinas

In this communication, we intend to discuss some aspects of social cognition from a neurolinguistic perspective,
focusing on discursive studies of metaphor, more specifically, the metaphorical conceptualization of aphasia
and Alzheimer’s Disease, clinical situations that affect language and cognition.
Our analysis will focus on some anchoring phenomena of metaphorical meanings considering different dis-
cursive practices, such as guided or semi-directed interviews, spontaneous conversation between aphasics and
non-aphasics, medical consultations, and support group meetings for family members of diagnosed individuals
with aphasia or Alzheimer’s Disease.
One of these anchoring phenomena is metaphorical categorization of aphasia as well as of individuals diagnosed
with aphasia. Studies about this topic have been previous developed by the COGITES (Cognition, Interaction and
Meaning) research group, at the University of Campinas, in Brazil.
Another anchoring phenomenon of metaphorical meanings are the consolidated, or emerging frames involved
in the definition of aphasia. A study in progress (Morato et al., 2020) highlights the sociocultural embodiment of
certain cognitive frameworks (such as biomedical, social, ecological), responsible for modeling the discursive
practices mentioned above.
An epistemic confrontation seems to take place not only when one thinks that metaphorical categorizations
related to pathologies itself and those related to diagnosed individual are conceptually distinct, as already ob-
served by several researchers, but also when social meanings associated with the semantic frames of care (ther-
apeutic monitoring, resilience, functional normality developed by the diagnosed individual, coping with social
exclusion through support networks, public health policies, etc.) and cure (conceived either as eradication of
the disease or restoration of health, or as a perception of welfare) emerge (CUIJPERS; van LENTE, 2015).
The categorizations produced in referential activities by expert and lay informants seem to indicate confronta-
tions between current epistemic models; moreover, they seem to indicate a referential adequacy to diseases
and diagnosed individuals; with an evaluative character, which may suffer more sociocultural restrictions than
metaphors, as already pointed out by Apothéloz and Béguelin (1995). We discuss, therefore, if metaphor would
imply different (socio)cognitive strategies for the designation of the referents in focus We also discuss how they
can gain a sense of epistemic change and even of social intervention (Kövecses, 2005; Semino et al., 2016; Steen,
2014, among others).
To give an example of the trends observed in our corpus, the use of metaphors of war (combat, fight, enemy, vic-
tim) and of weight are more recurrent in the conceptualization of Alzheimer’s Disease, and the use of metaphors
of consequence and alteration of bodily states is recurrent in relation to aphasia. In a somewhat different way
to what happens in relation to Alzheimer’s Disease, in which the disease is perceived as more fortuitous or with-
out a very clear causal nexus, in aphasia, the neurological sequel or the invasion of the body uncontaminated
by the brain lesion has its actions attributed not rarely to the aphasic person him/herself and his/her lifestyle.
This may imply, among other things, varying degrees of empathy towards people diagnosed with one or another
neurolinguistic condition.

1237
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Socio-cognitive processes in reading and writing academic


texts

Panel contribution

Dr. Kennedy Nobre 1 , Dr. Anna Bentes 2 , Mrs. Rafaely Carolina da Cruz 2
1. Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira, 2. University of Campinas

Letters Undergraduate Course of University of Campinas contemplates Laboratório de Produção Textual II, a
discipline which is offered every second semester of the year. The purpose of this discipline is to make students
work with academic and/or scientific genres, directing them to the most appropriate application of analytical
devices developed by text studies, so they can master not only social technologies oriented to Portuguese lan-
guage teaching, but also specialized languages, with special attention to the process of revision and rewriting
of texts. The comprehension of academic textual-discursive practices and effective participation of subjects in
a scientific community demand continuous reflexivity about discursive genres that circulate and characterize
academic spheres of knowledge production, and such reflection permeates the issue of scientific writing. The
social practices, the sociocognitive processes and the interactional activities of academic literacy are not con-
tinuous, and not reduced to the knowledge of textual superstructures. Considering a conception of language as
interaction, we understand texts and discursive practices as historically located instruments of social intercom-
munication, fulfilling effective purposes, and being directed to certain segments of society. Our research aims
more generally at focus on the main sociocognitive and discursive processes that enable the progressive auton-
omy of students in relation to academic literacy practices at university. The reflexive appropriation of sociocog-
nitive processes and textual-discursive strategies inherent of academic genres and of scientific dissemination
by first-year students of a language and literature undergraduate course results from the intense interaction
among the students themselves, and among supervising teachers and students, which leads to the continuous
incorporation of autonomous writing practices in academic-scientific and scientific-dissemination fields. The
corpus consists of a set of written answers produced by students to a form composed by questions about so-
ciocognitive processes associated to the various activities they were involved in, such as such as reviews, sum-
maries, interviews and audiovisual products for scientific dissemination (videos or podcasts). Results show the
fact that the main focus of students’ reflexivity lies on (i) the perception for necessary joint and continuous work
on their own written production and (ii) the self-perception of the limits and possibilities of academic language
practices inside other social spheres. The self-assessment process carried out through forms indicates, finally, a
close relationship between the main difficulties pointed out in the reading of the dissertation or thesis and the
main difficulties pointed out in the writing of the review and in the production of videos and/or podcasts.

1238
The speech action of
commenting across
discourse types
(organized by Robert
Külpmann, Rita
Finkbeiner)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“People incorrectly correcting other people”: (Re-)Correcting


comments as a means of stancetaking in digital
communication

Panel contribution

Dr. Karina Frick 1 , Dr. Dimitrios Meletis 2


1. Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2. Universität Zürich

Literate communities feel strongly about ‘their’ orthographies, claiming ownership of them and demanding the
right of co-determination. A context in which it becomes strikingly apparent that orthography is a form of social
action (cf. Jaffe et al. 2012) is social media. On the one hand, everyday digital communication is itself often at
the core of debates of linguistic criticism centering on, among other things, correctness and creativity, norms
and deviations from them, and writing competence(s) or the lack thereof. Linguistics has made contributions
through both the empirical study of linguistic phenomena (such as norm deviations) and the analysis of the
mentioned debates. On the other hand, adopting a user perspective shows that norms are habitually negotiated
within certain communities of practice: For example, comments on Facebook, etc. including deviances from
linguistic norms are frequently corrected (by people sometimes colloquially referred to as grammar or spelling
nazis) (cf. Hammel 2013; Albert/Hahn 2015; Bahlo/Becker/Steckbauer 2016). Interestingly, in such contexts, the
development of entire chains of corrections can sometimes be observed as (incorrect) corrections are iteratively
re-corrected or commented on. These chains reveal different speech acts or actions (including criticism or ap-
praisal) and pose challenges in distinguishing between them. They also demonstrate an awareness of linguistic
norms, which are made reconstructable through users’ implicit or explicit references to them. Pragmatically,
corrections are often not performed neutrally but in a manner that degrades and invalidates (the opinion of)
the person who made the mistake. We call this phenomenon orthographic shaming. At its center are people
interpreting linguistic knowledge (primarily of orthographic norms) as power: knowing something others do
not – and pointing it out publicly by displaying expertise – validates their superiority. Our talk focuses on the
sociopragmatic aspects of orthographic shaming and resulting (re-)correction chains as we analyze how refer-
encing linguistic norms can serve as a means of (often humorously framed) stancetaking (cf. Arendt/Kiesendahl
2014). In an exploratory approach, speech acts within orthographic shaming comments and reactions to them
are identified. Conclusions are drawn as to the pragmatic behavior surrounding orthographic shaming as well
as the stances towards this behavior, showing that orthographic shaming is a form of negotiating power through
commenting, which points to a gradual change of discussion culture.
Albert, Georg/Hahn, Nadine (2015): Erwartungen an die sprachliche Form. Was in einem Online-
Diskussionsforum als gute Ausdrucksweise „durchgeht“. In: Aptum. Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik und Sprachkul-
tur 11(2), 161–169.
Arendt, Birte/Kiesendahl, Jana (2014): Sprachkritische Äußerungen in Kommentarforen – Entwurf des
Forschungsfeldes „Kritiklinguistik“. In: Niehr, Thomas (Hg.): Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachkritik – Perspek-
tiven ihrer Vermittlung (= Greifswalder Beiträge zur Linguistik 8). Bremen: Hempen, 101–130.
Bahlo, Nils/Becker, Tabea/Steckbauer, Daniel (2016): Von „Klugscheißern“ und „Grammatik-Nazis“ – Gramma-
tische Normierung im Internet. In: Carmen Spiegel/Daniel Gysin (Hg.): Jugendsprache in Schule, Medien und
Alltag. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 275–286.
Hammel, Jennifer (2013): Schreiben im digitalen Alltag. Normabweichungen und metasprachliche Reflexionen
in Online-Foren. In: Aptum. Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur 9(2), 148–170.
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (et al.) (eds.) (2012): Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power.
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

1240
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Assertion, normativity, and commitment at the


minimalism/contextualism boundary: The case of
commenting

Panel contribution

Prof. Kasia Jaszczolt 1


1. University of Cambridge

Every speech act of assertion can perform a range of different functions in discourse, beginning with convey-
ing information, through revealing the perspectival stance of the speaker, their background assumptions and
beliefs, to establishing common ground through dynamic co-construction of meaning (for a recent model see El-
der and Haugh 2018). Assertion comes with different norms – among them are epistemic, linguistic, and ethical
(e.g. Goldberg 2011, 2012, 2020). In this talk, I address the question of the commitments the speaker makes in
performing an act of assertion with respect to these kinds of norms. The discussion is couched in the theoretical
framework of the minimalism/contextualism debates concerning speaker liability and commitment (e.g. Borg
& Connolly 2022; Elder 2021) where arguments are provided for and against distinguishing sentence-based, or
‘strict’ liability from overall conversational commitment. I demonstrate that when the above types of norms are
considered, the arguments for minimal liability are weak. Next, I move to the proposal of a unit of analysis that
captures the range of conveyed meanings to which the speaker – and, in the case of dynamically constructed
meaning, the interlocutors – are committed, called dynamic functional proposition (DFP, Jaszczolt 2021, 2023;
Jaszczolt & Berthon in press). For the purpose of this panel, DFP is put to use in the example of a ‘second-order’,
so to speak, use of assertion, namely in the case of a commenting in oratio obliqua (an ‘assertion about an as-
sertion’), in a context-shift scenario involving a shift in norms for assertion, where the importance of capturing
the varieties of commitments is particularly salient.
Select references
Borg, Emma and P. J. Connolly. 2022. ‘Exploring linguistic liability’. In: Ernie Lepore and David Sosa (eds).
Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language. Vol. 2. Oxford: OUP. 1-26.
DeRose, Keith 1992. ‘Contextualism and knowledge attributions’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
52: 913-929.
Elder, Chi-Hé. 2021. ‘Speaker meaning, commitment and accountability’. In: Michael Haugh, Dániel Z. Kádár
and Marina Terkourafi (eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 48-68.
Elder, Chi-Hé and Michael Haugh. 2018. ‘The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal
account of conversational inference’. Intercultural Pragmatics 15: 593-625.
Goldberg, Sanford C. 2011. ‘Putting the norm of assertion to work: The case of testimony’. In: Jessica Brown
and Herman Cappelen (eds). Assertion: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: OUP, pp. 175-195.
Goldberg, Sanford C. 2015. Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech. Oxford: OUP.
Goldberg, Sanford C. 2020. Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges. Oxford: OUP.
Haugh, Michael. 2013. ‘Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction’. Journal of Pragmatics 48: 41-56.
Jaszczolt, Kasia M. 2021. ‘Functional proposition: A new concept for representing discourse meaning?’. Journal
of Pragmatics 171: 200-214.
Jaszczolt, Kasia M. 2023. Semantics, Pragmatics, Philosophy: A Journey Through Meaning. Cambridge: CUP.
Jaszczolt, Kasia M. and Lidia Berthon. In press. ‘Negotiation and joint construction of meaning (or why health
providers need philosophy of communication)’. In: Sarah Bigi and Maria Grazia Rossi (eds). A Pragmatic Agenda
for Healthcare. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.

1241
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Commentative wenn-sentences in German

Panel contribution

Dr. Robert Külpmann 1


1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Posner (1972) defines comments as expressions that introduce new information into discourse about an
already known issue. From a pragmatic point of view, comments are illocutionary acts and, according to
Posner, belong to the category of assertions. The central property of comments is that they can be used to
make an assertion about discourse old information without the necessity to accept this information to be true.
While there are a number of syntactic phenomena in German that have been examined with respect to their
commenting function, such as parentheses or appositive relative clauses, very little is known about sentences
such as Wenn man seine Reifen bei Wish bestellt (‚When you order your tires from Wish’) or Wenn eine Folie zur
Waffe wird (’Whenn a foil becomes a weapon’) and their use as comments.

In my talk, I will pursue two goals. On the one hand, I will substantiate my claim that this type of wenn-sentence
(‘when-sentence’) can be used as a comment. According to Weuster (1983), commentative wenn-sentences are
characterized by three related properties. First, Weuster assumes an exclusive use of commentative wenn-
sentences in headlines. However, with the advent of social media memes and tweets have to be added. Second,
commentative wenn-sentences are usually used without an overtly realized matrix clause. This observation
and the fact that commentative wenn-sentences cannot be embedded under explicitly performative verbs give
Weuster reason to believe that this type of wenn-sentence is non-embedded, i.e. independent. However, exam-
ples with an overtly realized matrix clause as Das passiert, wenn (‘This happens when …’), which are subject
to the same discourse conditions as their matrixless counterparts, give reason to doubt and suggest that com-
mentative wenn-sentences are actually ellipses. Furthermore, commentative wenn-sentences fulfill a referential
function. Weuster assumes that the conditional subjunction wenn (‘when’) refers to an unrealized consequence.
I will argue that this consequence is grammatically realized by means of the elided matrix clause, semantically,
however, by another unit of information such as an image, a tweet, or a text. It is the task of the recipients to
establish a coherent link between them.
On the other hand, I will show that it is the properties mentioned above which make the commentative wenn-
sentence particularly well suited as a comment. The obligatory presence of a further informational unit always
makes it possible to trace the issue the commentative wenn-sentence refers to. This enables the broad use of
commentative wenn-sentences in intertextual contexts. Moreover, the vagueness of the utterance resulting from
the elliptical structure requires that recipients have to establish the link between comment and commented
information themselves. Unaware of what information recipients are relating the comment to, writers need
not commit to the truth of that information.
References
Posner, Roland. 1972. Theorie des Kommentierens: Eine Grundlagenstudie zur Semantik und Pragmatik. Frank-
furt M.: Athenäum.
Weuster, Edith. 1983. Nicht-eingebettete Nebensätze mit Verb-Endstellung. In Klaus Olszok & Edith Weuster
(eds.), Zur Wortstellungsproblematik im Deutschen, 7–87. Tübingen: Narr.

1242
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Commenting as an inherent function of because X


constructions

Panel contribution

Mr. Martin Konvička 1


1. Freie Universität Berlin

The English because X constructions (Bohmann 2016; Bergs 2018; Okada 2020; Konvička & Stöcker 2022) (1a),
unlike traditional because clauses (1b), as I argue in the present paper, have an inherent commenting function
besides their core causal meaning.
Because X constructions (1a) lack a finite verb and are therefore formally less complex than because clauses
(1b). The interpretation of because X constructions, however, is more complex than the interpretation of be-
cause clauses because they rely on the intersubjective knowledge shared by all interlocutors to a higher de-
gree (Konvička 2019).
(1a) I can’t come out tonight because Skyrim (Bailey 2012)
(1b) I can’t come out tonight because [I’ll be playing] Skyrim [the whole night]
The basic function of both because clauses and because X constructions consists of the expression of a causal
link between the elements preceding and following the connector because. This link is either factual, expressing
actual reasons, or epistemic, expressing the reasons for the utterance itself. In the case of because X, however,
an additional layer of meaning is inherently present – namely the commenting function.
Although always present, the commenting function is not always primary. In some cases, such as (1a), the
commenting function is only present in the implicit reference to the intersubjectively shared details of the causal
link. The author of (1a) does not (or does not have to) explain what Skyrim is and why it is a valid reason for
staying at home.
In cases such as (2), the commenting function can also be used for humorous effects (2).
(2) I can ignore your emotions and opinions because…patriarchy!
The commenting function in (3), unlike in (1) and (2), is dominant. The main function of because reasons, a
lexicalised form of because X, is to communicate the author’s comment about their inability or unwillingness to
explain the causal meaning or about its unimportance. Such instances have been called pseudo-causal (Konvička
2019: 173–175).
(3) I can’t come out because reasons.
In summary, while because X constructions share their core causal meaning with traditional because clauses, be-
cause X constructions differ in that they always also serve a commenting function. Which of the two functions
of because X is primary and which ancillary (and to what degree), however, is subject to individual variation.
List of References
Bergs, Alexander. 2018. Because science! Notes on a variable conjunction. In Elena Seoane, Carlos Acuña-Fariña
& Ignacio Palacios-Martínez (eds.), Subordination in English, 43–60. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bohmann, Axel. 2016. Language change because Twitter? Factors motivating innovative uses of because across
the English-speaking Twittersphere. In Lauren Squires (ed.), English in computer-mediated communication. Vari-
ation, representation, and change, 149–178. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Konvička, Martin. 2019. De verborgen complexiteit van want/omdat X [The hidden complexity
of want/omdat ‘because’ X]. Internationale Neerlandistiek 57 (2). 161–183.
Okada, Sadayuki. 2020. Category-free complement selection in causal adjunct phrases. English Language and
Linguistics, 1–23.
Konvička, Martin & Kristin Stöcker. 2022. (Non-)Ellipses in Dutch, English, and German: The case of because
X. Nederlandse Taalkunde 27 (3). 333-367.

1243
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Not Just a Laugh: Multi-Functions of Graphic Markers

Panel contribution

Dr. Pnina Shukrun-Nagar 1 , Dr. Galia Hirsch 2


1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2. Bar Ilan University

Our talk will discuss the pragmatic-rhetorical functions of the most common Hebrew graphic laughter marker
on Social Networks – “hhh”, composed of different repetitions of the letter Heth. The discussion will focus on
readers’ comments to Facebook posts uploaded by the two contenders for the post of Israeli prime minister
during the 2020 election campaign – Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Prime minister, and Benny Gantz, then the
head of the Opposition. The comments provide a particularly turbulent dialogic arena, on which commenters
from both political wings build solidarity and rapport inside their own group, while confronting the rival wing,
criticizing, and mocking it (Shukrun-Nagar, 2020).
Graphic laughter markers are frequent in many languages (see Ho, 2018), and were already shown to fulfil
diverse pragmatic-rhetorical functions, such as reflecting the joy of humor, showing empathy, softening threat-
ening speech acts, and more (e.g., McSweeney, 2016; Vandergriff, 2013). In Hebrew, it was shown that generally
laughter markers may be used in comments to politicians’ posts to convey both positive and negative stances,
towards either the politicians or other commenters (see Hirsch, 2020); but so far graphic laughter markers have
not been investigated systematically.
Based on an analysis of 100 occurrences of “hhh” in the corpus described above, we argue that in this discourse
type, “hhh” bears three main functions: (1) Contempt marker – conveying contempt, ridicule or disgust, towards
the post by the politician, or a previous comment by another commenter, including their authors and the entire
associated political wing; (2) Intention marker – signaling that the commenters employ pragmatic strategies
in their comment (e.g., irony, humor, softening strategies); (3) and Interpretation marker – indicating that the
commenters decipher pragmatic strategies (mostly indirect meanings) that were used by the politicians in their
posts, or by another commenter in a previous comment (Shukrun-Nagar & Hirsch, submitted).
Furthermore, it is suggested that while the function itself is affected by the markers’ co-text, and their textual
position in the comment, the intensity of the function is affected by the number of repetitions of the letter Heth
(ibid).
References
Hirsch, Galia (2020). “Humorous and Ironic readers’ comments to politician’s post on Facebook: The case of
Miri Regev.” Journal of Pragmatics 164: 40-53.
Ho, Pang-Chieh (2018). “No Laughing Matter: I Say LOL, Yous Say Ek1: How People Around The World Laugh
Online.” Digg.Com. Accessed February 12th 2021.
McSweeney, Michelle A. (2016). “Lol! I didn’t mean it: Lol as a marker of illocutionary force.” CIRCL Presenta-
tion,The Graduate Center at CUNY.
Shukrun-Nagar, Pnina. (2020). “ ‘Hero, genius, king, and Messiah’: Ironic echoing in pro-ethos and anti-ethos
readers’ comments on Facebook posts.” In The Discourse of Indirectness: Cues, Voices and Functions (Pragmat-
ics and Beyond New Series 316), ed. by Zohar Livnat, Pnina Shukrun-Nagar, and Galia Hirsch, 59-81. Amster-
dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Shukrun-Nagar, Pnina & Hirsch, Galia (submitted). “What Kind of Laughter? The Triple Function of “Hhh” as a
Contempt, Interpretation, and Intention Marker.”
Vandergriff, Ilona. (2013). “Emotive communication online: A contextual analysis of computer-mediated com-
munication (CMC) cues.” Journal of Pragmatics 51: 1-12.

1244
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The speech action of commenting: Approaches and challenges

Panel contribution

Prof. Rita Finkbeiner 1 , Dr. Robert Külpmann 1


1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Commenting is a kind of verbal behavior that is omnipresent in human communication. Comments can be made
by speakers using a broad variety of linguistic forms, ranging from graphematic means (e.g., round brackets)
to particular word classes (e.g., sentence adverbials) and sentence types (e.g., exclamative sentences), as well
as non-linguistic means such as emojis or gestures. Comments may also take the form of whole genres, e.g., in
legal, academic, or news discourse (Ehrhard-Macris & Magnus 2021).
Most scholars would agree that by commenting something, a speaker performs a kind of speech act (e.g., Posner
1972), or, more broadly speaking, speech action (Sbisà & Turner 2013: 1). Searle (1965: 221) mentions the verb
comment, alongside verbs such as assert, warn, order, and apologize, to illustrate basic types of illocutionary
acts. It is far from clear, though, how the presumed speech act(ion) of commenting is to be defined. While most
speakers will be able to apply an intuitive, everyday notion of commenting, a common linguistic definition
is lacking. On a Searlean account, comments in the form of declarative sentences share properties both with
assertions and expressives. Meta-discursive comments, on the other hand, come close to Austin’s (1962) class
of expositives. Other approaches take comments to be higher-order speech acts (Grice 1989: 362), might treat
them as one of multiple simultaneous functions of interactional turns (cf. Levinson 2017: 203), or as larger
(inter-)actional patterns or communicative practices (cf. Sbisà & Turner 2013: 5).
In this talk, we outline current pragmatic approaches to comments, commenting, and related phenomena, pur-
suing the question how the speech act(ion) of commenting can best be defined from the point of view of linguis-
tic pragmatics. Based on a sample of alleged comments from a variety of discourse types, we point to central
characteristics of this ubiquitous speech act(ion), reflect on convergencies and divergencies between different
types of comments and discuss controversial cases, in an attempt to sketch the main insights, but also the main
challenges the speech act(ion) of commenting poses to pragmatic analysis.
References
Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University
in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ehrhard-Macris, Anne-Francoise & Gilbert Magnus (eds.). 2021. Text und Kommentieren im Deutschen. Tübin-
gen: Stauffenburg.
Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2017. Speech acts. In Yan Huang (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, 199-216.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Posner, Roland. 1972. Theorie des Kommentierens: eine Grundlagenstudie zur Semantik und Pragmatik. Frank-
furt a. M.: Athenäum.
Sbisà, Marina & Ken Turner. 2013. Introduction. In Marina Sbisà & Ken Turner (eds.), Pragmatics of Speech
Actions, 1-21. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter (Handbooks of Pragmatics, 2).
Searle, John R. 1965. What is a Speech Act? In Maurice Black (ed.), Philosophy in America, 221-239. London:
Allen and Unwin.

1245
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The translation of I think as a speech act: A corpus based


study in English-Turkish translations of TED Talks

Panel contribution

Dr. Aytaç Çeltek 1


1. Kırıkkale University

The phenomenon investigated in this study is the translation process of the comment clause parenthetical I
think in relation to its pragmatic functions in English and Turkish. In English, I think (the most frequent I + verb
collocations in American and British corpus data according to Baumgarten & House, (2010)) is a complement
taking predicate and there are many studies indicating that this structure is no longer grammatical but lexical
and even pragmatic (Heine & Kaltenböck 2021). I think, a parenthetical comment clause (Heine & Kaltenböck
2021: 11), achieves the speech act(ion) of commenting by fulfilling attenuating and boosting functions in dis-
course. It achieves the attenuating function which expresses probability and possibility or the boosting function
which expresses certainty or necessity depending on linguistic context, i.e., co-occurring with various modality
markers (Fetzer 2011: 265). According to Fetzer (2011: 265), I think intensifies the degree of epistemic commit-
ment or non-commitment expressed through other epistemic devices. The grammatical equivalent of I think is
a predicate structure that takes an infinite noun clause complement in Turkish: -DIğInI düşünüyorum. In Çeltek
et al. (Under review), an initial study conducted by a group of researchers, it was observed that the occurrences
of I think are conveyed by other forms, as well, in the target language. It was revealed that lexical structures
such as bence (in my opinion), or bana göre (according to me), or verbs that take finite complements such as
sanıyorum (I am guessing) or sanırım/sanırsam (I guess) are used sentence-initially as an equivalence for I think.
Thus, the aim of this study is to determine whether these various structures used/preferred in Turkish transla-
tions of I think differ by considering the differences in how I think performs different speech acts. This study is
guided by the following questions:

1. What are the various realizations of speech acts that the I think comment clause fulfills in the source
texts?
2. How are these various realizations of speech acts conveyed in the target language?
3. Are the various forms used while conveying I think in the target language a reflection of the various
manifestations of I think as a speech act?

In order to examine this issue, we look at the use of I think in a corpus of TED talks in the original language,
English, and compare its use in Turkish translations.
References
Baumgarten, N., & House, J. (2010). I think and I don’t know in English as Lingua Franca and native English
discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1148–1200.
Çeltek, A., Zeyrek, D., Başer, Z. & Şen-Bartan, Ö. (under review). What happens to and in and-parentheticals in
Turkish translations? To appear in Turcologica: Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Turkish Linguis-
tics. Harrassowitz Verlag.
Fetzer, A. (2011). “I think this is I mean perhaps this is too erm too tough a view of the world but I often think
…”. Redundancy as a contextualization device. Language Sciences 33: 255-267.
Heine, Bernd & Kaltenböck, Gunther. (2021). From clause to discourse marker: on the development of comment
clauses. Language Sciences 87.

1246
18th International Pragmatics Conference

To whom does this message address? Sisterhood construction


through commenting by Chinese women

Panel contribution

Ms. Bin Wang 1


1. University of Porto

Based on daily observation, it has become a trend for Chinese women to complain about men’s conservative
behaviors via posting their chat history on a popular Chinese social media platform, Xiaohongshu (“Little Red
Book”). Posts with similar content usually attract a plethora of responses. The present study aims to explore
Chinese women’s attitudes toward conservative propositions about gender and their tactics of fashioning coun-
terarguments to dismiss such conventional value positions. This study has collected 511 comments (messages
published by viewers in response to the content of the post) to a post consisting screenshots of a conversation
where a woman (the post writer) and a man discussed about having children. The comments are analyzed using
Searle’s (1976) classification of speech acts. One comment is removed because it is merely a quote from the post,
which shows no personal attitude but only draws attention to that particular phrase. Three incomprehensible
comments are eliminated as well, which leaves 507 comments for examination in the end. The analysis shows
that directives have exceptional power in commenting. The audience can immediately shorten their distance
from the post writer through using imperatives, warnings, etc., and position themselves as close friends and sin-
cere advisors rather than the outsiders and strangers to the conversationalists. Moreover, through using a wide
range of speech acts, commenters unconsciously build a cooperative conversation space, where they take turns
to establish, piece by piece, a characterization of a conservative type of Chinese men. This collaboration indi-
cates that these comments are in fact directed to all women rather than the post writer alone, for the purpose of
offering help, displaying emotional alignment, and building solidarity. As a result, this teamwork upgrades this
disagreement between one woman and one man up to conflicts between two gender groups, where girls voice
objections to tentative manipulations strongly, unitedly, and creatively. The findings also suggest that with-
out gaze shift, touch, or other paralinguistic features, changes of footing (Goffman, 1981) can still be realized
effortlessly in commenting and such comments remain comprehensible by viewers. Finally, another intrigue
particularly concerning Chinese pragmatics has also emerged in the current study: due to (1) the null subject
feature of the Chinese language, and (2) the absence of verbal conjugation based on the person, the respective
speech acts can vary when the phrase alternates among different subject options.
Reference:
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. University Pennsylvania Press.
Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1-23.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500006837

1247
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Momentos desagradables” – Linguistic triggers for speech


action in social media

Panel contribution

Dr. Mailyn Lübke 1


1. Universität Osnabrück (Germany)

It is now typical of celebrities regularly to provide insights into their lives on social media. Failures, illnesses
or bereavements may also be shared, and in this type of transparent (explanatory) post, the comment section
is often not deactivated, thus allowing anyone to reveal their attitude towards such posts. This leads to an
ongoing series of comments and reactions of various kinds, with people able to continue adding their thoughts
on the posts, providing us with ever more data. As part of my research project on possible linguistic markers
for empathy, I have analyzed different posts of celebrities on social media in the context of COVID-19, in
conjunction with the comments their posts received. One is a statement of Rafael Nadal publicly announcing
his COVID infection and another is the announcement by the comedian Gad Elmaleh of the cancellation of
some of his performances due to health problems. Both posts were published on Facebook, Instagram, and
in text-only form on Twitter. Through the cross-platform posts, inferences can be drawn about the use of
different discourse types by commentators depending on the platform and even within the same platforms.
In the section “The speech action of commenting across discourse types”, selected comments on the two posts
will be examined to see whether differences between the languages (with particular emphasis on Spanish
and French commentaries) can be detected. We will give an overview of illocutionary speech acts found in
the comments and will present @replies and hashtags associated with certain speech acts. Moreover, we will
see what the “triggers” for the respective speech action are. For instance, the commentators do not always
provide empathetic responses (e.g. recovery wishes) to the celebrities’ health issues. On Twitter, for example,
Nadal is asked by several followers about the expression “momentos desagradables” (’unpleasant moments’)
he used in his post and that is why the expression is found in some comments. These and other examples will
be illustrated in the talk.

References (selected)

Sbisà, Marina / Turner, Ken (eds.) (2013): Pragmatics of Speech Actions, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik / Taddicken, Monika (eds.) (2017): Handbuch Soziale Medien, Wiesbaden: Springer.
Suler, John (2004): “The Online Disinhibition Effect”, in: Cyberpsychology & Behavior 7.3, pp. 321–326.

1248
Types of
conventionalization of
communicative
expressions and
processes of their
emergence and
disappearance
(organized by Masaki
Ono, Koichi Nishida)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Note on the Relation between Conversational Maxims and


the Emergence and Disappearance of Communication Styles

Panel contribution

Dr. Lina Ali 1 , Prof. Masaki Ono 2


1. Cairo University, 2. University of Tsukuba

1
A Note on the Relation between Conversational Maxims and the Emergence and Disappearance of Communi-
cation Styles:
A Case Study of Recent Changes in Egyptian Arabic Conversation

Conversation participants are supposed to speak with a purpose in mind, and in their speech they try to con-
vey as much information as possible that the hearer requires. However, the speaker tries to convey as much
information as possible that is required by the listener, but he/she does not know what kind of information
to convey or how to convey it. Grice (1975) proposed the Axiom of Conversational Coordination (CCC) to an-
swer such questions as what information should be conveyed, how information should be conveyed, and so on.
Grice (1975) proposed the Cooperative Principle of Conversation to answer such questions as what information
should be conveyed and how information should be conveyed. In this paper, I will discuss the direct rejection
of The paper examines the violation of the quantity axiom in the phenomenon of change from direct to indirect
rejection in communication in the Egyptian dialect Arabic. The author proposed that the Co-operative Princi-
ple of Conversation (CoP) should be The author collected and analyzed data on refusals by young Egyptians in
2015. The author collected and analyzed data on Egyptian youth refusals in 2015, and found that direct refusals
are frequently used, and that the author dares to use the quantity axiom in conversation for the purpose of
maintaining good relationships with others. The author collected and analyzed data on refusals from Egyptian
youth in 2015, and found that direct refusals were frequently used, and the axiom of quantity of conversation
was violated in order to maintain good relationships with others. In contrast, the recent refusal strategies of
young people have been used to avoid the “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” approach. On the other hand, the recent refusal
strategies of the young people also violate the quantity axiom, but they tend to give more reasons than neces-
sary. but often vague strategies are used without providing the necessary information. often without providing
the necessary information. For example, “hashuf we aollak” (I will respond to you when I see the situation),
“hashuf we aollak” (I will respond to you when I see the situation), and For example, “hashuf we aollak” (I will
respond to your situation), “hafakkar” (I will think about it), or “sarcasm” are used to deny the request. Thus,
in this study Therefore, the purpose of this study is to clarify how the phenomenon of a decrease in the amount
of information provided to the listener is related to the maintenance of human relationships. The purpose of
this study is to clarify how the phenomenon of a decrease in the amount of necessary information provided to
listeners relates to the maintenance of human relationships.

1250
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Considerations in the Transition of Address Terms

Panel contribution

Dr. Qinan Li 1
1. Peking University

From a diachronic point of view, it can be said that language has a life of its own, words changing and dis-
appearing over the long history of language use. This study explores the appearance or disappearance of the
considerate expressions in Chinese and the reasons for their current or disappeared usage. The study will
mainly focus on the usage of “Comrade”, “Miss”, “White Left”, and “Gong Zhi”.
In Chinese, the term “Comrade” is used as an address term in public occasions. In addition to referring to
people who share the same aspirations or interests, or who fight for the same ideals or projects, it was also used
as a mutual term of respect between adults, especially between adults who do not know each other. The term
was particularly popular in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, but seems to have fallen out of use in the 90s,
especially in the 21st century. One reason is considered that the term “comrade” has come to be used exclusively
in a narrower sense to refer to homosexuality.
The term “Miss” was once used to refer to women, especially young women, who shared the same fate as the
term “Comrades”, yet it has become exclusively used to refer to prostitutes and women who provide sexual
services in a narrower sense.
The above-mentioned causes have drastically changed the usage of the address terms from positive politeness,
and it has become abhorrent terms shared by many people. It has to be said that these address terms have
become a code in the past tense that has undergone a transition from politeness to impoliteness.
On the other hand, there has been a new usage of the term “White Left”, which began to be used in the mid-2010s.
This term was coined in China and has been included in the Urban Dictionary, an English online dictionary that
has been collecting online terms since 2017. “White Left” was originally used as an objective descriptive term,
literally referring to the white left, but later came to refer to people who only emphasize political correctness,
mainly to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority.
Another term “Gong Zhi” has been used as an abbreviation for “The Public Intellectual” on the Internet and
mass media since 2011. In recent years, it has been recognized as a satirical way to refer to those who are also
experts in their fields of expertise facing social issues with a sense of justice. Considering the speech function
of criticism, it can be seen as a negative politeness expression.
The evolution of address terms is a manifestation of such cognitive characteristics of human beings, especially
of things about human beings themselves, and it may also be a way of perceiving consideration.

1251
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Emergence and disappearance of Japanese Request


Expressions and Proposed Formulas for Calculating

Panel contribution

Prof. Masaki Ono 1 , Prof. Yukino Yamashita 2 , Dr. Hyunju Ju 3


1. University of Tsukuba, 2. Jumonji university, 3. Mejiro University

A new request expression can be found in Japanese e-mails, such as, “Haaku no hodo yoroshikuonegaishi-
masu”Eg.Please take care of this for me. is a new request expression in Japanese e-mail. Previously, it would
have been “Gohenshin onegaishimasu” Eg.Please reply to my inquiry. However, this expression seems to be a
strong request for the hearer to confirm or reply to the message. In the Japanese language, NP has traditionally
been considered to have developed mainly through face-to-face communication, but with the increase in online
communication, more proactive request expressions for the listener have appeared, explaining the emergence
and disappearance in linguistic communication. We propose a formula consisting of Japaneseness and under-
standability based on these changes. We will attempt to quantify the retention of the Japanese language in
society in terms of the degree of use, comprehension, and empathy.

1252
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Indirect self-expressions in English

Panel contribution

Dr. Koichi Nishida 1


1. Yamaguchi Prefectural University

In English, first-person pronouns like I and me are the speaker’s default way of calling himself/herself. However,
there are other cases where the speaker chooses indirect ways of self-expression, such as one in “One may
wonder why she had to resign suddenly.” As they are used in formal documents, but not in conversation, such
indirect self-expressions are contextually restricted and need to be supported by the addressee’s inference,
because he or she has to infer their referents by assuming them to be the same as the current floor holder.
This study aims to identify the contexts in which the speaker chooses self-expressions and clarify why they
are used in light of their group identity with normal people in public. It is argued that given indirect self-
expressions of this type belong to the formal register, they are used to show consideration to a group of normal
people to which the speaker considers himself/herself to belong, rather than to the actual addressee(s) with
whom he or she talks. Since this choice of expressions is not motivated by direct communication with the
addressee(s), the consideration involved is to be understood in terms of the contrast between formality and
casualness, rather than that between positive and negative politeness in the sense of Brown and Levinson’s 1987
Politeness Theory. While considerate expressions based on the latter serve to broaden the range of addressees
with whom the speaker can interact, those based on the former serve to limit the range of people with whom
he or she contacts, as they are also found in the deliberate choice (or avoidance) of jargon and technical terms.
These observations lead to a hypothesis that consideration of positive and negative politeness invites emergence
of new communicative expressions, but consideration of formality and casualness invites disappearance of once
common expressions, because the more limits on the range of the speaker’s contacts, the more likelihood of
disappearance of the expressions involved especially when their formality excludes people who prefer casual
communication.

1253
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mechanisms of diachronic change of Aizuchi in Japanese:


Aizuchi as a positive politeness

Panel contribution

Prof. Tsutomu Makihara 1 , Prof. Naomi Koda 2


1. GUNMA University, 2. Tohoku University

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mechanisms of diachronic change in aizuchi using politeness
theory. In this study, aizuchi is defined as a short verbal utterance which shows the listener’s responses to the
primary speaker’s speech.
Aizuchi functions in conversation as a marker of acceptance of information in the other person’s utterance. In
Japanese, “Un” and “Ee” are frequently used for this function. If these are positioned as unmarked forms in that
they have only their original function and are used as neutral expressions, there are also marked forms that
include PPS such as surprise and empathy. Maji ka�” is an example of such an expression commonly used by
today’s youth.
In the 1980s, when the presenters were university students, “Honto ka�” was often used among close young
people. It is now used in a different form, “Maji ka�”. At that time, too, this was sometimes extended to a wider
age group and the aizuchi “Hontou desu ka�” was also used, but it has not taken root, as older people often feel
uncomfortable, saying, ”Do you think what I say is a lie?
The purpose of this study is to examine why one expression declines and another becomes more common, by
exploring how and why “Honoto ka�,” which was commonly used about half a century ago, changed to ”Maji
ka�.
The change from “Honoto ka�” to “Maji ka�” can be roughly thought of as follows: “Honoto ka�” → “Maji ka�”.
“Honoto ka�” → “Honto�” → “Maji�” → “Majika�”
These changes can be thought of as occurring through the following process.
1) “Honto ka�” and “Maji ka�” function as PPSs to emphasize sympathy for the partner by expressing surprise.
2) “Honto ka�” is a form of questioning, which implies that the speaker doubts whether the other person’s story
is accurate, and thus violates the other person’s NP in this respect.
3) Within certain groups, the use of the slang term “Maji” to “use in-group identity markers” increases to
strengthen its function as a PPS.
4) The change to a non-questioning, descending intonation indicates that the listener has accepted and agreed
with the information presented by the speaker.
A quantitative analysis showed that men used the newer form “maji” more often and women used conservative
“honto” more often. Corresponding to the linguistic change in aizuchi, men showed innovation. These results
offer the key to finding the relationship between the use of language by different genders and their achieve-
ments in the development of language.
From these changes, the following two points can be considered as patterns of change in expressions that have
come to be accepted and customarily used in society to some extent.
(1) Within a unique group, the expression changes to a form more suitable for use within the group.
(2) Change to eliminate functions that conflict with the strategy of PPS.

1254
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Emergence and Disappearance of Japanese Condolence


Expression ‘Go-shusho-sama’

Panel contribution

Dr. Masaki Yamaoka 1


1. Soka University

In Japanese, when condolences to the family of a deceased person, the conventionalized condolence expression
‘’Go-shusho-sama-desu” is well known. However, it is said that it is not used so often nowadays. We found 45
cases in the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ). Among these cases, 16 cases were
actually used as condolence expressions. The other 29 cases were used in contexts completely unrelated to
condolences, such as metaphors for unfortunate situations or teasing.

• (actual condolence) 男性は��と�を�わせた��ミズ・ショーヴァン�このたびはご���です�Go-shusho-sama-


desu）�あなたのお�さんは��な�でした��ありがとうございます�（��）
• The man made eye contact with her. “Ms. Chauvin, I’m sorry to hear that. Your father was a fine man.”
“Thank you.” (Silence)

• (metaphor) 上場⽬指して����に�を��してたのかも�れず�結果はまぁご���（Go-shusho-
sama）ということに����Yahoo知恵袋）
• I don’t know if the stock was transferred to employees, etc. with the aim of listing. As a result, I am sorry
to hear that. (Yahoo Chiebukuro)

• (teasing)「・・・スーパーカマヤツ��い�して����めてんのに���あー�そりゃ�たんないよ�ご���（Go-
shusho-sama）�笑いながら��する���”…（�ブタ�プロデュース�
• “I’m shopping at Super Kamayatsu and saving up lottery tickets!”,”Ah, that won’t work. Sorry for the
inconvenience.” Morikawa laughed and put his hands together. (Produce wild pigs)

I think that the reason why its use in condolence scenes tends to decrease is that while condolence is unusual,
the use of metaphors and teasing has become more commonplace, so it is conceivable that the solemnity of the
expression of condolence is being lost.
Another reason is that in Japanese culture, it is preferred not to say things very clearly in the context of condo-
lence, so even if you say something, it is better to use individual and natural expressions related to the person
concerned rather than conventionalized phrases. It seems that there is an aspect that the feeling of condolence
can be conveyed.
I am also planning to conduct a follow-up survey.

1255
Who pays? Traditional
gender roles as
performances of
normality in mainstream
media (organized by
Maximiliane Frobenius,
Cornelia Gerhardt)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender and sexuality roles in Grace and Frankie: beyond sex


for seniors and women entrepreneurs

Panel contribution

Prof. Janet Fuller 1


1. University of Groningen

Cameron and Kulik (2006) note that heteronormativity does not only assume heterosexuality and frame non-
heterosexual relationships as deviant, but also includes a hierarchy of preferred types of heterosexual rela-
tionships. The most normative are monogamous relationships which are reproductive (implying that sexual
relationships are the for the young and fertile) and conventional in terms of gender roles. Based on the exam-
ple of the television series Grace and Frankie, we see that although while other normativities are challenged,
the normativity of long-term monogamy is reproduced.
Briefly, the plot of the 7 seasons of this series is that Grace and Frankie’s husbands, who were law partners,
reveal in the first episode that they had been lovers for some time, and want to leave their wives to set up a
household together. Although Grace and Frankie, age 70 at the beginning of the series, had never gotten along
well, they were left with no alternative but to move in together. Over time they become best friends.
How does the portrayal of these two characters challenge the ideal of normative heterosexuality? First, Grace
and Frankie portrays senior women who both openly discuss and enjoy sexual activity (Capelli 2019; Tortajada
et al. 2018). Second, these characters also diverge from traditional gender roles of women being passive or
dependent; they have had careers and pursue entrepreneurial enterprises (Guiterrez et al 2020; Periera and
Guiterrez San Miguel 2019).
Further, Grace and Frankie ultimately forgo heterosexual romantic relationships, the cornerstone of the het-
eronormative hierarchy, in favor of living together. Murphy (2020) describes this as a positive portrayal of a
couple which is not based on a romantic or sexual relationship, a narrative which goes counter to the trope
of romantic love being necessary for fulfillment. Michoud (2018) further argues that this constellation queers
the paradigm of compulsory heterosexuality and replaces heteronormative romance with a chosen family, in
particular, a close female friendship.
However, what has gone unsaid is that this scenario reproduces long term monogamy as normative, with the
only alternative a friendship which necessitates the same type of commitment. Grace and Frankie’s interactions
increasingly, throughout the seasons of the show, include verbal exchanges which construct their relationship
as exclusive and committed.
The opposition to alternatives to monogamy is most clearly interactionally produced in a scene in season 7
episode 2, when Grace attends an arraignment hearing for her husband Nick. When Nick, instead of pleading
‘not guilty’ as instructed, pleads with Grace not to leave him, a discussion of re-defining their relationship en-
sues. The interaction clearly shows how alternatives to traditional marriage are dismissed and mocked, and
the moment for challenging normativity is lost when Grace says she wants to give Nick another chance.
The focus on the normativity of traditional marriage opens the question for both theories about gender and
sexuality as well as reproduction of discourses in media. These data show how other aspects of the heteronor-
mative hierarchy are challenged, but options to monogamy are not valued.

1257
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of intimacy: A corpus perspective on First


Dates Ireland

Panel contribution

Dr. Brian Clancy 1 , Dr. Elaine Vaughan 2


1. Mary Immaculate College, 2. University of Limerick

First Dates is a reality TV show, which features people on blind dates set up by the show’s production team.
The viewer sees the date itself, the participants discussing their previous romantic encounters, and, finally, the
couples interviewed at the end of the date. A first date represents a high stakes initial encounter, and this is
amplified by the setting and the situation, making First Dates Ireland (FDIrE) a rich site for the analysis of how
participants negotiate the complexities of this encounter in their use of language. In contrast to the discourse of
established, long-term intimate relationships, such as those present in family discourse, the origins of intimacy
are often the stuff of anecdote. Reality TV shows, such as FDIrE, provide us with access to the beginnings of
intimacy. This paper uses a c.70k word corpus of interaction from FDIrE, and explores the pragmatic features
of nascent intimacy with a particular focus on the pragmatic markers that characterize this context. We bring
these markers into relief by comparing them to naturally occurring, established intimate discourse such as
that represented in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English. Findings show that the frequency of use of specific
pragmatic markers such as like are indicative of this context of emerging intimacy. In contrast, other pragmatic
markers that characterize intimate discourse in the family, for example, shur and now, are conspicuous by their
absence. The argument is put forward that markers such as like are those responsible for the establishment,
rather than the maintenance of intimacy. Questions of authenticity, the nature of performed intimacy and
the harnessing of unscripted TV dialogue as a vehicle for pragmatic analysis in an intimate context are also
addressed.

1258
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Who pays on the first date? Moral accountability in the


linguistic and embodied negotiation of gender roles during
blind dates on reality TV

Panel contribution

Dr. Maximiliane Frobenius 1 , Dr. Cornelia Gerhardt 2


1. WWU Münster, 2. saarland university

The international TV format First dates shows two people on a blind date at a restaurant. The negotiation of the
payment sequence, when the waiter brings the bill and the candidates discuss who pays, is in most cases shown
completely and often subsequently commented on by both date partners individually in interview sessions. In
the case of heterosexual matches, gender roles are usually cited as justification for the behavior on display:
the dating partners state for example “The man pays”, “That’s how my parents raised me”, and “That was very
kind, though of course I could have paid for this myself”. These comments perpetuate (or challenge) traditional
gender roles and are instrumental in the reflection of underlying norms and expectations. As such, they are
markers of moral accountability on display for a TV audience: the candidates both voice their expectations and
act accordingly.
This paper investigates the verbal and nonverbal means used to display the individuals’ understanding of their
roles and the resulting creation of accountable actions during these payment sequences. Besides verbal com-
ments in the individual interview and at the table, other modes are also relevant. Gaze shift and a hand motion
towards the purse, which is then halted when the date partner announces their intention to pay, for example,
represent complex elements in this negotiation. Likewise, one candidate’s reaching out for the bill, accompa-
nied by “you can give that to me”, is a multimodal instantiation of the understanding of gender roles.
Based on a corpus of about 500 minutes of the show First dates (Germany), this microanalytic investigation
discusses the linguistic and multimodal resources available to participants of this particular reality TV format,
and hence potentially in real life, to negotiate, act on, and explain their notions of chivalry and independence,
and thereby double down on or depart from more traditional roles. It employs EMCA based multimodal analysis
(Goodwin 1981, Mondada 2014) to explore the meaning making potential of the available semiotic resources in
these televised dating situations. The particular focus on the interactants’ understanding of and co-construction
of their roles as dating partners highlights how the multimodal behavior is used in the instantiation of gender
expectations and norms on TV.
Goodwin, Charles. (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York:
Academic.
Mondada, Lorenza. (2014). “The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction”. Journal of
Pragmatics 65: 137–156.

1259
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I feel so emasculated”: Gender construction, discursive


reproductions and payment negotiations in First Dates Ireland

Panel contribution

Prof. Anne Barron 1


1. Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

First dates represent critical turning points which may determine the further path of a relationship. Such inter-
actions, and particularly the payment negotiation within such interactions, also represent important contexts
for the interactional co-creation of gender roles. Psychological survey-based research on dating scripts in a het-
erosexual dating context suggests a high reproduction of traditional gender roles in payment negotiation (Eaton/
Rose 2012; Cameron/ Curry 2020; Lamont 2021). Pragmatic research on payment interactions, and in particu-
lar on the co-creation of gender roles in payment interactions in a first dates context, is limited (Barron 2022).
Likewise, research on the discursive reproduction of gender constructions in dating represents a research gap.
The present paper explores gender co-construction as portrayed in the first date reality television program, First
Dates Ireland. The data analysed includes the hetrosexual payment negotiation interactions and the metaprag-
matic interview snippets making up the program. The analysis, both quantitative and qualitative in nature,
focuses on the speech act sequences constituting the payment negotiation and on metapragmatic comments
pertaining to these speech acts. Quantitative speech act findings on the sociopragmatic level reveal a general
tendency towards traditional co-constructions of gender in First Dates Ireland, with offers to pay the complete
bill generally co-constructed as and discursively reproduced as representing the role of the man. Suggestions
to offer are rather the role of the woman. Triangulation with metapragmatic data supports this analysis. Chal-
lenges to these traditional gender constructions are analysed from a qualitative perspective, with particular
focus given to face-threat and its negotiation in such encounters. Methodological challenges of the television
data are also addressed.
References
Barron, A. (2022), “Don’t be daft, I’m paying”: First date payment negotiations across cultures and genders
Paper presented at the X International Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (EPICS X,
23th-25th May 2022)
Cameron J.J. & Curry E. (2020) Gender roles and date context in hypothetical scripts for a woman and a man on
a first date in the twenty-first century. Sex Roles 82(5): 345–362.
Eaton A.A. & Rose S.M. (2012) Scripts for actual first date and hanging-out encounters among young heterosexual
Hispanic adults. Sex Roles 67(5): 285–299.
Lamont E. (2021) The persistence of gendered dating. Sociology Compass 15(11): 1–15.

1260
“Keywords” in
sociopolitical debates:
Approaches to struggles
about meaning in
discourse (organized by
Philippe Hambye,
Barbara De Cock, Coline
Rondiat, Nadezda
Shchinova)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘Woke’: Corpus assisted discourse analysis of a stigmatising


keyword in polarised society.

Panel contribution

Dr. Melani Schroeter 1


1. University of Reading

Over at least the last three decades, processes of polarisation between conservative and right-wing as well as
liberal and left-wing political affiliations can be observed, and with it, the so-called ‘culture wars’ emerged in
most Western societies. Just like any other discourse, ‘culture war’ discourses produce discourse keywords
which can be understood as nodes in the lexical field of a thematic discourse. This contribution looks at woke as
the most recent keyword in this context, taking the example of the UK, although the word has been borrowed
by other languages as well, including French and German.
Following from the useful contextualisations of ‘woke’ as part of culture war discourse by Cammaerts (2022)
and Sobande/Kanai/Zeng (2022), this contribution provides a more detailed and more systematic, corpus-based
analysis of the emergence and current usage of the keyword ‘woke’ in UK newspaper discourse.
In a first step, the emergence of ‘woke’ as part of the culture war discourse will be traced in six UK national, daily
broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, demonstrating that from the start, it was used to stigmatise politically op-
posing views. In a second step, a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the keyword ‘woke’ will be undertaken.
The corpus collected for this purpose includes all articles over a one-year time span from November 2021 to
November 2022 containing ‘woke’ - excluding uses pertaining to waking up from sleep -, amounting to about
5,500 articles altogether. A detailed collocation analysis will be undertaken to show how ‘woke’ is used with
regard to issues of societal relevance (such as social justice), how it is tied to positioning and in particular neg-
ative othering of left-liberal political stances, as well as the extent to which there is a metadiscourse about the
word and its uses in public discourse.
References
Cammaerts, Bart (2022): The abnormalisation of social justice. The ‘anti-woke culture war’ discourse in the UK.
Discourse & Society 33 (6), 730-743.
Sobande, Francesca; Kanai, Akane; Zeng, Natasha (2022): The hupervisibility and discourses of ‘wokeness’ in
digital culture. Media, Culture & Society 44 (8), 1576-1587

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Re) contextualising the ‘anti-woke’ discourse: French and


English attitudes towards gender-inclusive language within
online discursive spaces

Panel contribution

Ms. Paige Johnson 1


1. University of Liverpool

This study examines the discursive negotiation of ‘woke’ as a prevalent keyword evoked by users discussing
gender-inclusive language reforms on Twitter in French and English. From a feminist linguistics perspective,
I compare how language reforms are politicized and problematised as a strategy that aims to raise awareness
of the socially embedded role played by language in gendering activities, people, and societies. Specifically, I
explore how ‘anti-woke’ discourse has been recontextualised and repurposed online by users to reject reforms
and, by extension, sustain wider gender inequality discourses. I do so by drawing upon tools from critical
discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995), as CDA allows for complex relations of discourses, and thus attitudes and
ideologies, to be more effectively explored cross-linguistically and cross-culturally.
I focus on a corpus of 13,000 French and English tweets collected using RTweet (Kearney, 2019). Tweets that
were retrieved respond to specific search items relating to gender-inclusive language reform, including ‘gender-
inclusive language’ and ‘écriture inclusive’ (en. ‘inclusive writing’). Responses were then imported into NVivo
12, a qualitative analysis software, where linguistic traces of discourses were manually identified, quantified,
and analysed following Wodak and Reisigl’s (2017) DHA framework.
While ‘woke’ (cf. ‘wokeism’, ‘wokeness’) has previously been associated with solidarity and courage among
individuals invested in challenging systemic racism, capitalism, and cultural oppression (Sobande, 2019), I ob-
serve that it is increasingly recontextualised by users to frame reform, as well as wider progressive attitudes,
as politically extreme (Cammaerts, 2022). My analysis thus focusses on how ‘anti-woke’ discourse linguistically
manifests and is diversely co-opted by users across both the French and English contexts to problematise reform,
particularly in relation to wider notions of security and identity. Amid the resurgence of populist discourses in
the European socio-political context, I also examine how ‘woke’ is recontextualised by users to symbolise politi-
cal correctness ‘gone mad’, cancel culture, among other ‘censorship’ and ‘policing’ practices that are ostensibly
mobilised by “social justice zealots” (Pilkington, 2022). I conclude by calling for attitudes towards reforms,
among other social issues, to be understood as discursive struggles over word-meaning, with these conflicts
underlined by discourses and ideological systems that contend, conflict, and co-construct each other. As such,
these conflicts must be discursively engaged with to navigate and challenge how, in this case, marginalised
genders are represented.
References
Cammaerts, B. (2022) ‘The abnormalisation of social justice: The ‘anti-woke culture war’ discourse in the UK’,
Discourse & Society, pp. 1-14.
Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman.
Kearney, M. W. (2019) ‘Rtweet: Collecting and analyzing Twitter data’, Journal of Open Source Software, 4(42).
Pilkington, A. (2022) ‘Perspective Chapter: Black Lives Matter and the Anti-Woke Campaign in the UK’, Effective
Elimination of Structural Racism, [s.l.]: IntechOpen.
Sobande, F. (2019) ‘Woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery’, European Jour-
nal of Marketing, 54(11), pp. 2723-2745.
Wodak, R. and Reisigl, M. (2017) ‘The Discourse-Historical Approach’, in Wodak, R. and Reisigl, M. (eds.) Methods
of Critical Discourse Studies. 3rd ed. London: Sage, pp. 23-61.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

An Anglicism on the Foreground of Francophone Press.


Combining Macro-diachronic and Enunciative Perspectives on
the Metadiscursive Keyword ‘Fake News’

Panel contribution

Mrs. Elise Schürgers 1


1. Université de Liège

The notion of ‘fake news’ has flooded the contemporary public sphere and has become a polemic topic laden
with social, political and epistemological issues. Questioning our relationship to information in democracies as
well as the legitimacy and the trust to attribute to media and political institutions, it condenses a series of val-
ues concerning the problematic boundaries between truth, opinion, representation and knowledge. This work
postulates that a critical comprehension of the problem also requires an analysis of those media productions
that, so to say, talk about fake news.
Bodin and Chambru stated that “the ensemble of structures composing the social world has been set in motion,
through discourse, via the formula ‘fake news’. Representation-based institutions (political, scientific, educa-
tional, security, media or cultural…) seem forced, in consideration to their symbolic needs, to position them-
selves through an order of ‘true’ discourse (Foucault, 1971).”[1]
To engage with this densely accurate and stimulating observation, I would like to study the word fake news as it
reaches the status of formula [2] in the francophone public sphere (limiting myself to France and Belgium) and
by following two complementary approaches.
As a first step, I wish to describe, on a diachronic and macro-discursive level, the possibility of establishing a
trajectory of that formula by focusing on a specific linguistic context: the moments of high mediatisation of the
locution ‘fake news’ in 6 major daily newspapers between 2016 and 2019[3]. This first part will determine a
few semantic, figurative, co-occurrence-wise, and argumentative landmarks on that trajectory to understand
the key socio-political and discursive features of the circulation of the locution.
Building on that, if one pays attention to the fact that the entity designated by ‘fake news’ does not directly refer
to economic or cultural realities (‘sustainable development’), a political event (‘Brexit’) or a group of people
(‘gilets jaunes’), but to a form of discourse ; if one admits that this discourse is always attributed to an Other,
can we make it a subtype of formula with specific pragma-enunciative features? Therefore, the analysis aims
to understand, from a socio-discursive perspective, the phenomenon of labelling the Other’s speech via a more
or less fixed signifier, to observe whether this identification of a heterogeneous discourse produces a knock-on
effect on the very discourse that enunciates it.
[1] Bodin, Cyrille, et Mikaël Chambru. 2019. « Introduction ». Études de communication. langages, information,
médiations, no 53: 9.

[2] Krieg-Planque, Alice. 2003. « Purification ethnique ». Une formule et son histoire. CNRS Communication.
Paris: CNRS éditions.
—. 2009. La notion de « formule » en analyse du discours. Cadre théorique et méthodologique. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Franche-Comté.

[3] The corpus has been built through the data base Europresse and a quantitative study, which has identified 3
stages in the chronology of the formula and a sample of representative months within those : it gathers a total
of 902 articles for 1490 occurrences of ‘fake news’ (newspapers selected: La Libre Belgique, Le Soir, La Dernière
Heure, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Libération).

1264
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constructing the meaning of sustainability through


argumentation: locus from definition in the public
controversy surrounding sustainable fashion

Panel contribution

Ms. Chiara Mercuri 1


1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI)

This paper adopts an argumentative perspective to examine how the meaning of sustainability is constructed
in the public controversy surrounding sustainable fashion.
In this lively public controversy, misalignments arise among the different players involved, especially when it
comes to defining sustainable fashion (Greco and De Cock, 2021): in fact, while all players claim to be advocates
for sustainability, it is not clear what “being sustainable” means in this context.
Drawing on conflict resolution studies (e.g. Shmueli, 2008), the different players appear to hold conflicting char-
acterization frames in respect to sustainability, i.e. conflicting ways in which they express their views about
their own behaviour and that of others in respect to sustainability.
While scholars (Shmueli, 2008) agree on the importance of reconstructing the different parties’ conflicting
frames in order to better understand the deep interests at issue within the controversy, these studies lack the
discursive-linguistic tools to justify how such frames can be reconstructed, starting from discourse.
In this respect, argumentation under the Pragma-dialectical approach (van Eemeren, 2010) in combination with
the Argumentative Model of Topics (Rigotti and Greco, 2019) appears a useful tool to investigate the implicit
premises underlying these conflicting characterization frames.
Thus, by adopting an argumentative perspective to the study of conflicting characterization frames, this paper
aims at explaining how conflicting parties in this controversy construct the meaning of sustainability through
arguments from definition containing characterization frames.
To this end, I empirically analyze a multi-genre corpus composed of texts issued by conflicting players in the
controversy, i.e. 400 social media posts published by activists, 10 sustainability reports and websites produced
by global fashion brands and 2 public documents released by public institutions between 2020 and 2021. In
the corpus, I first identify the conflicting characterization frames held by these conflicting players in respect to
sustainability. Then, I perform an argumentative analysis to determine how these players employ conflicting
characterization frames to justify their own claims of being sustainable by means of loci from definition. From
this, the different meanings of being sustainable according to the conflicting players will emerge.
Preliminary findings reveal that conflicting characterization frames contribute to constructing underlying ar-
gumentative premises; in other words, that they contribute to constructing the meaning of sustainability as
understood by conflicting groups of players.
Overall, this paper contributes to research about the specific mechanisms that construct the meaning of sustain-
ability in the public controversy surrounding sustainable fashion, as well as bringing forward the reflection on
the relationship between frames and implicit premises in argumentation.
Greco, S., & De Cock, B. (2021). Argumentative misalignments in the controversy surrounding fashion sustain-
ability. Journal of Pragmatics, 174, 55-67.
Rigotti, E. & Greco, (2019) Inference in argumentation: A topics-based approach to argument schemes. Cham:
Springer.
Shmueli, D. (2008). Framing in geographical analysis of environmental conflicts: Theory, methodology and three
case studies. Geoforum, 39(6), 2048-2061.
Van Eemeren, F.H. (2010). Strategic manoeuvring in argumentative discourse: Extending the pragma-dialectical
theory of argumentation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

1265
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discussing the Boundaries of Science. “Scientific” as a


Keyword in Politicians’ and Experts’ Discourses during the
Covid-19 Crisis in Belgium

Panel contribution

Ms. Coline Rondiat 1


1. UCLouvain

In contemporary democracies, where evidence-based policy prevails, science has the rhetorical capacity to es-
tablish uncontested truths insofar as it allegedly “lets the facts speak” without being affected by external in-
fluences, such as political interests (Boswell 2008). Yet, what is acknowledged as “scientific” by the scientific
community is of political interest. It indeed articulates the political debate: firstly by constituting in part the
shared and undisputable truths upon which the discussion takes root, but also by occasionally being used to nat-
uralize policy proposals, based on the premise that science is invested with a normative force per se. The spread
of covid-19 greatly enhanced the appeal to science in political communication (Amossy 2022), and thereby its
lexical salience in public discourse, including the integration of “scientific” into several syntagmas (e.g. scientific
evidence, scientific fact, scientific truth, scientific proof). Without undermining the rhetorical strength of “sci-
entific”, the numerous epistemic dissensions that emerged in the wake of the pandemic have, however, given
rise to the problematization of its signified in the public sphere. The meaning of “scientific” has actually been
the site of a more or less explicit struggle in which experts, but also politicians, took part to define what can be
labelled “scientific” or not. By doing so, they (de)legitimized objects and hierarchized them as holding a greater
or lower political relevance for the decision-making process. In this respect, “scientific” may be considered to
have functioned as a political keyword (Schröter et al. 2019) during the pandemic.
Through a pragmatic lens, this presentation will tackle the use of “scientific” by Flemish and French-speaking
politicians and experts to answer the following questions: What do politicians and experts consider to be scientific
or not? On what basis, if any, do they make such judgments? How do they (de)construct the notion of “scientific”
in their discourses? In what context and for what argumentative purposes do they use this keyword? To do so, the
analysis will rely on several pragmatic tools (e.g. Verschueren 2012) applied to discourses produced during the
first two years of the pandemic (Jan. 2020 - Dec. 2021) in three distinct areas of communication: on the social
media Twitter, in 6 national newspapers (Le Soir, La Dernière Heure, De Standaard, Het Laatste Nieuws, Metro
Fr, Metro Nl), and within the federal and federated entities’ Parliaments.
Bibliography
Amossy, Ruth. 2022. Constructing Political Legitimacy and Authority in Discourse. Argumentation et Analyse
du Discours 28.49-66.
Boswell, Christina. 2008. The Political Functions of Expert Knowledge: Knowledge and Legitimation in Euro-
pean Union Immigration Policy. Journal of European Public Policy 15.471-88.
Schröter, Melani, Marie Veniard, Charlotte Taylor & Andreas Blätte. 2019. A Comparative Analysis of the Key-
word Multicultural(ism) in French, British, German and Italian Migration Discourse. Migration and Media:
Discourses about Identities In Crisis, ed. by A. Musolff & L. Viola, 13-44. London/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Verschueren, Jef. 2012. Ideology in Language Use. Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research Cambridge:
CUP.

1266
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Empty or overloaded? A comparative analysis of the


keywords populism(s) and populist(s) in Belgian, French, and
Spanish media discourses

Panel contribution

Ms. Nadezda Shchinova 1


1. UC Louvain

Populism is a highly contested concept in academic and public debate, which has been discussed within various
fields as being “exceptionally vague” and used “in different contexts to a bewildering variety of phenomena”
(Canovan, 1999: 3). Recent studies that analyse the uses of the term in discourse from the perspective of lin-
guistics (Kranert, 2020; Thornborrow et al., 2021) have provided empirical results that present a challenge to a
common view on populism as “empty” or “floating signifier” (Laclau, 2005). These studies suggest that populism
is not used randomly, neither can it be perceived as empty of meaning. More research on the pragmatic func-
tion of the term in discourse is needed to understand the plasticity of the term that can occur in both positive
and negative contexts.
This paper presents some of the findings from the cross-linguistic analysis of the terms populism(s) and
populist(s) in Belgian, French, and Spanish media discourses. Specifically, through the lens of sociopolitical
keywords (Jeffries and Walker, 2017) and discourse keywords (Schröter et al., 2019), it compares the occur-
rences of the token populis*—that is, populism(s), populist(s)—in media outlets of French-speaking Belgium,
Dutch-speaking Belgium, France, and Spain published in 2019. Using a corpus-assisted discourse studies
approach, this paper analyses quantitatively and qualitatively articles containing at least one token of populis*,
collected from digital media sources including public-owned media, established media, serious-popular
media, and free daily media in each country. By analysing different types of media discourse in the studied
socio-political contexts, this paper aims to determine the features of discourse that allow to understand the
pragmatic meanings and functions of the keywords populism(s) and populist(s) and hence to understand why
people do use them the way they do.

References
Canovan, M., 1999. Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies 47, 2–16.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00184
Jeffries, L., Walker, B., 2017. Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Kranert, M., 2020. When Populists Call Populists Populists: ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ as Political Keywords in
German and British Political Discourse, in: Kranert, M. (Ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disci-
plines: The Return of Populists and the People. Springer, pp. 31–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_2
Laclau, E., 2005. Populism: What’s in a Name?, in: Panizza, F. (Ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy.
Verso, pp. 32–50.
Schröter, M., Veniard, M., Taylor, C., Blätte, A., 2019. A comparative analysis of the keyword multicultural(ism)
in French, British, German and Italian migration discourse, in: Lorella, V., Musolff, A. (Eds.), Migration and
Media: Discourses about Identities in Crisis. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Thornborrow, J., Ekstrom, M., Patrona, M., 2021. Discursive constructions of populism in opinion-
based journalism: A comparative European study. Discourse, Context & Media 44, 100542.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100542

1267
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Patterns of transphobia in English and German

Panel contribution

Dr. Berit Johannsen 1


1. University of Greifswald

The rights of trans people play a central role in current public discourse and sociopolitical debate in Germany,
the USA and the UK. Among other terms, transphobia and transphobic can be considered keywords in such de-
bates. While (queer)feminist theoretical writings provide clear definitions of transphobia (e.g. Serano 2016;
Ewert 2021), its meaning is constantly negotiated in social media discourse in processes of political positioning.
In the present study, which is inspired by methods from corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (compare e.g.
Partington, Duguid & Taylor’s (2013: 194) analysis of racism and xenophobia), I seek to identify patterns in which
the keywords transphobic and transfeindlich are used in English- and German-speaking discourse on Twitter.
Using the Python tool Twint, I scraped all tweets containing transfeindlich and a structured subset of tweets
containing transphobic (March and September of the past ten years). In my quantitative analysis, I analyse fre-
quency of usage over time, collocates and n-grams, and conduct collostructional analyses for identified patterns.
For example, the most frequent trigram in German Twitter data is ist nicht transfeindlich ‘is not transphobic’,
which is part of a pattern (X ist nicht transfeindlich), whose interaction with lexemes occuring in its slots (collex-
emes) can be analyzed. The quantitative analysis is complemented by qualitative analysis of the contexts in
which the patterns are used, including the social actors, time, location, and larger discourse context. In further
steps, I plan to take alternative terms and related concepts into account (transhostile in English, transphob in
German, cissexist(isch) and transmisogyn(istic)) and to study the keywords in newspaper discourse, comparing
it to social media discourse.
References:
Ewert, Felicia. 2021. Trans. Frau. Sein: Aspekte geschlechtlicher Marginalisierung. 3. überarbeitete Auflage.
Münster: edition assemblage.
Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid & Charlotte Taylor. 2013. Patterns and meanings in discourse: Theory and
practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.55.
Serano, Julia. 2016. Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Second
edition. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.

1268
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Revolution in Context: Vector Space Representations of


Keywords in 20th Century Latin American Insurgent Discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Isabelle Gribomont 1


1. KBR (Royal Library of Belgium)

The discourse of 20th century Latin American insurgent movements is traversed by a dense network of ge-
nealogical and intertextual relations. Many revolutionary actors of the twentieth century have identified ex-
plicitly with past and present activist groups. The Nicaraguan Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and the
Salvadoran Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional both adopted the names of earlier insurgent heroes.
Colombia’s best-known insurgent army of the 1970s and 1980s, M-19, established its identity in 1974 by seizing
the sword of Simón Bolivar. In the 1960s and 1970s, urban insurgents in Argentina chose the name Montoneros
to link themselves with insurgents of the independence period (Chasteen 1993, 84). The contemporary Mexican
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional takes its names from central American guerrillas from the 1980s as
well as Emiliano Zapata, a leader of the Mexican revolution of 1910. Such choices highlight the “continuity and
ubiquity of the discourse of insurgency in Latin America” but say little about the links and relations between the
movements (Chasteen 1993, 84). Scholars who studied such relations identify “a pattern of cross-fertilization”
which results in various “clusters” and insurgent trajectories throughout the continent (Wickham-Crowley 2014,
222–228).
This paper argues that these relationships can be identified and/or refined by modelling the semantic relations
between keywords and concepts in the discourse issued by these movements (available in the digital archive
of the Centro de Documentación de los Movimientos Armados (CeDeMA)). Using word embedding techniques
(Word2Vec and BERT), statistically significant keywords which take different meanings in discourses from dif-
ferent movements—or in texts from different eras of the same movement—are identified. This subset of key-
words are not only statistical keywords, but they are also semantic keywords. They contribute to highlight the
differences in meaning construction between sets of texts which belong to a relatively codified form. By observ-
ing which terms have differentiated meanings and functions in a specific discourse, and how this difference is
manifested in the texts, it is possible to analyse spaces of “semantic struggle” (Kranert, 2020) within the corpus,
as well as the locations of semantic change.
More broadly, by identifying and analysing lexical patterns surrounding keywords which undergo a re-
semanticisation process as they (re-)emerge in different contexts, this approach facilitates the study of narrative
continuities and ruptures as well as processes of filiation and legitimation in the discourse from 20th century
Latin American insurgencies.
References
Centro de Documentación de los Movimientos Armados (CeDeMa). http://www.cedema.org/.
J. Chasteen, Fighting Words: The Discourse of Insurgency in Latin American History. Latin American Research
Review, 28(3), 1993, pp. 83-111. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2503611
M. Kranert, When Populists Call Populists Populists: ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ as Political Keywords in German
and British Political Discourse. In M. Kranert (Ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines: The
Return of Populists and the People, 2020, pp. 31–60.
T. Wickham-Crowley, Two “Waves” of Guerrilla-Movement Organizing in Latin America, 1956–1990. Compara-
tive Studies in Society and History, 56(1), 2014, pp. 215-242.

1269
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What do they mean by polarisation? Usage and meaning in


Spanish and British press.

Panel contribution

Dr. M Dolores Porto 1 , Dr. Manuela Romano 2


1. Universidad de Alcalá, 2. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Polarisation is a buzzword in the media these days. As a metaphorical term, it describes strongly differing
attitudes in terms of spatial distance, moving discourse towards more and more distant ideological extremes.
The meanings of polarisation have spread far beyond its original use in the political arena and can now be
traced in public opinion discourses within a wide variety of social and cultural domains, from economics to
education, health, environment or even religion. Rather than an enriching plurality of views, polarisation is
mostly perceived as a negative trend that hinders consensus and favours conflict instead, threatening welfare,
peace and even democracy (Di Maggio et al. 1996, Iyengar et al. 2019, Fletcher & Jenkins 2019).

This paper examines the different uses of the word in English and Spanish broadsheet online press. To this aim,
a specific corpus of four hundred articles has been compiled including one hundred articles from four widely
read papers (El País and El Mundo in Spain and The Times and The Guardian in UK), all of them containing the
word polarisation/polarización and published in 2021. A combination of Corpus Linguistics methods and Criti-
cal Socio-Cognitive approaches to Discourse Analysis has been followed in order to analyse the most common
contexts and patterns of usage of the term in the press in these two countries. More specifically, we study its
negative semantic prosody and collocational behaviour, as well as the underlying schematic conceptualizations
created as the meaning evolves from one domain to another.
Preliminary results show that even though minor statistical differences have been identified, significant simi-
larities predominate in both datasets, such as the negative evaluation associated to the term, related to expres-
sions like risk, instability, damaging democracy, crispación (‘tension’) and confrontación (‘confrontation’), and
to its metaphorical use, projecting mappings onto target domains like VIRUS, WAR, or ROPE TENSIONING.
Conclusions suggest that polarisation has become a socio-political keyword (Jeffries & Walker 2012, 2017), that
is, a term that shows unusual statistical frequency and takes on political and social significance in a short period
of time in the media, acquiring an absolute value, negative in this case, which transforms the term into a distinct
marker of ideology.
DiMaggio, P., Evans, J., & Bryson, B. (1996). Have American’s Social Attitudes Become More Polarized? American
Journal of Sociology, 102(3): 690–755.
Fletcher, R., & Jenkins, J. (2019). Polarisation and the news media in Europe. European Parliamentary Research
Service. https://bit.ly/2ZKKpcQ
Iyengar, S, Lelkes, Y, Levendusky, M, Malhotra, N, Westwood, S J (2019). The Origins and Consequences of Af-
fective Polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 22(1): 129-146.
Jeffries, L., & Walker, B. (2012). Keywords in the press: A critical corpus-assisted analysis of ideology in the Blair
years (1998–2007). English Text Construction, 5(2), 208-229.
Jeffries, L., & Walker, B. (2017). Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years. London: Bloomsbury.

1270
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What is “sustainable development”? A contrastive keyword


analysis of tweets about climate change in Norway, France
and Belgium

Panel contribution

Dr. Andrea Pizarro Pedraza 1 , Dr. Louise-Amélie Cougnon 2 , Prof. Kjersti Fløttum 3 , Dr. Øyvind
Gjerstad 3
1. Université Saint Louis-Bruxelles, 2. UCLouvain, 3. University of Bergen

‘Sustainable development’ is a crucial concept related to Climate Change that permeates a variety of discourses
(Redclift 2006). Such a success has developed a vagueness in meaning that becomes evident when we observe
its semasiological variation. As Krieg-Planque (2010) studied, depending on the user’s ideology or intention, the
term can acquire different meanings. These meanings emerge in specific linguistic contexts, in the sense that
the presence of particular expressions such as proper names or topoï (idem) surrounding the term contributes
to varied meaning construals.
Our study is part of a bigger, interdisciplinary, European project that focuses on the scientific understanding of
obstacles and disincentives to climate change mitigation through social media discourse, among others. In this
occasion, we analyze the multiword expressions referring to the concept ‘sustainable development’ in French
(développement durable) and Norwegian (bærekraftig utvikling) in three self-collected corpora of tweets from
the participating countries (France, Belgium and Norway), dating from 2007 to 2021. The corpora are topically
related to climate change and are automatically annotated with metadata such as date of the tweet and social
segment of the Twitter account (population, media, politicians). The Belgian French corpus has 385 977 tweets,
the French corpus has 529 099 tweets and the Norwegian has 445 338 tweets.
For this paper, our goal is to analyze potential differences in the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ in the
three countries, as a way to unravel the values related to it (Wierzbicka 1997). For that purpose, we compare
the relevance of the term in each corpus (keyword analysis) and then we analyze the differences in meaning
within climate change discourse in Twitter, based on the linguistic context (collocation analysis).
When compared to general web corpora from SketchEngine, the terms reach different positions in their respec-
tive lists of multiword keywords: 25th for the Norwegian corpus, 41st for the French and 100th for the Belgian
French. The collocation analysis for the expression (in examples such as développement durable et environ-
nement ‘sustainable development and environment’) reveals the presence of a varied list of nouns referring to
economy in general (innovation, croissance ‘growth’) and a variety of sectors (énergie ‘energy’, sécurité ‘security),
together with abstract notions such as paix ‘peace’ or égalité ‘equality’, among others.
In the next steps, the list of collocates of the three corpora will be compared in detail (in terms of pres-
ence/absence of certain collocates, and their ranking). Then, assuming that frequency is a measure of salience,
the most relatively frequent collocates in each language will be manually analyzed in context to reach a better
understanding of the meanings of the term in each country.
References
Krieg-Planque, A. 2010. « La formule “développement durable” : un opérateur de neutralisation de la conflict-
ualité », Langage et société, vol. 134, no. 4, 2010, pp. 5-29.
Redclift, Michael R. 2006. « Sustainable development (1987-2005): an oxymoron comes of age », Horizontes
Antropológicos. vol. 12, no. 25, 65-84.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1997. Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and
Japanese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1271
“Only joking”:
Negotiating offensive
humour in interaction
(organized by Chi-He
Elder, Eleni Kapogianni,
Isabella Reichl)
18th International Pragmatics Conference

(Un)intended offence: intentionality and scales in the


negotiation of offensive humour

Panel contribution

Prof. Michael Haugh 1 , Prof. Rosina Marquez Reiter 2


1. The University of Queensland, 2. The Open University

A frequent response to someone taking offence, or to inoculate oneself against that possibility, when joking in
interaction is to construe that joking as ‘not serious’ (Skalicky, Berger and Bell 2015), and any offence arising
from it as ‘unintended’ (Culpeper 2011). Yet in some instances a claim to have not intended to cause offence is
construed as an inadequate or even irrelevant response to the offence that was (ostensibly) caused (Poggi and
D’Errico 2018; Sinkeviciute 2019). In this paper we consider why that is the case. Building on an interactional
pragmatics analysis of a dataset of 30 incidents in both private and public settings in which the ostensibly jocular
teases and other related phenomena are construed as offensive through explicit or implicit claims that offence
has been taken (or could have been taken), we propose that the offence is co-constituted within relationally- and
morally-imbued discourse fields. It follows that offence is a fundamentally scalar phenomenon (Blommaert
2007, 2015): not simply in the sense of particular talk or conduct being open to evaluation as more or less
offensive (Culpeper and Haugh 2021), but with respect to the morally ordered scope of that offence (Haugh
and Márquez Reiter forthcoming). On that view, the degree to which (perceived) offences become impervious
to claims that the joking was ‘not serious’ or that the offence was ‘unintended’ is a function of the scope of the
spatial and temporal scales invoked by users (or observers) of the event in question. We conclude by considering
the implications of this for the theorisation of the relationship between conversational humour and offence
more broadly.
References
Blommaert, Jan. 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(1):1-19.
Blommaert, Jan. 2015. Chronotypes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review
of Anthropology 44: 105-116.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness. Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Michael Haugh. 2021. The metalinguistics of offence in (British) English. A corpus-
based metapragmatic approach. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9(2): 185-214.

Haugh, Michael and Rosina Márquez Reiter. forthcoming. Offence, scales and morality.
Poggi, Isabella and Francesca D’Errico. 2018. Feeling offended: a blow to our image and our social relationships.
Frontiers in Psychology 8: Article 2221.
Skalicky, Stephen, Cynthia M. Berger and Nancy D. Bell. 2015. The functions of ‘just kidding’ in American English.
Journal of Pragmatics 85: 18-31.
Sinkeviciute, Valeria. 2019. Conversational humour and (im)politeness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

1273
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Accountability and its discontents

Panel contribution

Prof. Laurence Horn 1


1. Yale University

As is often observed (Carson 2010, Stokke 2018, Marsili 2021, among others), to lie one must assert (or promise),
and to assert one must warrant the truth of what one says. Speakers are normatively accountable for what they
are taken to have asserted, subject to modulation or negotiation (Haugh 2013). But if speaker S, knowing that p
is false, utters p in a non-truth- warranting context—if S is joking or being sarcastic, if S is rehearsing, arguably
if S is speaking under threat or duress—then (apparently) S makes no assertion, performs no insincerity, and
utters no lie. Advocates of a commitment-based theory of assertion (from Peirce 1932 to MacFarlane 2011 and
Geurts 2018) might take such a speaker to “uncommit” to the truth.
Speakers, including actors on the contemporary political stage facing pushback, regularly appeal to the sarcasm
defense as a post-hoc get-out-of-accountability-free card, in many cases supporting this escape hatch by citing a
purported insincerity marker accompanying the critical utterance. But proffered plausible deniability is often
in fact implausible, resulting in legal or public disputes. What criteria can be applied to evaluate the credibility
of the sarcasm or “only joking” defense, especially when made retroactively? In Grice’s terms, how do we dis-
tinguish what a speaker SAYS from what a speaker MAKES AS IF TO SAY? This presentation surveys, illustrates,
and evaluates an array of devices associated with signals of insincerity across different genres—casual conver-
sation, political speech, testimony under oath—employed from the 17th century (equivocation; the doctrine of
mental reservation; crossed fingers) to our own times (winks; “mere puffery”; utterance-final “NOT”; the use of
dedicated markers like <jk> and /s in social media posts). We will review a practice tacitly but crucially invoked
by those engaged in (alleged) sarcastic speech, the DOUBLE AUDIENCE, wherein speakers intend different sub-
sets of their addressees to interpret their message in different—indeed often opposite—ways (Clark & Gerrig
1984). We will also demonstrate that the explicit flagging of sarcastic intent when expressing a proposition has
both social and grammatical correlates.

1274
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Deniable offenses - different ways of communicating


controversial messages

Panel contribution

Dr. Ellen Breitholtz 1 , Dr. Vladislav Maraev 1 , Dr. Christine Howes 1


1. University of Gothenburg

In the televised coverage of the Swedish elections of 2022 many viewers were surprised - if not shocked - by
an utterance by Rebecka Fallenqvist, a representative of the right-wing Swedish Democrat party (SD). She cel-
ebrated their victory with the (non idiomatic) phrase “Helg Seger” (weekend victory), which sounds similar to
the Swedish version of the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil”, “Hell Seger”. When asked about her behavior she first an-
swered that she did it as a joke aimed at easily provoked leftist media. However, she later claimed that any
similarity with the Nazi salute was accidental and unintentional. This is a somewhat spectacular example of
how offensive thing can be hinted in a humorous (and a potentially deniable way) - just as a slip of the tongue.

In this work we contrast two ways of communicating offensive things: through hinting and through exaggera-
tion. The Fallenqvist episode is a case of the former. In the latter case, offensive actions are made less offen-
sive by making them harder to believe - for instance in the humorous episode where Sir David Attenborough
suggested shooting Donald Trump as a way of influencing American elections. Attenborough’s utterance is sup-
posed to be taken as a joke, while at the same time showing great displeasure with the situation at hand. Franzén
et el. (2021) discuss how exaggerated taboo-breaking can bring rage, fear and pleasure in a conversation.
We look at these two ways of communication following the theoretical dialogical account of Maraev et al. (2021)
who cast jokes in terms of topoi (as a granular resource to account for different ways of opposing joke scripts)
and enthymemes (as an argument occurring in a dialogue or text, and involving one or more topoi; Breitholtz,
2020) that arise from specific interactional experiences. Additionally we claim that hinting share the same
inference mechanism with dogwhistles (expressions that are used to communicate different messages to dif-
ferent groups), semantics and pragmatics of which were studied previously (Henderson and McCready, 2017;
Breitholtz and Cooper, 2021).
References:
Breitholtz, E. (2020). Enthymemes and topoi in dialogue: the use of common sense reasoning in conversation (p.
161). Brill.
Breitholtz, E., & Cooper, R. (2021, October). Dogwhistles as Inferences in Interaction. In Proceedings of the
Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021) (pp. 40-46).
And there is one more reference: Anna G. Franzén, Rickard Jonsson, Björn
Sjöblom (2021) Fear, anger, and desire: Affect and the interactional
intricacies of rape humor on a live podcast, Language in Society.
Henderson, R., & McCready, E. (2017, November). How dogwhistles work. In JSAI International Symposium on
Artificial Intelligence (pp. 231-240). Springer, Cham.
Maraev, V., Breitholtz, E., Howes, C., Larsson, S., & Cooper, R. (2021). Something Old, Something New, Something
Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 654615.

1275
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Egocentrism and salience in stand-up interaction

Panel contribution

Dr. Ibukun Filani 1


1. Augustine University Ilara-Epe

Language and interaction with the audience are central to the performance of humorous intention in comedy
venues. Within linguistics, scholars have approached stand-up comedy from three broad perspectives: conver-
sation analysis (e.g., Scarpetta & Spagnolli, 2009; Rutter 1997), pragmatics (e.g., Adetunji 2013; Yus 2016), and
discourse analysis (e.g., Ruiz-Gurillo & Linares-Bernabeu 2020). However, the central idea in these studies is
that instantiating humour is based on common ground assumptions between comedians and their audience. In
view of this, Adetunji (2013:2) notes that “the local linguistic and non-linguistic forms and background knowl-
edge” are oriented to by both comedians and the audience. Besides, these studies argue that humour in stand-up
comedy results from the joint act of performer-audience cooperation. Yet, recent occurrences where stand-up
comedians have to apologise for their jokes in a post-mortem review or within a show challenge the assump-
tion of common ground between the performer and audience. These occurrences also indicate that humour
is not necessarily an expression of mutual community membership or joint action between the participants in
comedy venues. My paper comes from a socio-cognitive pragmatics perspective, and it explores the place of
individual beliefs and egocentric tendencies in stand-up comedy interaction. I argue that although generating
humour in stand-up comedy requires cooperation, individuals in comedy venues could hold on to their private
assumptions. Therefore, if the humorous intention of the comedian is to be successful, audience members must
not reject the comedic representations of background assumptions. Similarly, the salient meanings in the co-
medians’ utterances should not be derived from the shared background knowledge of culture and language but
rather from how they use the foregrounded assumptions in the context of the routines.
References
Adetunji, A. (2013). The interactional context of humour in Nigerian stand-up comedy. Pragmatics 23(1), 1-22.
Rutter, J. (1997). Stand-up comedy as interaction: Performance and audience in comedy venues.[Doctoral dis-
sertation, University of Salford, UK].
Scarpetta, F. & Spagnolli, A. (2009). The interactional context of humour in stand-up comedy. Research on Lan-
guage and Social Interaction 42 (3), 1-22.
Yus, F. (2016). Humour and relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Ruiz-Gurillo, L. & Lineares-Bernabeu, E. (2020). Subversive humour in Spanish stand-up comedy. Humour:
International Journal of Humour Research, 33(1), 29-54

1276
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hateful illocutions and humour

Panel contribution

Dr. Vahid Parvaresh 1


1. Anglia Ruskin University

It goes without saying that, despite all the efforts made over the years to tackle hate speech, it is still a preva-
lent phenomenon, especially in the cyberspace. This lack of tremendous success could be attributed to the fact
that most of the approaches to description, analysis and prevention of hate speech are still “far from being
able to [fully] grasp context or to detect the intent or motivation of the speaker, failing to recognise specific
usages of certain words” (Dias Oliva et al. 2021: 702). Drawing on a corpus of Instagram comments directed
at Afghan people, who have undergone “the largest displacement and refugee movements in modern world
history” (Abbasi-Shavazi and Sadeghi 2015: 89), the present study investigates communication of hate through
seemingly humorous remarks. In doing so, the study distinguishes between illocution – “performance of an act
in saying something” – and locution – “an act of saying something” (Austin 1975: 91, original italics) – demon-
strating how the former could be conveyed covertly and under the guise of humorous remarks.
References
Abbasi-Shavazi, Mohammad Jalal, and Rasoul Sadeghi. 2015. Socio�cultural adaptation of second�generation
Afghans in Iran. International Migration 53(6), 89-110.
Austin, John Langshaw. 1975. How to do things with words. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Dias Oliva, Thiago, Dennys Marcelo Antonialli, and Alessandra Gomes. 2021. Fighting hate speech, silencing
drag queens? Artificial intelligence in content moderation and risks to LGBTQ voices online. Sexuality & Culture
25(2): 700-732.

1277
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Having a license for offensive humour. The case of emigrant


Romanian stand-up comedians’ discourse

Panel contribution

Dr. Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu 1


1. University of Bucharest

The anthropological view about comedians is that they have a “traditional license” for a verbal (and also non-
verbal and paraverbal) behaviour diverting from socially accepted behaviour, which is part of the public ritual
of the humorous performances, a public ritual iconoclasm (Mintz 1985). Offensive humour perfectly illustrates
this licence and hence could be exploited in various humorous public or private settings.
In a (mainly) sociopragmatic approach, this presentation focuses on the performances of two first-generation
emigrant stand-up comedians of Romanian origin (Radu Isac, Victor Pătrășcan), acting in the UK, but also tour-
ing throughout Europe. Emigrant comedians belong to what is considered the group of marginal performers,
who often resort to self- and other-deprecation in subversive acts (cf. Holmes and Marra 2002 subversive hu-
mour; Ruiz-Gurillo, Linares-Bernabéu 2020).
My claim is that deprecation is the main discursive strategy used by first-generation emigrant stand-up comedi-
ans of Romanian origin during their humorous performances; the analysis highlights the staging of the possible
offensive remarks, exploiting sensitive topics like racism, religion, gender imbalance, ethnic discrimination,
economic crisis, etc.; the way offensive remarks are inserted in the discourse is also illustrated in the analysis
(the metacommunicative devices used by comedians to deny offensive intent: it’s a joke, I know you guys are
sensitive, or for self-appraisal: that was disgusting). The reaction/lack of reaction from the public is taken into
account as a way to appraise the effects of derision.
Comedians create an onstage persona, a form of self-presentation which is highly important during the per-
formances (Sinkeviciute 2019; Evans Davies 2019). As first-generation emigrants, the comedians whose perfor-
mances are analysed present their personae as outsiders, with distinct marginality in the UK/Western Europe.
The analysis reveals that they construct the personae of offenders (negative comic personae). Their negative
comic personae (verbally aggressive, unsympathetic) are construed as simultaneously belonging to a stigma-
tised group (or assimilated to it), mainly challenging the dominant cultural representations in the UK, while
reinforcing the cultural representations of the British majority about (new) minority groups, like the Romani-
ans.
The offensive “episodes” offer the comedians the possibility to align or dis-align with/from other personae, from
the mainstream or the marginal community. Thus, the audience is allowed to identify or des-identify with/from
the comic personae according to the effect of the humorous discourse on their cultural representations (self- and
other-deprecations represent a way to evaluate the audience’s cultural representations, Yus 2004). Nevertheless,
I consider that deprecation does not always manifest as “safe entertainment” and a “critique with impunity”
(Gilbert 1997; cf. Mintz 1985). Regardless of the way this discursive strategy is perceived theoretically – as a
form of entertaining impoliteness (Culpeper 2011), jocular mockery (Haugh 2010), or mock aggression (Dynel
2021) – its emic interpretation is instrumental for the humorous performances’ success.

1278
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Implied offensive language on social media

Panel contribution

Dr. Tahmineh Tayebi 1


1. Aston University

One of the biggest challenges facing research on ‘taking offence’, particularly in online contexts, is that there are
occasions in which there is a lack of explicitly offensive words. Drawing on a corpus of online hate comments
flagged so by the targets, I will discuss examples of offensive language disguised by humour. In doing so I will
focus on issues such as their complex pragmatic structure and whether and how the speaker could be held
accountable for implying such offensive meaning. I will also focus on how in some examples the speaker’s
accountability and intention tend to dissolve and it is the hearer who pursues further assumptions in search
of an offensive meaning. I will argue why such examples of offensive language are difficult to report and why
they are often ignored when tackling online hate.

1279
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Offensive humour and ‘only joking’ claims on Reddit

Panel contribution

Prof. Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen 1 , Ms. Ylva Biri 1


1. University of Helsinki

This paper contributes to the study of offensive humour and its negotiation by investigating ‘only joking’ claims
made by participants in discussions on the social news and discussion website Reddit. A claim of jocular intent
can be added to a Reddit post containing offensive or problematic humour pre-emptively or it can be offered
later after a reaction by another participant (cf. Haugh 2016). In both cases, the participant making the claim
tries to show that potential or perceived denigrating humour in their post is not meant to give offence, and that
they should not be held accountable for such an intention. However, as Dynel (2021) notes, participants are
accountable also for interpersonal pragmatic effects, such as amusing or offending. The interpretation of the
post by other participants may differ from the initial intention (Elder 2021), which makes studying the reactions
by other participants and the potential ensuing negotiation interesting.
We analyse ‘only joking’ claims on Reddit with a combination of corpus methods and close analysis drawing
from approaches to digital interaction. Our corpus represents a sample of posts published on Reddit in October
2022. We use a Python script to identify n-grams containing “joke” or “kid” that are used as indicators of jocular
intent (e.g. “just kidding”, ”just a joke”, “take a joke”). Instances of the phrases are then analysed in their context
to find out how offensive or problematic humour is presented, perceived and negotiated. The findings throw
light on how participants in Reddit discussions commit offensive humour, how other participants react to it and
how it is negotiated in the interaction, furthering our understanding of intentions and accountability.
Elder, Chi-Hé. 2021. Microaggression or misunderstanding? Implicatures, inferences and accountability. Jour-
nal of Pragmatics 179: 37–43.
Dynel, Marta. 2021. Desperately seeking intentions: Genuine and jocular insults on social media. Journal of
Pragmatics 179: 26–36.
Haugh, Michael. 2016. “Just kidding”: Teasing and claims to non-serious intent. Journal of Pragmatics Volume
95: 120–136.

1280
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The lifecycle of “edgy” stand-up jokes: from rhetoric to


offended audiences

Panel contribution

Dr. Eleni Kapogianni 1 , Dr. Chi-He Elder 2 , Dr. Isabella Reichl 1


1. University of Kent, 2. University of East Anglia

This paper examines explicitly offensive (often prefaced with terms such as “career ending”, “saying the un-
sayable”) stand-up comedy jokes, with the aim of distinguishing their various effects inside and outside of the
comedic performance. The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the limits of comedy is taking place both
off-stage and on-stage: comedians like Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais use jokes that target sensitive characteris-
tics (race, disability, gender identity etc.) with the ostensible goal of proving that no social group or topic should
be “off limits”, while taking a stance against recent calls for a more empathetic comedic tradition that does not
reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs (Perez 2013).
A matter of frequent debate is whether or not the “true” beliefs and intentions of comedians need to be taken
into consideration when they are held publicly (and legally) accountable for the content of their jokes. The
discussion will focus both on the jokes themselves (sourced from the aforementioned comedians’ most recent
Netflix specials) and on the reactions of various audiences (user comments on social media platforms). Taking
an interactional pragmatic approach to this debate, we begin by clarifying the following important distinctions:
(a) the explicit target (“butt”) of the joke versus its rhetorical target (opposed “humour ideologies”- Kramer 2011)
(b) the joke as “use” versus the joke as “mention” (Sperber and Wilson 1981)
(c) the performer versus the comedic persona (a distinction that can, on occasion, become blurred)
(d) the joke as part of the comedic performance versus the joke in the public sphere
We argue that jokes have a life-cycle which expands beyond their original performance and are thus able to
carry offence outside the context of their production. Even though it is important to examine the birth and
original context of an offensive joke, it is equally important to consider the issue of comedian accountability
when it comes to producing jokes that are bound to enter the public sphere, given the modern format of video-
recorded and social media-covered comedy sets.
References

Kramer, E. (2011). The playful is political: The metapragmatics of


Internet rape-joke arguments. Language in Society, 40, 137–168.

Pérez, R. (2013). Learning to make racism funny in the “color-blind” era: Stand-up comedy students, perfor-
mance strategies, and the (re)production of racist jokes in public. Discourse & Society, 24, 478–503.

Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1981). Irony and the use-mention distinction. Radical pragmatics, 295-318.

1281
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Using humour to call out racism: political satire, the right to


offend and take offence

Panel contribution

Dr. Dimitris Serafis 1 , Prof. Stavros Assimakopoulos 2 , Dr. Anna Piata 3


1. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), 2. University of Malta, 3. University of Neuchâtel

Satirical news shows have for long been recognised as venues where political journalism is being reinvented,
with the relevant research underlining that they influence audience perceptions about current affairs in equal
measure to traditional newscasting (Hoffman & Young 2011). Identifying humour as the main discursive strat-
egy at play, “most literature expects that satirical news can persuade the audience to adopt a stance in line with
the satirical message” (Burgers & Brugman 2022:972). Given this intrinsic aptitude to affect public opinion,
while also taking into account their ever-increasing dissemination over social media, it is certainly not surpris-
ing that skits belonging to this genre have often sparked controversy, generating broader political discussions
in the public sphere.
In October 2022, Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show, was heavily criticised by several public figures in the
UK for suggesting that Rishi Sunak’s assumption of the Prime Minister position was met locally with racist back-
lash on the basis of Sunak’s ethnic origin. In this paper, we review this controversy with a view to assessing the
role that traditional and social media have played in framing the original humorous monologue as offensive,
leading Noah to eventually clarify that he never suggested that the entire UK is racist. In this respect, we at-
tempt to shed some light on an aspect of humorous import negotiation that may be tied to a speaker’s plausible
deniability, but also stands on the opposite side of it; that is, the classification of a humorous piece of discourse
as offensive on the basis of a misconstrual of the speaker’s original intention.
After a close reading of the monologue under question that will help establish its humorous tone, we examine
the kind of reactions that it generated on social media through the use of corpus linguistics tools, in an attempt
to assess whether it was perceived as offensive on a broader scale. Following this, we turn to look at the ways
in which this story was covered by four UK (broadsheet and tabloid) media outlets of distinct ideological ori-
entations, with a view to identifying the role that such outlets have played in (re)framing the monologue as
offensive or defending its antiracist stance respectively. Through this process, we find that more often than not
the onus is placed on the credibility of the skit’s producer, in terms of his positioning in relation to the in-group
that is allegedly being offended, rather than on the actual content of the humorous piece of discourse itself.
We explain this noted pattern synthesising ideas pertaining to epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010) and the
relevance-theoretic approach to context selection processes during verbal comprehension (Mazzarella 2021).
References:

Hoffman, L.H. & Dannagal G.Y. 2011. Satire, Punch Lines, and the Nightly News. Communication Research Re-
ports 28: 159–168.
Burgers, C. & B.C. Brugman. 2022. How Satirical News Impacts Affective Responses, Learning, and Persuasion.
Communication Research 49: 966–993.
Sperber, Dan, et al. 2010. Epistemic vigilance. Mind & Language 25: 359–393.
Mazzarella, Diana. 2021. Deniability and context reconstruction.
Mind & Language (Online first).

1282
Lectures
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Brussels is in panic”. A relevance theoretical approach to


political discourse.

Lecture

Dr. Ildiko Vasko 1


1. Eötvös Loránd University

Social media has a significant influence on society in general and politicians seem to demonstrate an increasing
tendency to use this interactive form of interaction. Political discourse in the media has become a more and
more dynamic platform offering challenging research topics for linguists. A growing academic interest has been
developed in hate speech, offensive language, trolling and manipulation, just to name a few of them.
The present paper focuses on the pragmatic aspects of political discourse exploring the impact of social me-
dia. The study is based on a corpus collected from Hungarian online newspaper articles and from the social
networking site, Twitter. The objective of political language is to affect audience opinion. A powerful means of
achieving this is to apply strategies as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information. This investigation
will shed light on the communicative functions of (figurative) language use that contributes to desired affects or
guidance of attention. It will be argued that the relevance-theoretic approach helps to account how the choice
of a linguistic device can contribute to the persuasive meaning and how utterance interpretation can vary in
different communicative contexts depending on the reader’s ideas, as according to Sperber & Wilson (1986)
relevance is always relevance to an individual. The study seeks to explore the meanings that arise in specific
contexts, revealing the speaker’s intention and aims to demonstrate how these cognitive effects are constrained
by the principle of optimal relevance. A major issue in this respect that there is the possibility that interlocutors
might interpret the same tweet, one certain piece of discourse, in very different ways, making room for multiple
interpretations.
According to Relevance Theory, linguistic expressions that encode conceptual (in contrast to procedural) mean-
ings are semantically underspecified. The research aims to reveal that the potential meaning stemming from
what is linguistically encoded in a tweet relies on the diversity of potential readers. The results so far, reveal
that the digital discursive practices go hand in hand with or even reinforce political polarization and online
hostility.
References:
Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing Political Discourse. London, Routledge.
Johansson, M., Kleinke and S., Lehti, L., (2017). The Digital Agora of Social Media. Introduction. Discourse,
Context and Media 19, 1−4.
Murthy, D. (2013). Twitter. Social Communication in the Twitter Age. Cambridge: Polity Press
Sperber, D., Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford

1284
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Fear Allah”: (Im)politeness, Morality, and Religion.

Lecture

Mr. Ahmed Elgadri 1


1. Lancaster University

There has been an increasing number of studies investigating (im)politeness and the evaluative judgment of
interactants in the last twenty years. Nevertheless, the focus on the role and the influence of religion on
(im)politeness has not been thoroughly investigated, especially with respect to its relation to the moral order.
Spencer-Oatey and Kadar (2016) briefly comment on the possible relevance of religious beliefs that could under-
pin people’s moral evaluation, and they recommend further research in that regard. The current study seeks to
examine (im)politeness in relation to the moral order in the Libyan Arabic context.
The aims of this study are as follows: a) to improve the understanding of the role of religion and social norms
(socio-religious moral norms) in constructing and understanding (im)politeness in the Libyan context, and b) to
identify which moral grounds are invoked in order to evaluate a particular behaviour as a type of impoliteness/
transgression/ Haram/ or ʕeib. To address the above aims, this study adopts Culpeper’s (2011) impoliteness
framework supplemented by Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) rapport management.
The data under investigation is extracted from “social experiment” TV shows recorded in Libya and that are
publicly available on YouTube. These shows also include retrospective interviews with the bystanders as well
as meta-statements and comments in the comment sections of the YouTube channels of these shows. The idea
of these TV shows is to observe and examine Libyan people’s behaviours and reactions when confronted with
some ethical and social dilemmas that could possibly trigger their reactions. The data analysis is presented
in two parts: socio-pragmatic analysis, and pragmalinguistic analysis. The initial analysis of the data has re-
vealed the following: a) socio-religious moral norms represent the most dominant aspects in the evaluation
of (im)politeness in the Libyan context, b) the breach of the socio-religious moral norms generates strong emo-
tional reactions, some of which lead to physical violence, c) morality in the Libyan context seems to be grounded
in religion and ʕurf, which represent and generate Libyans’ sense of identity and group membership, d) the
maintenance and the preservation of the moral and social order is a religious and social duty.
ʕurf: refers to what is commonly approved by society as righteous or virtuous, accepted by reason (intellect)
and pure human nature, passed on from one generation to another, and which does not contradict Islamic
instructions.
Haram: This refers to acts and behaviours that are explicitly forbidden in the Qur’an and the Sunna.
ʕeib: This term is commonly used in Libya and the Arab world to describe behaviours that are socially disap-
proved.
References:
Culpeper, J. 2011. Impoliteness: using language to cause offence. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Spencer-Oatey, H. ed., 2008. Culturally speaking second edition: Culture, communication and politeness theory.
Bloomsbury Publishing

Spencer-Oatey, H. and Kadar, D.Z. 2016. The bases of (im)politeness evaluations: Culture, the moral order and
the East–West debate. East Asian Pragmatics. 1(1), pp.73–106.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Just Like, Risking Your Life Here”: Envisioning AI to Bolster


Women’s Communication Practices in Assessing Risk of Harm
in Online Dating

Lecture

Ms. Isha Datey 1 , Dr. Douglas Zytko 1


1. Oakland University

The upsurge of online dating usage has opened up additional avenues for infliction of harm, especially against
women [1]. This study explores how women’s interactions with users and AI contributes and can contribute
to respectively ameliorating decision making when choosing whether or not to initiate communication and
whether to convert online communication to offline based on the degree of risk of harm either may pose. We
evaluate how women envision AI supporting them in assessing risk of harm in online dating, and how this risk
assessment AI could influence their current communicative practices.
The research, thus, presents an interview study in which twenty cisgender and transgender women participated
in focus groups and one-on-one interview sessions, later open coded for qualitative analysis. Women produced
explicit rule models for risk assessment AI, or: AI models augmenting women’s strategies for assessing risk of
harm with communicating through online modalities (textual and otherwise) or meeting given users offline.
The AI implementation would influence primarily the communicative practices involved in determining
whether to interact at all (online or in-person). Women foremost scrutinize profile content- incompleteness
and improperness communicates insincerity or fraudulence, while other features communicate certain unde-
sirable personality traits (discriminatory nature, aggression, purely intentions of sexual encounters) that could
potentially lead to infliction of harm. Direct communication through app-provided chats is the preferred modal-
ity for first time communication and informational cues inspected are similar to profile content with the added
advantage of dynamicity utilized to check for redundancy (an indicator of catfishing or bot behavior), reactions
to, for example, rejection, and look for more user information to validate the users’ existence.
The decision to meet in-person or not is also influenced by communication with the participants’ “mutual
friends’‘ with users as well as people in the users’ interaction circles- current and otherwise, people who may be
able to provide feedback (“reviews”). Reviewing social media communication history of users for problematic
content or content that points towards aforementioned “risky” personality traits through the way users’ interact
with other people online also influences communication practices.
This impression formation may also influence “where” an in-person meeting takes place and whether a sug-
gested location is acceptable or not. How safe a person feels based on prior communication can influence not
just whether or not to meet in-person but also the degree of “eject-ability” or walkability of the location needed
to feel more secure.
Women envision interacting with AI as a supportive, information gathering entity that communicates the infor-
mation and implications of risk of harm unique to each participant, and presents it in a way that is easy to skim
for quick decision making, yet not in a manner that influences the participant towards, especially, a negative
perception or actively engages in decision making beyond filtering profiles based on participant interests.
References:
[1] UK National Crime Agency. 2016. Emerging new threat in online dating: Initial trends in inter-
net dating-initiated serious sexual assaults. National Crime Agency London, England. Retrieved from
https://trends.ifla.org/node/425

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

-To omou (‘I think’) utterances in L2 Japanese: testing the


effect of user background in their interpretation

Lecture

Dr. Mika Kizu 1 , Dr. Barbara Pizziconi 2 , Dr. Eiko Gyogi 3


1. Notre Dame Seishin University, 2. SOAS, University of London, 3. Okinawa University

The pragmatic functions of -to omou ‘I think’ have been discussed extensively, though not conclusively, in the
literature (Nitta 1989, Ono 2001, Yokomizo 1998). As a modal expression, it marks information as fundamen-
tally (inter)subjective, that is, relating to the speaker’s stance vis-a-vis information, in relation to that of the
hearer’s. In context, -to omou appears to generate distinct meanings, such as the marking of information as (a) a
speaker’s personal opinion, (b) a speaker’s lack of certainty, or (c) a ‘mitigation’ of the utterance’s interactional
force (e.g., Moriyama 1992). While the first two of these definitions are routinely used and clearly explained in
pedagogical material of L2 Japanese, the latter is not (e.g., Three A Network 2012). The pragmatic multifunc-
tionality of -to omou entails potential variability in the way users (lay users and professionals alike) assess the
appropriateness and negotiate the meaning of this form in specific contexts of use.
Due to -to omou’s early appearance in the syllabus, a moderate amount of research is available on its use in
L2 production, including comparisons of L2 production with L1 norms (e.g., Sasaki & Kawaguchi 1994; Iwasaki
2009; Okugiri et al. 2014). However, how such utterances are actually received has not gathered much attention,
leaving observations about the supposed intended meaning of -to omou largely untested. To overcome the
challenge of retrospective access to hearers’ interpretations, we selected five instances of -to omou use from
English speaking Japanese L2 users’ production. We then submitted the L2 users’ production to the assessment
of users with different linguistic and social (both inevitably also cultural) backgrounds - L1 and L2 Japanese
students, L1 and L2 Japanese language teachers - and tested their assessment of the L2 users’ intended meanings
and their degree of appropriateness.
Our preliminary analysis reveals distinct results with regards to 1) judgments of naturalness and 2) meaning
interpretations. 1) Judgments of naturalness show remarkable agreement or remarkably similar distribution of
agreement patterns both within and across groups. However, while 2) the meaning interpretation also shows
similar distribution patterns across groups, we find very low levels of agreement within groups regarding at-
tribution of the meanings (a), (b), and (c). This suggests that, as with the case of English ‘I think’ (Zhang 2014),
and despite the transparent semantics, the pragmatic functions of -to omou are fuzzy, overlapping, and simul-
taneously available. It also suggests that while all groups can achieve a comparable intuitive sense of prag-
matic appropriateness, the metapragmatic articulation of such competence (including in evaluations of NNS
performance) remains challenging, regardless of expertise (i.e., proficiency levels or professional knowledge).
These preliminary results prompt us to question the validity of analytical categories derived from scholarly
accounts and underscore the importance of pedagogical practices that focus on indexical (that is richly context-
dependent) rather than denotational meanings.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A case-study of affect display in HE institutional email


discourse at Covid-19 times: exploring the interplay between
politeness and empathy

Lecture

Dr. Louisa Desilla 1 , Dr. Angeliki Alvanoudi 1


1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

To date, there has been a number studies focusing on the multilingual crisis communication raised by the COVID-
19 pandemic (Zhang & Li 2020), its figurative framing on Twitter (Wicke & Bolognesi 2020) or the relational work
of expressive speech acts on public signs during the pandemic (Ogiermann & Bella 2021). Yet, little is known
about the collateral impact of the pandemic on computer-mediated communication (CMC), let alone its prag-
matics. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there appear to be no studies within linguistics specifically
designed to explore empathy in email communication or CMC in general. The rather nihilistic and absolute
view of CMC “as emotionally barren, lacking the nonverbal channels necessary for intimate interpersonal com-
munications” has been challenged by recent research on social networking sites which suggests that people can
develop empathic relationships online; still, far too little attention has been paid to the nature and situational
determinants of “digital empathy” (Powell & Roberts 2017: 137). Drawing on insights from politeness research
(Brown & Levinson 1987; Bella & Sifianou 2012), as well as from research on empathy displays in interaction
(Kupetz 2014; Herlin & Visapää 2016; Powel & Roberts 2017), the present paper primarily reports on some of
the key findings of Alvanoudi and Desilla’s (2022) case study of politeness strategies and manifestations of af-
fect in the context of email discourse between university students and teaching staff. The data obtained cover a
significant period of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 until January 2021) and comprise redacted excerpts
from emails written either in English or in Greek by undergraduate students of the School of English, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, addressing their lecturers. When English is chosen as the language of communica-
tion by two interactants who share Greek as their native language, we are dealing with a fairly idiosyncratic
yet very intriguing communicative event which presumably allows for the collision or co-deployment of polite-
ness norms from both languages. Interestingly, the data analysis shows that students use a variety and, often,
a combination of positive politeness, negative politeness and self-politeness to achieve their communicative
goals. The present paper will demonstrate the link between the aforementioned politeness strategies and affect
display while shedding some light on the ways cognitive empathy can be used as a positive politeness device.
Some references
Alvanoudi, A., & Desilla, L. (2022). Exploring the collateral impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication:
Displaying affect in email discourse. Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics, 3, 230–246. Retrieved
from https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/awpel/article/view/30237
Bella, S. & Sifianou, M. 2012. “Greek student e-mail requests to faculty members.” In R. L. de Zarobe &Y. de
Zarobe (eds.), Speech acts and politeness across languages and cultures. Bern: Peter Lang, 89-113.
Kupetz, M. 2014. “Empathy displays as interactional achievements –multimodal and sequential aspects.”
Journal of Pragmatics 61: 4-34.

Powel, P.A. & Roberts, J. 2017. “Situational determinants of cognitive, affective, and compassionate empathy in
naturalistic digital interactions”. Computers in Human Behavior 68: 137-148.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A cognitive model of discourse structure building: From the


perspective of intonation units and cognitive grammar

Lecture

Dr. Tomoko Sakita 1


1. Doshisha University

Along with the criticism that cognitive linguistics tends to pursue static analyses of expressions in isolation, a
growing number of studies have highlighted the significance of examining cognition in interactional discourse
(e.g., Chafe 1994; Pickering & Garrod 2004; Verhagen 2005; Du Bois 2007; Deppermann 2012; Brone & Zima
2014; Zima & Brone 2015). In response, attempts have been made to produce an integrated view of structure,
processing, and discourse (e.g., Langacker 2001, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2016), but more discourse-oriented
studies are still awaited. The current study proposes a cognitive model of discourse structure building, from
the perspective of intonation units and emerging utterances (Chafe 1994; Du Bois 2022).
The intonation unit (IU) is the basic unit of language from a prosodic point of view and a focus of attention
and limitation – i.e., a cognitive burden – when it comes to information processing (Chafe 1994). The field of
cognitive grammar adopted the IU as a window of attention encoded in an intonation group (Langacker 2001),
hoping to have the current discourse space (CDS) model encompass a series of usage situations (Langacker 2008).
However, Langacker’s cognitive model has a limitation when it comes to following the flow of discourse. By
improving the model, I analyzed authentic spoken interactional data from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken
American English (Du Bois et al. 2000–2005), which is based on the IU system.
Using a diagram, I will present the way in which the CDS is updated in a series of approximately 15 IUs, by stack-
ing successive IUs along the development of cohesive and connected discourse. Specifically, each IU presents
a conceptual cohesion for the CDS update; the composite semantic structure of the IU constitutes a focal frame
with a profile and a minus frame that regulates the CDS. The diagram thus has two columns: the first is the CDS
in successive stages of discourse, and the second performs the update, meaning that it represents the synthetic
semantic structure. Each time the CDS is updated, the minus frame of the composite representation is matched
with the existing CDS. When an existing CDS meets the requirements of a synthetic representation, a new CDS
is created. The latter is matched with the minus frame of the subsequent CDS, leading to the next update. As the
discourse progresses, a connected conceptual structure is constructed, and the CDS is updated endlessly while
maintaining the cohesion of the discourse.
The diagram to which I refer above captures the dynamic nature of the discourse development and the pro-
cess by which the speakers construct complex conceptual structures. The analysis of connected conceptual
structures is well supported by the theory of given/accessible/new information (Chafe 1994). As the discourse
progresses, new information is added, and when the structure is built while maintaining cohesion, the contents
collated with the previous CDS are carried over to the minus frame. IUs are chained while conceptually over-
lapping with what has been presented. Discussion touches upon structural consolidation and its functioning
with long-term memory.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A continuum approach to Politeness in Chinese courtroom


discourse

Lecture

Prof. Meizhen Liao 1


1. Kashi University

Literature on politeness study is legion, but the focus is predominantly on politeness in everyday conversa-
tion or non-institutional settings (Leech,1983; Brown et al.1987; Gu 1996; Culpeper, 2010). Lack of adequate
research on politeness in institutional settings on the one hand and criticism of existing models of politeness
study for their failure to do justice to the complexity and the dynamics of politeness, as well as the synergy of
interlocutors on the one hand and curiosity as to the nature and the patterns of politeness in Chinese courtroom
discourse as an example of institutional discourse on the other motivate the present paper. Therefore, the aim
of the research is to further promote politeness studies and research, particularly in instituional settings, and
have more and better insights into politeness phenomena by a new and unique apporach to poloeness. Based
on Leech’s classification of illocutionary speech acts into four types (Leech, 1983), and also in response to Pro-
fessor Robin Lakoff’s remarks made about two decades ago of courtroom discourse as “limits of politeness” and
a complex web (1998), we proposed a model of politeness in terms of a continuum of negative, neutral and
positive politeness, which is meant to do away with or replace the trditional and popular dichotomy of polite-
ness or impoliteness. The following three questions (in descending importance) are to be addressed: (1) What
are the politeness patterns in Chinese criminal courtroom discourse as a typical representative of institutional
discourse? (2) How are the patterns distributed among the trial participants? and (3) What do the peculiar
or unique politeness patterns reveal about Chinese legal ideology and culture or provide as implications for
politeness research in general? The study is data-based. transcripts of eight criminal trials of different types,
jurisdictions and periods of time are used as data for analysis. It is found that politeness in Chinese courtroom
is a complex web of positive, neutral and negative politeness at either the macro or micro level of discourse of
interaction, with neutral politeness strategies predominant, negative ones ranking the second and the positive
ones the least. More specifically, use of politeness strategies in Chinese criminal courtroom discourse is a con-
tinuum of three dimensions of negetaive, neutral and positive politeness, rather than a dichotomy of polieness
or impoliteness and more importantly the three types of politeness strategies are not evenly distributed among
the trial participants in their interaction. It is hoped that the politeness continuum model as applied to a minute
examination of the authentic data out of the unique Chinese legal system and culture and the unique patterns
identified will contribute to the further development and enriching or deepening our understanding of linguis-
tic politeness as well as the diversity and inclusiveness in related studies. more importantly a call for a turn to
neutral politeness and strategies either in institutioanl or non-institutional settings is proposed or due attention
should be paid to neutral politeness so as to more a more comprehensive and better picture and understanding
of politeness phenomena.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A corpus-based case study of human understanding of


concepts and reality: Japanese “jibun” (‘self’) and “shiawase”
(‘happiness’) modified by “hontou-no” (‘true’)

Lecture

Dr. Yoko Mizuta 1


1. International Christian University

Introduction
Our understanding of concepts and reality has been studied in terms of cognition and categorization (Austin,
1962; Lakoff, 1987; Neisser, 1987; Putnum, 1975; Rosch, 1978). However, little is known about how we deepen
our understanding through experiences. For example, while we know the meaning of the word happiness, what
does true happiness mean and refer to? This work aims to shed light on such aspects based on the pragmatics
of Japanese hontou-no (‘real’/’true’).
Method
The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ) was used to locate examples of jibun (‘self’)
and shiawase (‘happiness’) that are modified by hontou-no, with the preceding and following contexts (50 char-
acters each). Then, cooccurring expressions were analyzed.
Results and Analysis
114 examples were found for hontou-no jibun (HN_J, ‘real/true self’) and 21 examples for hontou-no shiawase
(HN_S, ‘real/true happiness’). Major cooccurring expressions are provided below in English translation under
the following classification: (A) occurring with the subject HN_J/S, (B) occurring with the object HN_J/S, (C) re-
lated notions, and (D) contrasted notions.
HN_J: (A) HN_J {shows her face on such an occasion/ exists deep in our heart}, HN_J is {original/ one’s essence/
honest feeling}; (B) [currently] {don’t/want to} know HN_J, {cheat/hide/confine/deny/deceive} HN_J, [future ex-
pectation] {seek/find/come closer to} HN_J, should accept and express HN_J as it is, polish HN_J; (C) established,
eternal, nonfragmentary; (D) {false /temporary/borrowed} self, replaceable, vanity, {appearance to/ evaluation of}
others, empty efforts to camouflage, perform different personas.
HN_S: (A) HN_S {never breaks/ is hard to obtain/ can be found only deep in one’s heart/ is accompanied by suffer/
is obtained by making others happy/ requires others}, what is HN_S?; (B) don’t know HN_S, hard to get HN_S; (C)
true wealth, “golden joy”, peace, feeling of accomplishment, impression; (D) selfishness, esteem, wealth, power,
sacrifice others.
The data reflects human critical thinking and indicates the insight that HN_J/S contrasts with more familiar
realizations of jibun and shiawase: Specifically, 1) HN_J exists deep in one’s heart vs. the pretended self or
appearance; 2) One is expected to find and improve HN_J; 3) HN_S is internal in nature and involves consider-
ation of others; 4) HN_S can be obtained only through continuous effort. Also, hontou-no can be viewed as a
contrastive marker for the core concept vs. reality.
Conclusion
The corpus data sheds light on our deeper understanding of the concepts jibun and shiawase obtained through
experiences beyond lexical and encyclopedic knowledge. It also indicates that hontou-no is a contrastive marker
reflecting critical thinking. The proposed corpus-based analysis serves as an effective means for obtaining
empirical data for philosophical issues and lexical semantics/pragmatics.
References
Austin, J.L. (1962). Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford UP.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. U. of Chicago Press.
Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1987). Concepts and Conceptual Development. Cambridge UP.

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Putnum, H. (1975). The meaning of meaning. In Gunderson, K. (Ed.) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
Science Vol. 7. U. of Minnesota Press. 131-193.
Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In Rosch E. & Lloyd, B.B. (Eds.) Cognition and Categorization. LEA.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Critical Multimodal Study of ‘Cute Language’ in Chinese


Cyberspace and Beyond

Lecture

Dr. Feifei Zhou 1


1. Lingnan University

Derived from moe in Japanese, meng (萌, ‘cute’) in Chinese youth subcultures refers to affection towards cute,
vulnerable objects or characters in pop culture and everyday life (De Seta 2014). Meng language (萌化语⾔, ‘cute
language’), as a register originally associated with Japanese, and later, Chinese youth subcultures, is now widely
used by various parties on the Chinese internet (and social media) for evaluative, affective, and identity-making
purposes. It is noted that practices of ‘cutefication’ (萌化) constitute important features of Chinese Internet Ver-
nacular (Nie 2018). The Chinese state also starts to exploit the political power of cuteness as a new form of
governance strategy in online communications (Wong et al. 2021).
In this presentation, I will offer three case studies to illustrate ‘atypical’ applications of ‘cute language’ in both
online and offline settings: on a medical app, in urban (and rural) semiotic landscapes, and in state-run on-
line news accounts, respectively. I will examine the (re)appropriations of ‘cute language’ in these emergent
‘atypical’ contexts beyond the original subcultural ones. Drawing on a corpus of various ‘cute’ elements such as
visuals, memes, emoji stickers, shop signages, language objects (Jaworski 2015), and other online texts, in this
study I seek to broaden the scope of ‘cute language’ to include ‘multimodal cute resources’. The purpose is to
highlight the prominent role of digital technologies in facilitating and intensifying the creation, circulation, re-
semiotization and commodification of ‘cute resources’, which often encompass visual, audio, typographical and
other material features. The contextual, pragmatic, and indexical meanings and functions of these multimodal
resources will be analysed through a range of notable examples drawn from the mentioned cases. I will explore
what makes these ‘cute resources’ a popular ‘currency’ in Chinese cyberspace and beyond, against the backdrop
of China’s rapid social changes, an emergent ‘experience economy’, and a distinctive internet culture. The im-
pacts of such resources in various communication modes and settings on the involved participants, and Chinese
society at large, will also be discussed. Overall, with three case studies cutting across commercial, professional,
and political sectors, I hope to shed light on the rich affordances and indexical values of ‘cute language’ in the
Chinese ‘market’ and the complex political economies of language, play and affect in China.
Notes:
Data collection and analysis for all three case studies are now completed. In the presentation I may focus on
one or two of the case studies due to time limits.
References:
De Seta, Gabriele (2014). ‘Meng? It just means cute’: A Chinese online vernacular term in context. M/C Journal
17(2).
Jaworski, Adam (2015). Word cities and language objects: ‘Love’ sculptures and signs as shifters. Linguistic
Landscape 1(1): 75–94.
Nie, He (2018). Memes, communities, and continuous change: Chinese Internet vernacular explained. PhD
Thesis, Tilburg University, Tilburg.
Wong, J., Lee, C., Long, V. K., Wu, D., & Jones, G. M. (2021). ‘Let’s go, baby forklift!’: Fandom governance and the
political power of cuteness in China. Social Media + Society 7(2).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A new perspective on interpersonal relations: a triadic


alternative to in/directness and imposition mitigation

Lecture

Dr. Isabella Reichl 1


1. University of Kent

This paper examines informal future-actions negotiations and proposed an alternative, systematic analytical
approach to the negotiation of interpersonal relations which goes beyond the established (but flawed) notion
of in/directness. Drawing on Stevanovic & Peräkylä’s (2014) study which shows that deontics, epistemics, and
affect are ‘omnirelevant’ in social interaction and key resources for action recognition, I argue that this triad
also provides an effective lens for the analysis of interpersonal dynamics. Rather than focusing on the level
of in/directness of proffers (i.e. requests, suggestions etc.) and refusals, I examine whether (and how) utter-
ances express deontic, epistemic, and affective stances. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate this approach’s
two major advantages: first, it moves away from viewing deontic rights as the key explanatory domain for in-
terpersonal implications in future-action negotiations. Ever since the classic politeness theories of Brown &
Levinson (1987) and Leech (1983), power has been considered a main factor for determining how im/polite an
utterance is. More recently, various conversation-analytic studies have argued that proffer formats can be put
on a ‘deontic scale’ (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Etelämäki 2015; Landmark, Gulbrandsen & Svennevig 2015) based on
the degree of deontic rights they express. According to such accounts, an imperative ‘Have some soup’ claims
strong deontic rights, whereas ‘hints’ such as ‘There’s some soup’ expresses weak deontic rights. By incorporat-
ing the epistemic and affective domains, by contrast, my approach demonstrates that, while some utterances
do indeed foreground the speaker’s lack of deontic authority (e.g. ‘Would you like some soup?’), many others
actually foreground an epistemic stance (e.g. ‘You should have some soup, it’s good for you’) or affective stance
(e.g. ‘This soup is delicious’). The second advantage is that this explains why so-called indirect utterances can
cause interpersonal offence. A speaker making a suggestion by claiming epistemic authority (e.g. ‘You should
have some soup, it’s good for you’) may, for instance, be perceived as overstepping their epistemic rights and
can be sanctioned for it by the addressee. The data examined in this paper consists of future-action negotiations
extracted from the subset of face-to-face conversations of SPICE-Ireland (Kirk et al. 2011).
References
Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, & Marja Etelämäki. 2015. “Nominated Actions and Their Targeted Agents in Finnish
Conversational Directives.” Journal of Pragmatics 78, 7-24.
Kirk, John M., Jeffrey L. Kallen, Orla Lowry, Anne Rooney, & Margaret Mannion. 2011. The SPICE-Ireland Cor-
pus. Systems of Pragmatic Annotation for the Spoken Component of ICE-Ireland. Version 1.2.2. Belfast: Queen’s
University Belfast & Dublin: Trinity College Dublin.
Landmark, Anne Marie Dalby, Pål Gulbrandsen, & Jan Svennevig. 2015. ”Whose Decision? Negotiating Epis-
temic and Deontic Rights in Medical Treatment Decisions.” Journal of Pragmatics 78, 54-69.
Leech, Geoffrey (1983), Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Stevanovic, Melisa, & Anssi Peräkylä. 2014. “Three Orders in the Organization of Human Action. On the In-
terface between Knowledge, Power, and Emotion in Interaction and Social Relations.” Language in Society 43
(2),185-207.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Pragmatic Cultural Analysis of Multilingual Linguistic


Landscape in Cyprus

Lecture

Dr. Sviatlana Karpava 1


1. University of Cyprus

Linguistic Landscape (LL) research deals with the way of how languages are presented and interpreted in public
places based on their functional and symbolic values (Shohamy, 2015). Landry and Bourhis (1997, p. 25) defined
LL as ‘the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop
signs, and public signs on government buildings combined to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory,
region, or urban agglomeration.’
There is a close relationship between LL items and people who create, own and interact with them, their at-
titudes and perceptions (Aiestaran et al., 2010; Garvin, 2010), identities on individual, collective and national
levels (Curtin, 2009; Kallen, 2009; Trumper-Hecht, 2009), ideologies associated with the shared public space and
different discourse communities (Kramsch, 2002; Shohamy, 2015). LL researchers try to reveal and analyse
the patterns of language use in public spaces in a systematic way, taking social, pragmatic, political, economic,
ideological factors into consideration. Public signage can have different types and levels of texts and semiotic
modes (Shohamy, 2015).
The aim of this study was to implement pragmatic and cultural analysis of public signs in Cyprus (LL) regarding
speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Black, 2006; Sharndama, 2015), pragmatic cultural schemas and prag-
matic devices (Sharifian, 2017; Mey, 2001, 2010; Kecskes, 2010) and politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson,
1987). The researcher implemented an in-depth qualitative and quantitative landscape analysis of visible semi-
otic signs in public space, by visiting geographical areas of the Republic of Cyprus, rural and urban: Larnaca,
Agia Napa, Nicosia, Limassol and Paphos as well as Troodos, mountain area, and collecting photographic data of
advertising billboards and commercial shop signs (Huebner, 2006). The focus was on the main shopping streets
and highway/street billboards. Overall, 4,200 signs have been photographed, documented and analysed.
The findings suggest that the most common types of politeness strategy were bald on record, positive and neg-
ative politeness, which conveyed direct and precise meaning, lack of imposition on the customers as well as
attracting their attention. The sign makers try to engage readers/viewers directly by using imperatives or re-
quests with negative politeness markers, expressing gratitude. The analysis of public signs in terms situated
speech acts, pragmemes, or generalized pragmatics acts, and practs, or concrete pragmatic acts, substantiations
of pragmemes, revealed that many signs aim to emphasize the focus of the business by mentioning the products
or services together with the target customers and words of collective implications. In addition, there is an em-
phasis on the access to the business, via mentioning the products or services together with the business owner’s
identity, the nearby places. It is obvious that private signs in Cyprus show international qualities, trends and
identities by using multiple languages and ensuring the reliability of quality standards, expressing credibility,
referring to home-made and famous brand origins, year of business establishment, family, care and ethics,
showing outstanding qualities of the products and services and providing favourable treatment.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Study on “Mounting”: A New Interactional Concept Related


to Im/politeness in Japanese

Lecture

Dr. Seiko Otsuka 1 , Dr. Ryogo Yanagida 2


1. Osaka Institute of Technology, 2. Jissen Women’s University

In Japanese, a new concept called “mounting,” which refers to a specific interactive behavior, has been gaining
citizenship in recent years. “Mounting” is essentially the physical act of a primate mounting an opponent in
order to show his/her superiority. This primate physical act was metaphorically brought into the context of
human interactions. Interactive mounting differs from mere “boasting” or “showing off one’s superiority” in
that the participants cooperatively engage in an interaction that on the surface appears to be pleasant and
“smooth” in progress while actually hurting each other.The interactional behavior itself, labeled “mounting,”
must have existed for a long time, but there has been no concept to describe it. With the advent of this new
term, we now have another way to understand what is going on and why it is uncomfortable in interaction.
While “Mounting” is a new concept that first emerged in 2014 in Japan and has therefore received little academic
attention as yet, it is related to the negotiation of relationships over the positioning of self and others. It can be
an important research perspective especially in im/politeness studies that deal with the construction, mainte-
nance, and disruption of relationships. In particular, it includes important themes that have been pointed out in
im/politeness research since its discursive turn in the early 21st century, such as emotion and demeanor (Goff-
man, 1967), and face balance between self and others. In this study, we examine what is going on in “mounting”
interactions in terms of im/politeness, analyzing role-plays in an essay on mounting (Takinami and Inuyama,
2014) and an actual LINE group communication.
In our analysis of the LINE interaction, we have found instances of participants’ facework in which a mounter
(Participant A) positions his self-face higher than the other’s (Participant B) face, but in order not to appear to
do so, switching between two opposing values in the Japanese society: one that endorses being busy and hard at
work, and the other that endorses having a fulfilling personal life separated from one’s work life. A values being
busy at work and brags about it, but compliments B by saying that B’s work has time to spare by contrasting
himself with B. That is, by praising B’s life, A is displaying that B is not as busy as he is and undermining B’s
face in A’s own value system, pretending as if he values a life with time for personal life. This is arguably a kind
of mock politeness, in which A places his own face higher than that of B, but by praising B, he avoids taking
responsibility for threatening B’s face.
By examining speaker’s intentions, linguistic forms and the actual effects of speech acts, this study investigates
the strategies used in mounting interactions.

Goffman, Erving. (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to Face Behavior. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Takinami, Yukari and Inuyama, Kamiko. (2014) Onna wa Egao de Naguri Au: Mauntyingu Joshi no Jittai (Women
Smile and Hit Each Other: The Reality of Mounting Women.). Tokyo: Chikuma Publishing.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Acquisition and use of ‘poder’ and ‘conseguir’ among Hispanic


learners of Brazilian Portuguese

Lecture

Dr. Cristina Perna 1 , Ms. Martha Porto 1


1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul

This ongoing study presents some ideas on the acquisition and on the use of the verbs ‘poder’ and ‘conseguir’
among basic-level Hispanic learners of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). This study is inserted in a semantic-pragmatic
perspective and takes into account the previous studies by Kratzer (1977; 1981; 1991; 2008; 2012), Vendler (1957;
1967), Dowty (1979), Abusch (1985), Smith (1997) and Taguchi (2015), Cabrelli et al. (2020). Commonly used in-
terchangeably among BP learners, these verbs can convey different meanings: while the verb ‘poder’ (‘can’) is
traditionally a modal verb in BP, assuming different modal roles according to the context (deontic, epistemic),
‘conseguir’ (‘be able to’) has a variety of meanings and functions that might pragmatically mislead non-native
speakers due to its a quasi-modal deontic role (Quaresma et al., 2014). The pilot study used in this research
was collected in BP classes with Hispanic students during a University term. These findings have shown that
a non-facilitative transfer from Spanish to Portuguese occurred. Since the BP and the South American Span-
ish language pairs differ in several aspects, our hypotheses are: (1) non-facilitative transfers from Spanish to
Portuguese would be repeated among the controlled groups, (2) the quantity of non-facilitative transfers would
be reduced among the tested groups and (3) the effectiveness of the pragmatic acquisition of the words may
depend on the approaches adopted for teaching. Further data in this ongoing research will be collected during
the first term of 2023 to check our hypotheses, by means of questionnaires with the Hispanic students learn-
ing Portuguese as L2. Regarding cross-language transfer, other structures will be taken into account in the
data collection, such as: ‘yo no puedo con esto’(‘I can’t stand it’), ‘I can’t help it’ and ‘I couldn’t make it’. It is
expected this study may prove the need to raise metapragmatic awareness to help develop pragmatic compe-
tence among these foreign language learners (Takahashi, 2012; Taguchi 2015: Timpe-Lauglin, 2021). The study
suggests the possibility of adopting different practices to raise metapragmatic awareness and pragmatic compe-
tence regarding these differences between BP and Latin-American Spanish so that learners can use these forms
appropriately according to their context of use.

1297
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Advertising in Pedro Almodóvar’s Films: A Multimodal


Analysis

Lecture

Mr. Rui Pedro Vau 1


1. School of Arts and Humanities

Advertising, in view of its persuasive rhetoric and pragmatics, is a common feature in Pedro Almodóvar’s cin-
ema, with special reference to Pepi, Luci, Bom y Otras Chicas del Montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls like
Mom, 1980), as well as to Todo sobre Mi Madre (All about My Mother, 1999), and to Madres Paralelas (Paral-
lel Mothers, 2021). Due to their imaginative parodic subversion as a mark of the visual style of the director,
ads aim at criticizing the cultural and sexual behavioural practices in Spanish society biased by the catholic
creed. Based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions applied to a multimodal analysis of adverts
(Forceville, 1996, 2002, 2009, 2012, 2017; Urios-Aparisi, 2009), we will reflect on the mechanisms of production
and reception of these ads, which, by using the techniques of cinema and television, enhance the “cognitive
involvement” (Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Forceville, 2020) of the public by simulating daily experiences lived by
the spectators (Messaris, 1997: 266). Special attention will be dedicated to the context and functions of the
different modes of representation (Kress & Leeuwen, 2006 [1996]: 33; Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009; Urios-
Aparisi, 2010a, 2010b, 2020) with the purpose of unveiling how image, words, and sound, as narrative strategies,
contribute to meaning creation of the adverts.
Keywords: Advertising; Cinema; Pedro Almodóvar; Multimodality; Metaphor.
References
FORCEVILLE, C. (1996). Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London: Routledge.
FORCEVILLE, C. (2002). The identification of target and source in pictorial metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics,
34(1), 1-14.
FORCEVILLE, C. (2009). Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research.
In C. Forceville, & E. Urios-Aparisi (Eds.). Multimodal Metaphor (pp. 19-42). Berlin/ New York: Mouton De
Gruyter.
FORCEVILLE, C. (2012). Creativity in pictorial and multimodal advertising metaphors. In R. Jones (Ed.), Discourse
and Creativity (pp. 113-132). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.
FORCEVILLE, C. (2017). Visual and multimodal metaphor in advertising: Cultural perspectives. Styles of Com-
munication, 9(2), 26-41.
FORCEVILLE, C. (2020). Visual and multimodal communication: Applying the relevance principle. New York:
Oxford University Press.
FORCEVILLE, C., & URIOS-APARISI, E. (Eds). (2009). Multimodal metaphor. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
KRESS, G. R., & LEEUWEN, T. V. (2006 [1996]). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). London/
New York: Routledge.
MESSARIS, P. (1997). Visual persuasion: The role of images in advertising. Thousand Oaks/ London/ New Delhi:
Sage Publications.
SPERBER, D., & WILSON, D. (1995 [1986]). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
URIOS-APARISI, E. (2009). Interaction of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in TV commercials: Four case
studies. In C. Forceville, & E. Urios-Aparisi (Eds.), Multimodal Metaphor (pp. 95-117). Berlin/New York: Mouton
de Gruyter.
URIOS-APARISI, E. (2010a). Puro teatro: Metáfora y espacio en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ediciones
Libertarias.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

URIOS-APARISI, E. (2010b). The body of love in Almodóvar’s cinema: Metaphor and metonymy of the body and
body parts. Metaphor and Symbol, 25, 181-203.
URIOS-APARISI, E. (2020). Metaphor emergence in cinematic discourse. In Kraljevic Mujic, B., & Hidalgo-
Downing, L. (Eds.), Performing Metaphoric Creativity across Modes and Contexts (pp. 97-118). Netherlands:
John Benjamins Publishing Company.

1299
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ageing in a foreign land: loneliness among Mauritian Chinese


migrants in the UK

Lecture

Ms. Xuechun Xiang 1


1. Queen Mary University of London

This research explores ageing in a transnational social field. Growing old in a foreign land is part of the late-life
experience of many elderly adults (de Jong-Gierveld et al., 2015), who may encounter the challenge of combating
loneliness (Victor & Yang, 2012) due to the intersectionality of immigrant status, language/culture differences
(Keating & Scharf, 2012).
In the UK, public perceptions have consistently ignored the heterogeneity of the British Chinese community, in
terms of their migration pattern, and language use habits (Li, 1994). Drawing on the life stories of Mauritian-
Chinese migrants in the UK as a paradigmatic example of ethnic-Chinese migrants who do not speak the lingua
franca (Cantonese: the lingua franca of the British Chinese community), this research examines the loneliness
experience of six participants from this group of ageing migrants.
Using Levitt and Glick Schiller’s transnational social field framework, this research first focuses on participants’
ways of being and belonging in the context of migration. With particular attention to the positioning and index-
icality in the small stories narrated in individual semi-structured interviews with each participant (Bamberg,
2004; Georgakopoulou, 2006), the analysis revealed how participants constructed their identities as migrants
not speaking lingua franca; the stance they take with respect to the transnational mobility, and how the feeling
of loneliness interplays with their identity construction and their understanding of transnationalism and their
integration.
Keywords: Mauritian-Chinese migrants; Ageing; Loneliness; Identity Construction; Language Repertoire;
Transnationalism

1300
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Aging metaphors in Chinese advertisements: A multimodal


analysis

Lecture

Dr. Shuping Huang 1


1. National Sun Yat-sen University

Aging is a social and psychological issue in current society. Existing studies have pointed out that the descrip-
tions of ageing and the elder population show the public’s fear and resistance to getting old, which hinders a
positive and healthy mentality for the elderly (Biggs, 1997; Fitzgerald, 1999; Rozario & Derienzis, 2009). To learn
how the ageing process is conceptualized in the Chinese society, 200 advertisements of anti-ageing products
have been collected, including cosmetics, nutrient supplements, etc. Multimodal metaphorical expressions are
identified and tagged with Atlas.ti, with special focus on the integration of texts and images. In addition to
metaphors identified in previous works – AGEING IS A MASK, AGEING IS GOING GREY, AGEING IS GOING
DOWNHILL, AGEING IS AN ENEMY, and AGEING IS A DISEASE – some metaphors such as AGEING IS DARKNESS
and AGEING IS WITHERING have also been popular in our database. Compared to governmental propaganda,
which is conservative in using metaphors, commercials are loaded with figurative images that show unfriendly
attitude toward ageing and elders, particularly rejection. Also, by analyzing how images and texts are inte-
grated in metaphors (Forceville, 2002, 2016), we found in our data that it is usually the text that characterizes
more unfriendly attitudes. By multimodal metaphor analysis and critical discourse analysis, we gained a more
systematic understanding of Chinese aging metaphors and uncovered the culture-specific values about ageing,
which could decide the ways people cope with getting old.
–
Biggs, S. (1997). Choosing not to be old? Masks, bodies and identity management in later life. Ageing and Society,
17, 553–570.
Fitzgerald, T. K. (1999). The elderly at the millenium: Courting the older consumer. Ageing International, 25,
72–86.
Forceville, C. (2002). The identification of target and source in pictorial metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(1),
1–14.
Forceville, C. (2016). Pictorial and multimodal metaphor. In E. F.McQuarrie &B. J.Phillips (Eds.), Handbuch
Sprache im multimodalen Kontext (Issue January 2016, pp. 241–260). Mouton de Gruyter.
Rozario, P. A., & Derienzis, D. (2009). “So forget how old I am!” Examining age identities in the face of chronic
conditions. Sociology of Health and Illness, 31(4), 540–553.

1301
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An analysis of business closure signs during the Covid-19


pandemic in Korea

Lecture

Prof. Hye-Kyung Lee 1


1. Ajou University

This paper aims to investigate the structures and functions of business closure signs in Korea. Specifically, it
will examine signs shown on the doors of closed businesses in Korea during a couple of lockdown of the Covid-
19 pandemic (Ogiermann and Bella 2021). For this study, business closure signs posted all around Korea are
sampled chiefly from Google images and other multiple available sources. The collected data are then modified
and converted into text files for the ease of managing and searching the data. The refined data are analyzed
in terms of their structures and functions, especially with reference to discursive moves and the speech acts
(Austin 1962; Searl 1969) they are intended to impart. The analysis results are compared to relevant previous
research such as Ogiemann and Bella (2021), in which closure sings in Athens and London were comparatively
examined. The preliminary research for this study reveals that closure signs in Korea also feature heavy use of
relational speech acts such as greetings, apologies, thanks, and wishes. At the same time, Korean closure sign
texts are relatively shorter in length and contain less lexemes, employing fewer numbers of discursive moves,
than the reference texts. The speech acts found on the signs are assessed in terms of the conventions expected
from the genre of closure signs (Watt 2003; Sifianou 2013). This study then investigates conventions related to
the expression of emotions and practiced formulae in different countries and unravel culture-specific norms
the functions of expressive speech acts carry.
References
Austin, J. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ogiemann, E. & S. Bella. 2021. On the dual role of expressive speech acts: Relational work on signs announcing
closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Journal of Pragmatics 184, 1-17.
Searle, J. 1969. Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sifianou, M. 2013. The impact of globalisation on politeness and impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 55(1),
86-102.

1302
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An analysis of grammatical elements in conversation repairs:


case markers and second language acquisition.

Lecture

Ms. Kaori Doi 1


1. Institute of Technologists

This study investigates repairs in Japanese learners’ conversations focusing on the syntactic elements of repair
and second language acquisition. Most of previous studies about “repair” have analyzed the types of repair, the
organization of it and its position in interaction. Relationships between repair and syntax have received rela-
tively little attention except for the study by Fox, Hayashi and Jasperson (1996) that focuses on the relationships
between syntax and repair and demonstrates the difference of repair between languages that can be attributed
by syntax of both languages. However, most of previous research on repair have not studied the relationships
between repair and language acquisition. This study focuses on the syntactic features of conversation repairs
comparing interactions by basic level Japanese learners and by advanced level learners. The study also inves-
tigates how learners acquire the second language observing the grammatical elements of conversation repairs.
The data in this study consists of conversational interactions videotaped and transcribed in detail in which
pairs talk about given daily topics freely. Japanese conversation data in which English native speakers have
to communicate only in Japanese are analyzed. This study divides learners’ levels of Japanese proficiency by
experience of studying Japanese and the period of living in Japan and into ‘advanced’ and ‘basic’ level. The
study analyzes conversational interactions by mainly “basic level” learners of Japanese comparing advanced
speakers. This study also uses conversation data of Japanese native speakers in order to compare with data of
learners of Japanese.
This study focuses on case marker as one of grammatical elements in conversation repair and investigates the
frequent occurrence of repairs by the marker by basic level learners. The study also analyzes how learners ac-
quire the case markers comparing conversational interactions by both basic level and advanced level Japanese
learners. Furthermore, this study shows the difficulty in acquisition of grammatical elements by basic level
learners of Japanese comparing the strategies in conversation and the grammatical features of conversation
repair used by advanced level Japanese speakers. This study reveals how the pragmatic acquisition of second
language occurs by analyzing not only syntactic elements of repairs but also how to use them in second lan-
guage.

1303
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An experimental approach to the production of criticisms and


replies to criticisms in a work environment

Lecture

Mr. Baptiste Bersier 1 , Prof. Sandrine Zufferey 1 , Prof. Diana Mazzarella 2 , Dr. Sandra Schwab 1
1. University of Bern, 2. University of Neuchâtel

Since the birth of the speech act theory (Austin, 1962) this central theoretical notion in pragmatics has been
discussed by many different scholars, both within discourse-oriented (e.g., Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2016) and cross-
cultural perspectives (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984). However, fewer contributions have analyzed speech act
production using a controlled experimental methodology. Moreover, most of the studies on speech act produc-
tion tend to focus solely on the speech act itself, omitting the verbal response to it, whereas the latter constitutes
an integral part of a conversational sequence from an interactional perspective.
To fill this gap, we ran a controlled experiment in French, involving the speech act of criticism as well as the
responses to criticisms in a work environment, in order to assess the favors that lead people to formulate an act
more or less directly. In this task, French-speaking participants from France (n=80) had to complete a written
DCT (Discourse Completion Test) in which 20 scenarios were presented to them in four different experimental
conditions, forming of a 2x2 design with 5 different scenarios in each condition. The first variable tested was
the power relation between participants (equal vs. unequal) and the horizontal distance between them (close
or distant). We also analyzed three interindividual variables likely to influence participants’ formulation of
criticisms and their responses to them: gender (male or female), age (below or above 30) and their position at
their work place (junior vs. senior position). Half of the participants (N=40) were asked to formulate criticisms,
and the other half to answer criticisms already formulated in the task (N=40).
Results from a logistic regression analysis of the data indicates that age, gender and work position were not
strong predictors of participants’ tendency to formulate criticisms in either a direct or an indirect manner, nor
did it influence their propensity to answer criticisms more or less directly. However, the two manipulated
variables did have a significant impact on the results, as participants tended to formulate more direct criti-
cisms when they were themselves in a powerful position at work, and they also tended to be more direct with
a distant person compared to a closer colleague. A more detailed analysis of the data also revealed that partic-
ipants use different modifying strategies depending on tested variables, with softeners being significantly less
used in a distant-superior relationship whereas intensifiers (threats) being significantly more used than in the
other experimental conditions. We conclude that the expression of criticism at work depends principally on
the power-distance relationship whereas individual differences have minor effects for the formulation of this
speech act, and also discuss future avenues of enquiry for experimental research on criticisms.
Keywords:
Experimental pragmatics, speech acts, criticism, Power-Distance relationship, individual variations, pragmatic
competence

1304
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An interview of a victim of repression in Argentina.


Negotiating the topics and the sense of the past

Lecture

Prof. Alejandra Vitale 1


1. Universidad de Buenos Aires

This paper arises from a research project directed by myself and funded by the University of Buenos Aires. It
examines the so-called archives of repression in Argentina and an oral archive with the voices of the victims.
It takes a rhetorical approach to discourse analysis (Amossy, 2000; Vitale, in press). Archives of repression
are documentary collections produced by repressive bodies of the security forces. One of the most important
archives is that created by the Intelligence Directorate of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires (Dirección
de Inteligencia de la Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, DIPBA). It started in 1956, a year after the coup
d’état that overthrew Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, and it was closed in 1998. The DIPBA archive is preserved
by the Provincial Commission for Memory. In 2008, the Provincial Commission for Memory created the so-
called Oral Archive. This happened during Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s first presidency. Kirchner served
two consecutive terms, from 2007 to 2011 and 2011 to 2015. The Oral Archive, with its testimonies from the
victims, encourages dialogue and confrontation between the point of view of these victims and that of the per-
petrators. Among the different sections of the Oral Archive, one consists of interviews with victims of political
and ideological surveillance by the DIPBA. This paper focuses on the testimony of Jorge Rulli, a leading figure
in the Peronist resistance. This movement fought for the return of Juan Domingo Perón to Argentina and the
lifting of the electoral ban on Peronism. Peron had been in exile since 1955. Rulli’s testimony was recorded in an
audio-visual interview conducted in his home by two Provincial Commission for Memory members on 11 May
2009. In this regard, I will only consider the verbal dimension of the interview, as recorded in the transcript
by the Commission. My objective is to describe the negotiations between the interviewee and the interviewers
on the issues raised for the interview and the meanings granted to the past. The methodology is based on the
French pragmatic approaches (Johansson & Suomela-Salmi, 2011) and particularly on Kerbrat-Orechioni’s pro-
posals on verbal interactions (Kerbrat-Orechioni, 2005, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997). Furthermore, I consider the use
of interviews in Oral History (Portelli, 2018).
References
Amossy, R. (2000) L’argumentation dans le discours. Paris: Armand Colin.
Johansson, M. & E. Suomela-Salmi (2011) “Énonciation: French pragmatic approach(es).” In J. Zienkowski, J.-
O. Östman, J. Verschueren (Eds) Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company: 71-101.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2005) Le discours en interaction, Collection U, Lettres, Linguistique. Paris: Armand Colin.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (1990, 1992, 1994) Les interactions verbales (3 vol.). Paris: A. Colin.
Kerbrat Orecchioni, C. (1997) “A multilevel approach in the study of talk-in-interaction,” Pragmatics 7:1, 1-20.
Portelli, S. (2018) “Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience,” The Oral History
Review45 (2): 239-248.
Vitale, M. A. (in press) “Enfoque retórico del análisis del discurso”. En Londoño Zapata., O. I. (Comp.) Métodos
del análisis del discurso. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Biblos.

1305
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An Investigation of Chinese Adult English Learners’


Comprehension of Sarcastic Tweets in English

Lecture

Mr. Xuan Li 1
1. Queen’s University Belfast

Xuan Li (PhD Student in Linguistics)


Queen’s University Belfast, UK
xli42@qub.ac.uk
Sarcasm is frequently utilized in individuals’ daily life for expressing offensive humor. However, this kind of
tricky language, sarcasm is much more difficult for non-native speakers (NNS) than native speakers (NS) to
comprehend (Kim, 2014). Therefore, this research was conducted under the relevance theoretical framework
proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986). It aims to investigate what kinds of cues and strategies Chinese adult
English learners use to comprehend sarcastic tweets in English and what kinds of difficulties they have in com-
prehending sarcastic tweets in English. The data set consisted of concurrent think-aloud protocols (TAP) and
semi-structured interviews from 20 CAELs and 10 native speakers (NS) studying in the UK. In the TAP and the
semi-structured interview, they were asked to verbalize their thoughts while comprehending 35 tweets (25 sar-
castic and 10 non-sarcastic) and to answer some follow-up questions. Analysis revealed that CAEL used certain
L1 schemas in their L2 comprehension process of sarcasm and different strategies, and cues were utilized by
CAEL and NS. In addition, the result showed that the difficulties in comprehension of sarcasm did not only result
from their language ability and lack of context knowledge.
This study provides an insight into the different strategies, cues and challenges involved in NS and NNS’ com-
prehension of sarcasm on Twitter and it will offer a new method for pinpointing and collecting sarcastic tweets
online, which could be applied in further studies. Besides, the research results could provide some pedagogical
inspirations for L2 pragmatics teaching, especially on sarcasm.
References:
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Harvard University Press.
Kim, J. (2014). How Korean EFL learners understand sarcasm in L2 English. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 193–206.

1306
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analysis of interaction features of high-school English


textbook: A conversation analysis perspective

Lecture

Dr. Esmaeel Abdollahzadeh 1


1. Iran University of Science and Technology

Abstract
Conversations play a significant role in learning a language as they are mostly the main artefacts through which
learners in second language learning contexts practice and learn language and develop their communicative
competence. Language teaching materials produced in textbooks need to promote authentic features of commu-
nication should they be used for language instruction purposes especially in English as a foreign language (EFL)
contexts. Course books often possess a plethora of conversations with different themes. Yet, there seems to be a
number of challenges in the teaching procedures and the purposes behind them. The aim of the present study
is to investigate interactional features of conversations presented in Iranian eleventh grade English textbook
Vision 2. To thid end, the conversation section of each unit was investigated. The examples of the interac-
tional practices and the sub-strands were obtained. Consequently, the frequency and the percentage for each
interactional practice was tabulated. The findings revealed that turn-taking as well as sequencing practices are
presented in the conversations while overall structuring and repair practices are missing in the conversations
in this textbook. In addition, lack of overall authenticity is noticeable in both the conversations and listening
and pronunciation sections. This absence in the application of interactional practices is not justifiable consid-
ering that the eleventh grade English textbook is supposed to be presenting an intermediate level of English
language in schools and make students ready to move on to the last year of high-school and enter university.
Interactional competence is of great importance in English language instruction and is currently neglected in
high-school textbooks.Implications for language teaching purposes will be discussed.

1307
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analysis of Pronominal Choices in African Suicide Notes

Lecture

Dr. Yunana Ahmed 1 , Mr. Daniel Danladi 1


1. Gombe State University

Suicide as an act of deliberately killing oneself is a universal problem and a global public health concern that
cuts across cultures. Eighty percent of suicides occur in developing countries (WHO 2021) and, according to the
World Health Organization, Africa has the highest rate of suicide in the world, with Nigeria having the leading
number. Yet, most of the efforts to examine the phenomenon of suicide come outside of Africa (e.g., Shneidman
and Farberow 1957, Osgood and Walker 1959, Gregory, 1999, Shapero, 2011). Most especially, the examination
of suicide notes from linguistics/pragmatics perspectives is sparse. The suicide note is discursive and therefore
needs serious linguistic attention. Drawing on Chilton’s (2004) legitimization and proximization framework and
computational linguistics, this work examines the pragmatic implications of pronominal choice in suicide notes
collected from Nigeria. Selected extracts are presented here:

1. I am highly indebted that I cannot afford to pay it. I decided to kill myself (commit suicide), please (in
the name of Allah (God)), take-care of our children.
2. I told you it is Bawa I want to marry, but you said I would not marry him except Alhaji Modi. You are the
one who put me in this situation.

In example one, the person says he is highly indebted but cannot tell the audience who he owes. Also, there is no
reference to the exact amount owed, the amount is glossed as ‘it’. There is a certain vagueness associated with
this lack of information that leaves room for any judgement on whether or not the suicide is justified. In this text
also, through the use of “I” the speaker takes responsibility for his action but recognizes that the consequences of
his action extend beyond him creating a rhetorical structure in which the writer makes a direct contrast between
“I decided to kill myself” with “take care of our children.” In the second example, the writer shifts from the use
of “I” in reporting the reason for the suicide to using the second person “you” as a responsible party for the
suicide which shows that the act of committing the suicide rests on some forces beyond the writer. One obvious
force in this text is the cultural practices of forced marriage by the family that take off the agency of the suicider
in deciding on whom to marry. From the two texts, it is not an accident that the circle of communality is larger
than the individual in the suicide texts as both writers, through the use of pronouns, shift the responsibility
and the consequences of the act of suicide from just an individual agency to group responsibility of family or
community. Thus, instead of viewing the Self as an independent, self-contained, and causative force guiding
events when working with people with suicidal thoughts in Africa, the collective must be paid attention to in
curtailing such situations. Insensitive to this African sense of experiencing reality will cause problems in our
understanding of suicidal ideation, and thus limit efforts to prevent it.

1308
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Analysis of Social Media Posts Emanating from Selected


Doxxed Actresses in Nigerian Kannywood Movie Industry

Lecture

Ms. Ummi Ibrahim 1


1. Gombe State University

The widespread adoption of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok by Nige-
rian netizens has led to positive developments like community formation, information discovery, image, and
video sharing. However, social media platforms have become an enormous source of online violent acts, in-
cluding bullying, hate speech, trolling, and doxxing. While considerable works have focused on examining
some of these social media-facilitated violence (Adediran 2021, Ayansola 2021), there is a paucity of studies on
doxxing in the Nigerian academic context, particularly from pragmatics perspective that pays attention to the
gendered nature of doxxing. Drawing on van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategy and Lazar’s (2018) feminist criti-
cal discourse analysis (FCDA), this paper examines social media comments emanating from the doxxing of four
selected female actors from the Nigerian Kannywood movie industry. The analysis begins by examining the in-
tertextual connection between the desire to harm and the deeply entrenched ideology that tries to control one
gender at the expense of the other. The study identifies two legitimization strategies from the data collected:
rationalization and the construction of the negative- other. The social media users’ comments on doxxed fe-
male actors use language that focuses on rationalizing the motives of the doxxers, which is achieved by framing
the action of the doxxer in terms of a morally acceptable act. They also engage in negative-other construction
of the female Kannywood actors treating the doxxed women as nonconformists and social deviants using ex-
cessive vitriolic online abusive language. Such construction has multiple effects on the victims’ offline lives
and can inflict irreparable emotional, professional, and physical harm onto already marginalized groups. Since
these women are perceived as nonconformists and social deviants, they are more likely than men to experience
doxxing. Doxxing is therefore not a random act of hostility in the Nigerian Kannywood movie industry but a
product of the existing intersecting layers of structural, systemic patriarchy and misogyny that aim at maintain-
ing unequal power relations and dominance

1309
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Animal metaphor as a co-joint enterprise of blame,


categorization, and emotional interaction on social media

Lecture

Dr. Ying Jin 1 , Prof. Dennis Tay 1


1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This study investigates blog comments about the management of donations during the coronavirus pandemic in
Wuhan, China. Rather than understanding animal metaphors as a cognitive process, we consider their usage as
a co-joint enterprise of categorizing and blaming. We downloaded anonymized user comments on Sina Weibo
during the first wave of the Coronavirus outbreak in China (December 1, 2019, to April 20 2020) using a Python
web crawler. In total, we collected 14540 comments containing 292253 Chinese characters. Invoking Conversa-
tion Analysis (CA), with its focus on sequential organization (Schegloff, 2007b) and societal membership (Sacks,
1972; Schegloff, 2007a), we show that animal metaphors like horses, maggots, dogs, etc. operate as a rejection of
a proposal, an evaluation of an action, and a curse on others. Most importantly, by assigning others to a certain
category, the text producer makes visible the relationship between the target’s actions, moral accountability,
and category-associated attributes. The use of animal metaphor, with its derogative connotations, almost al-
ways reflects the expression of anger. In online typed interactions, this display of anger is typically composed
of an animal metaphor and the emoji of an enraged face. The emoji functions as an anger token that invites
agreement, affiliation, and elaboration of the blame. We, therefore, argue that CA emphasizes the interactional
dimensions of metaphor research which complement predominant cognitive approaches.
Sacks, H. (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in
sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 325-345). Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007a). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(3), 462-482.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007b). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis I. Cambridge
University Press.

1310
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Apologies in “Entrevías” and “Vivir sin permiso” – a test of


pragmatic competence for learners of Spanish

Lecture

Dr. Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch 1


1. University of Southern California

Various studies have analyzed the linguistic encoding of apologies within the framework of speech acts (Blum-
Kulka & Olshtain, 1984; Blum-Kulka & Levenston, 1987; Escandell Vidal, 1995; Meier, 2010; inter alia). Con-
trastive studies have demonstrated only a partial equivalence of use, function and frequency of apologies
(Davies, 1987; Márquez Reiter, 2000; González Cruz, 2012; Bella, 2014).
Following the line of research proposed in Chodorowska-Pilch (2019), this study analyzes the usage of lo siento
(‘I’m sorry’ in English’) and other expressions of apology produced by native speakers of Spanish in the Netflix
series “Entrevías” (‘Wrong side of the tracks’) and “Vivir sin permiso” (’Unauthorized living’) and compares
them with English-speaking learners of Spanish. For this reason, excerpts from the movie will be used to survey
English-speaking students, testing their pragmatic competence in Spanish.
While applying concepts of positive and negative politeness by Brown & Levinson (1987), it will be shown to
what extent the use of lo siento and other apology expressions invoke the use of politeness strategies. Although
Blas Arroyo (2005: 313) considers apologies as strategies of negative politeness, Wagner & Roebuck (2010) give
examples of apologies that invoke both positive as well as negative politeness strategies.
This paper will show that the former and the latter proposal are partially corroborated illustrating the contrast
and differences in pragmatic competence of university students. While comparing native and acquired uses of
apology expressions, the final objective of this study is to offer possible recommendations for instructors who
are interested in improving the pragmatic competence of English-speaking students using apologies in Spanish.
REFERENCES
Bella, S. (2014). A contrastive study of apologies performed by Greek native speakers and English learners of
Greek as a foreign language. Pragmatics. Vol. 24 (1), pp. 679 – 713.
Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2005). Sociolingüística del español. Madrid: Cátedra.
Blum-Kulka, S. y Olshtain, E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization
Patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, 5, pp. 196-213.
Blum-Kulka, S. y Levenston, E. A. (1987). Lexical-Grammatical Pragmatic Indicators. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition. Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 155-170.
Brown, P. y Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Chodorowska-Pilch, M. (2019). “¿La sobregeneralización de lo siento por los alumnos angloparlantes?: Estudio
preliminar.” Sociocultural Pragmatics. An International Journal of Spanish Linguistics, 7.2: 206-230.
Davies, E. E. (1987). A Contrastive Approach to the Analysis of Politeness Formulas. Applied Linguistics, Vol. 8
(1), pp. 75-88.
Escandell Vidal, V. M. (1995). Cortesía, fórmulas convencionales y estrategias indirectas. Revista Española de
Lingüística, 25, pp. 31-66.
González Cruz, M.I. (2012). Apologizing in Spanish. A study of the strategies used by university students in Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria. Pragmatics. Vol. 22 (4), pp. 543-565.
Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests and
apologies.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Meier, Ardith J. (2010). Culture and its effect on speech act performance. En Martínez-Flor, A. & Usó-Juan, E.
(Eds.), Speech Act Performance. (pp. 75-90). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

1311
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Apology in the discourse of Japanese Olympic Athletes

Lecture

Dr. Chie Yoshinaga 1 , Dr. Ryo Takamura 2


1. Sanyo gakuen university, 2. Rissho University

An apology has often been studied in the level of speech acts and cross-cultural
pragmatics. However, sociolinguistic factors have little been considered. Therefore, this
paper addresses the apology in the context of sports. As some sports have a strong
connection with a nation such as judo or karate, the people’s expectation for the sports
are relevant to the athletes’ apologies when they miss out on a medal. Besides such a
nationwide factor, the more individuals are featured in media, the more chances they
need to apologize in Japan, because they feel they betray the people. In this paper, we
investigate the post-game discourses of the five Japanese athletes who participated in
the Olympic Games held in Tokyo and Beijing in 2021 and 2022, and study their
apologies in relation to the social factors.
We use their interviews and posts on Instagram as data for the analysis of the five
specific athletes’ discourses. They are divided into three categories. The first category is
the case where the athletes missed out on a medal. For instance, a ski jumper, Sara
Takanashi who was disqualified for violating suit regulations apologized on her
Instagram by expressing mooshiwake arimasen deshita ‘I’m sorry’. Kohei Uchimura, a
gymnast, expressed dogezashite ayamaritai ‘I will kneel down on the ground and
apologize’. Because they were the most prospective athletes to receive a medal, they
were nearly forced to express an apology. The second category is the case where the
athletes obtained a silver medal but still expressed an apology. For instance, although a
Greco-Roman wrestler, Kenichiro Fumita obtained a silver medal, he
said mooshiwakenai ‘I’m sorry’ for his result. A Judo practitioner, Shoichiro Mukai also
expressed mooshiwakenai kimochi ga aru ‘I feel sorry’. Fumita and Mukai’s apologies
drew the attention from The New York Times (Cf. Yamane 2011). By contrast, a
Japanese world-famous figure skater, Yuzuru Hanyu did not apologize even though he
missed out on a medal. With his right ankle injury, Hanyu tried a quad axel, only to fail.
Such an attempt under an unfavorable condition did not call for an apology. This is
referred to as the third category.
The athletes’ apologies function as a remedial work (Goffman 1971). To apologize in
public remediates their offensive to the expectation of their spectators and teammates.
The goals of this paper are 1) to describe how apologies are made, 2) to find the
discourse patterns for an apology and 3) to consider the social factors upon the Japanese
athletes.
References
Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. New
York: Basic Books.
Yamane, Chie. 2011. Orinpikku sensyu no intabyuu danwa bunseki [A discourse
analysis of interviews among Olympic athletes]. In: Yasuko Kanda, Chie Yamane and
Sachiko Takagi (eds). Orinpikku no genogaku [The linguistics of the Olymipcs].
Okayama: Daigaku Kyoiku Shuppan.

1312
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Asymmetrical talk: an argument for the conjoint


co-constitution of asymmetry in doctor-patient interaction

Lecture

Dr. Ahmad Izadi 1


1. University of Bayreuth

This presentation argues for the conjoint co-constitution of symmetry and asymmetry (hereafter both written
as asymmetry) in interaction, using empirical data from doctor-patient interaction to support the argument.
A conjoint co-constituting model of communication (CCMC) proposes that interaction is shaped by the conflu-
ence of utterances in at least three positions. This three-position architecture of communication also applies to
relational phenomena. Interactional pragmatics provides significant insights into the ways a central account
of human relationships, namely, relational connection and separation, or face, is conjointly co-constituted in
talk-in-interaction. Such a view is consistent with a central stance of Conversation Analysis and (more gener-
ally) ethnomethodology that relationships are endogenous to talk. Arundale (2020) foregrounds the study of
relationships in human interaction by arguing that ‘relationships are created, sustained, and changed as partic-
ipants engage resources for interacting in constituting interpreting of turn taking, action, meaning and many
more‘ (p. 289). And, asymmetry, being essentially a relational account, can best be investigated in a relating
theory that is consistent with methods and premises of CA and provides a comprehensive set of both theoretical
presumptions and analytical tools to explore the delicate and often elusive nature of asymmetry in interac-
tion. This paper, therefore, contextualizes the omni-relevant account of asymmetry in interaction in the con-
joint co-constituting model of relating, and more specifically in Face Constituting Theory, proposed by Arundale
(2010, 2020). Furthermore, the study argues that asymmetry can best be investigated in view of the underlying
moral order of social action formation by speakers (Schegloff, 2007) and social action ascription by recipients
in conversation (Levinson, 2013). The moral order refers to a set of rights and responsibilities with regard to
epistemics (Heritage, 2012), deontic, (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2014; Stevanovic and Svennevig, 2015) benefac-
tive (Heritage and Maynard, 2014) and emotional (Peräkylä, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen, 2012; Stevanovic and
Peräkylä, 2014) backgrounds. The data come from detailed transcriptions (based on Jefferson´s transcription
conventions) of 20 hours of naturally occurring talk between 10 specialized physicians and 50 patients in medi-
cal consultation visits in the private sector in Iran. The analyses are informed by Conversation Analysis and Face
Constituting Theory (Arundale, 2010, 2020) and show how accounts of symmetry and asymmetry are conjointly
co-constituted along the conjoint co-constitution of relational connection and separation. The study hopes to
offer theoretical contributions to the elusive (although well-researched) endogenous account of asymmetry in
talk and its correspondence with the exogenous account of power.
Keywords: asymmetry, conjoint co-constitution, doctor-patient interaction, Face Constituting Thoery, conver-
sation analysis, moral order

1313
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Behind the scenes of remote teaching in the pandemic context


and the new face-to-face in public schools: digital hope or a
necropolitical education?

Lecture

Ms. Viviane dos Santos Cavalcanti 1


1. SEEDUC-Rio

The present research in progress results from the narratives of teachers who work in public schools in Rio de
Janeiro and aims to understand the backstage of remote teaching and our conditions of realization in the context
of a pandemic through narrative constructions and positions (Bamberg, 1997, 2002). The study is, therefore,
qualitative and interpretive (Denzin & Lincoln, 2006), besides it proposes an analysis of an autoethnographic
bias, given that, its author is also part of the teaching staff of public schools. The data presented in this research
are generated in interactions in qualitative semi-structured interviews and recorded in audio (Mishler, 1986; De
Fina, 2009) and through whatsapp. In addition, the interviews in this study are analyzed based on the theoretical
perspective in Narrative Analysis (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972; Riessman, 2008; Bastos & Biar, 2015),
more precisely in the conception of non-canonical narratives, micronarratives (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou,
2008) and life stories (Linde, 1993), focusing on life experiences and micro order positions that dialogue with
macro discourses. The research is situated in the context of Contemporary Applied Linguistics (Moita Lopes et
al ., 2006; 2013) with the advent of the pandemic outbreak, which directed this research theme to dialogues with
the concepts of affective equality (Apple, 2017), hope (Crapanzano, 2003; Miyazaki, 2004; Silva, 2021; Cortella,
2014) and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2016) linked to the digital path of unofficial tools opposing the official ones
as an attempt to reach and survive teaching and learning in the public network.

1314
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Bú kèqi (不客⽓Don’t be polite) and Yào yǒu lǐmào (要有礼貌You


need to be polite) – Understanding Chinese Politeness

Lecture

Dr. Qing Li Kinnison 1


1. Wofford College

Bú bié kèqi is a formulaic response to xièxie (谢谢thank you) in Chinese, like “You’re welcome” is to “Thank you”
in English. Kèqi is often translated as polite/politeness, so the literal translation of this phrase is “Don’t be polite.”
Chinese parents often instruct their children: “Yào yǒu lǐmào,” (You need to be polite), as lǐmào is another word
translated as polite/politeness. So, what is Chinese politeness? To be (polite - lǐmào) or not to be (polite - kèqi),
that is the question. Researchers on Chinese politeness choose one or mix them, but they fail to explain the dis-
crepancy in Chinese behaviors: respectful, deferential, and humble with some people and then disrespectful,
blunt, and rude with others. This study aims to explore the differences between the two lexemes because, the
author contends, knowing the distinction is the answer to understanding Chinese politeness. First, neither of
these two lexemes is equivalent to English polite/politeness, nor do they designate Chinese politeness by them-
selves. They are distinctive both in etymology and usage. Lǐmào derives from Confucian lǐ (ritual propriety),
a guiding principle for Chinese social conduct in respecting hierarchical social orders (Cua, 1983). In contrast,
kèqi was used first in Zuǒ Zhuàn (左传), an ancient Chinese narrative history describing a feigned act of a warrior
in a battle during the Warring Period (520BC). Examples of different usage of the two words are found in over
800 sentences with lǐmào and over 750 with kèqi. These sentences were selected from stories, novels, newspa-
per articles, speeches, blogs, etc., and listed online as samples for composition. The data shows that lǐmào and
kèqi are by no means synonyms as they are used in different contexts and are unexchangeable in many cases.
Lǐmào is often used together with civility or civilization (⽂明wénmíng), indicating it is related to civility and
civilization (Sifianou 2019:54). It is used as a criterion of morality (道德标准 dàodé biāozhǔn). It denotes one
has self-cultivation (修养xiūyǎng) and a good upbringing (有教养you jiàoyǎng), etc. But these positive attributes
are not used with kèqi, as it often implies fakeness and insincerity, as a blogger states: “In many cases, kèqi is
not applied to express self-cultivation or lǐmào, but to create [personal] distance.” The author argues that lǐmào
and kèqi are the two ends of a spectrum of Chinese politeness. Unlike the Anglophone culture believing, ideally,
that everyone should be treated politely, regardless of social status or relational distance, Chinese politeness,
however, is conditional and selective based on hierarchical orders and relational distance. It is more outward
performance and formality with those high in the hierarchy or with acquaintances, i.e., colleagues, to observe
social harmony, but not with strangers or insiders. It is frowned upon as kèqi, fake or insincere, if performed
to kins and family because it destroys intimacy and solidarity.

1315
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Call-takers impoliteness in Estonian emergency calls

Lecture

Mr. Tiit Hennoste 1 , Mrs. Andriela Rääbis 1 , Ms. Piret Upser 1 , Ms. Kirsi Laanesoo 1 , Ms. Andra
Annuka-Loik 1
1. University of Tartu

The topic of our presentation is call-takers linguistic impoliteness (rudeness, face attack) towards callers in Es-
tonian emergency calls. Our research questions are (a) in what social actions (speech acts) impoliteness occurs,
(b) what triggers it, and (c) how the callers respond to impoliteness.
Our data consists of audio-recorded calls from the emergency call corpus of the University of Tartu. When defin-
ing impoliteness, we are based on reactions of interactants, in which rudeness is assessed by the interactants
themselves, and linguistic markers of impoliteness found in previous studies (Bousfield 2007, Culperer 2011,
Taylor 2011), including those used in emergency calls (Tracy & Tracy 1998).
Preliminary results reveal that there are two groups of impolite social actions. One group consists of reproaches
to the caller, which are themselves impolite actions. Some of the reproaches concern the information provided
by the caller (e.g., providing insufficient or incorrect information), some of the reproaches criticize the making
of an emergency call if the incident does not deserve it. These are often accompanied by patronizing comments
about the caller. Another group consists impolitely formulated questions, requests, refusal of help and unilat-
eral closing of calls by call-takers.
The analysis shows that impoliteness is mostly triggered by the caller. These dismissals can be divided into three.
The largest group includes drunk or rude callers, and those who do not follow social norms of interaction (e.g.,
do not answer repeated questions). The second group consists of cases where the information provided by the
caller does not meet the standards of the call-takers or the Emergency Response Center. Only in a few cases the
call-takers initiate an impolite social action without the influence of the caller.
Callers rarely respond to rudeness: the analysis showed only three cases of explicit response by callers to the to
the call-takers’ impolite actions in our data.
References
Bousfield, Derek 2007. Impoliteness, preference organization and conducivity. Multilingua 26 (1-2): 1-33.
Culpeper, J. 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence (Vol. 28). Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Charlotte 2011. Negative politeness forms and impoliteness functions in institutional discourse: a
corpus-assisted approach. In: B. Davies, M. Haugh, & A. J. Merrison, Situated Politeness, New York: Continuum.
209-225.
Tracy, Karen, Tracy, Sarah J., 1998. Rudeness at 911. Reconceptualizing face and face attack. Human Commu-
nication Research 25, 225-251.

1316
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Celebrification and viewer interaction in microcelebrities’


product promotion videos

Lecture

Prof. Chi-hua Hsiao 1


1. Tunghai University

This study adopts digital ethnography and discourse analysis to investigate celebrification in product promotion
videos created by microcelebrities based in Taiwan. To explore the communicative functions of celebrification
practices, in particular how product features motivate novel practices, I focus on three interrelated levels of
analysis on videos and viewers’ comments collected from the microcelebrities’ YouTube channels. First, I exam-
ine how microcelebrities use multimodal resources to describe products and advertise them. I then analyze how
microcelebrities present themselves via celebrification practices to project images suitable for product brands.
I also examine viewers’ comments in response to microcelebrities’ self-presentation and celebrification strate-
gies. I argue that celebrification in product promotion videos constitutes a creative means of communication
for microcelebrities to craft a “self” according to product features (Goffman 1959). Furthermore, this analy-
sis shows that celebrification is not just about making oneself stand out and become famous. Celebrification
contains one’s capability to express the salient aspects of oneself that match product highlights and to endorse
products while maintain some sense of “authenticity” perceived by viewers. In product promotion videos, us-
ing celebrification delicately to customize self-presentation for products and to provide viewers with genuine
opinions is a media literacy the demonstrates microcelebrities’ competence related to product advertisement
and social protocol.

1317
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Challenges and limitations of analyzing impression


management

Lecture

Mrs. Éva Szabó 1


1. University of Szeged; MTA-SZTE-DE Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics and Informatics

Impression management is a complex, productive phenomenon which has been found to play a cruial role in
social interactions. Social-psychological and pragmatic research analyzes its different levels and aspects, char-
acteristics depending on the cultural, situational, and contextual factors (Goffman 1959; Leary 1995; Archer
2018, etc.).

There have been several attempts to describe impression management. According to Schlenker (1980), impres-
sion management is an un/conscious attempt to achieve a certain image and control of the projected self-image
in real or imagined social interactions. Impression management manifests on different levels of awareness,
and it affects verbal and nonverbal behavior, including the choice of linguistic items (Verschueren 1999). Many
studies define several patterns called impression management strategies and tactics which are adaptable for
creating, maintaining or defending certain impressions. Nevertheless, the established taxonomies vary accord-
ing to the analyzed corpora, methodological processes, and the scope of the acquired definition. Also, many
scholars have explored external and internal factors which influence the usage of impression management
tools by interlocutors such as motivation, short or long-term goals, current or potential image, and audience.
The investigation of impression management has basically been founded on researchers’ observations and spo-
ken corpora.
This problem-based research aims to investigate impression management in Hungarian political discourses and
everyday communication. Its object is to define the factors and methods which may be necessary and suitable
for the pragmatic investigation of impression management in order to gain a wider scope of human interac-
tion in this aspect. The research faces theoretical and methodological diversity and attempts to demonstrate
what problems emerge during the application of various theories, methods, and analysis techniques in the
study of impression management. This paper presents the investigation of Hungarian political debate shows,
an open-ended discourse completion test (DCT) aiming to trigger impression management strategies filled out
by Hungarian university students, and an attitude questionnaire which focuses on the relation between atti-
tudes and linguistic items related to impression management. Combining these various types of data sources
and analytical methods the paper introduces new methodological pathways for analyzing impression manage-
ment. The study concludes that the applied methods separately offer limited insight into the understanding
of impression management, but the combination of data collection and analytical methods may provide the
possibility of verifying the components and factors of impression management and may lead to well-grounded
results.
Archer, D. (2018): Impression management in the Early Modern English courtroom. Journal of Historical Prag-
matics 19.2, 205–222.
Goffman, E. (1959): The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Leary, M. R. (1995): Self-presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior. Madison: Brown &
Benchmark Publishers.
Schlenker, B. R. (1980): Impression Management. The Self-concept, Social Identity, and Interpersonal Relations.
Monterey: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.
Verschueren, J. (1999): Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold Publishers.

1318
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Changing sociocultural context, changing social meanings of


gender references in the pragmatics of translation

Lecture

Prof. Zhuo Jing-Schmidt 1


1. University of Oregon

The social meaning of gendered referents has changed dramatically in the last 5 or so decades in response
to changing sociocultural contexts. How does this change impact pragmatic decisions in translation across
gender-diverse languages? This presentation examines the changing social meanings of gender and gendered
references in translation from a gender-neutral language to a language with pronominal gender marking in the
larger sociocultural context of Anglo-American developments in linguistic gender neutrality. This study draws
attention to the social meaning of gender representation in the pragmatics of translational and its place in prag-
matics in general.
Chinese is grammatically gender-neutral and number-unmarked. Its isolating typological profile poses difficul-
ties for translation to a typologically different language such as English with number and pronominal gender
marking. In this work-in-progress talk I trace how English translations of the ancient Chinese text Tao Te Ching
(TTC) or Dao De Jing ‘Book of the Way’, ascribed to the sixth-century BCE philosopher, Lao Tzu (Laozi), have
changed over time in handling gender as a translation problem arising from the typological differences be-
tween the source and the target languages. I specifically focus on the history of how gender-indefinite personal
references in the Chinese original are rendered and recontextualized in English in relation to the larger socio-
cultural shift toward gender parity in language use in the Anglo-American cultural context where gendered
references have taken on new social meanings.
Quantitative analyses of frequency changes in generic masculine forms and qualitative semantic-pragmatic
analyses of such forms were conducted based on a corpus of fifteen best known translations published between
1891 and 2003. The results showed a steady decrease of generic masculine forms in the TTC translations corpus.
A strong correlation was found between this trend and the overall decrease of generic masculine uses in the
corpus of Google Books n-grams within the same time interval. Scrutinizing these results for historical prag-
matics, I argue that the pragmatic and semiotic interplay varies not only across cultural contexts in translation
practice, but the recontextualization of the source semantics also changes across historical contexts shaped by
macro sociocultural shifts in the target culture. The irony of this history is the gender-neutral Way in the orig-
inal text finally came to the English-speaking audience thanks to the second wave feminist language reform in
the U.S. after the masculine Way, semantically inaccurate as it is, had prevailed for over a century.
Selected references:
Cameron, Deborah (1992). Feminism and Linguistic Theory (2nd ed.). New York, NY
Curzan, Anne (2003). Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Corbett, Greville G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge University Press.
Eckert, P. & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003).Language and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman.
Foucault, M. (1998).The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London, Penguin
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & communication,
23(3-4), 193-229.

1319
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Children’s and adults’ sensitivity to over-informativeness and


under-informativeness in referential communication

Lecture

Dr. Chiung-chih Huang 1 , Dr. Kanyu Yeh 1


1. National Chengchi University

Effective communication requires interlocutors to be informative. According to the Maxim of Quantity (Grice,
1975), the speaker should be as informative as required but no more informative than needed. Previous studies,
however, have shown inconsistent results as to whether adults and children are sensitive to informativeness
as speakers and as hearers. Some studies reported that adult speakers and hearers are sensitive to under-
informativeness but not to over-informativeness (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2006); other studies revealed that adult
speakers and hearers are sensitive to both under- and over-informativeness (Davies & Katsos, 2013). As for chil-
dren, it has been suggested that children often fail to detect pragmatic violations of informativeness as hearers
even though they have little difficulty producing optimally informative utterances as speakers (e.g., Sonnen-
schein, 1982). Other studies, however, demonstrated that children are pragmatically competent as speakers
and hearers, but that they lack metalinguistic awareness about accepting or rejecting pragmatically infelicitous
utterances (e.g., Davies & Katsos, 2010).
In order to gain a better picture of this issue, the present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking adults
and children were sensitive to informativeness in referential communication as speakers, hearers, and met-
alinguistic raters. Twenty-seven 5-year-old children and twenty-eight adults participated in three tasks: a pro-
duction task, a comprehension task, and an appropriateness rating task. The tasks were presented on a laptop,
and the materials were designed using the E-prime software. The trials involved an array of four objects ma-
nipulated with the presence or absence of a contrast set (i.e., two items of the same type contrasted in size). The
responses and stimuli were classified into four informativeness types (over-informative, under-informative,
optimal-1, and optimal-2). A 5-point Likert scale was adopted in the rating task. Each of the tasks consisted of
24 target trials for the child participants and 40 target trials for the adult participants; filler trials were also in-
cluded. The informativeness types, the accuracy rates, the reaction times, and the rating scores were analyzed.
The results of the production task showed that while all of the adults’ responses were optimally informative,
the children’s responses were frequently under-informative. As suggested by Matthews et al. (2007), children
may not realize that to refer means to describe differences. The results of the comprehension task showed that
while the adults were sensitive to both under- and over-informativeness, the children were insensitive to over-
informativeness. The results may be related to the fact that unlike under-informativenss, over-informativeness
does not preclude establishing reference for the hearers. The results of the rating task showed that while the
adults’ rating scores for under-, over- and optimally-informative utterances were significantly different, the
children’s rating scores showed no significant difference. It appears that the children had difficulty judging
the appropriateness about informativeness at this age. This study demonstrated that the adults followed the
Maxim of Quantity in referential communication as speakers, hearers, and metalinguistic raters. The children,
however, seemed to have asymmetrical sensitivity to under- and over-informativeness as speakers and hearers;
in addition, they appeared to have limited metalinguistic awareness about informativeness.

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Chinese politeness revisited: evidence from the Yijing ‘Book


of Changes’

Lecture

Dr. Anita Huang 1


1. Columbia University

Previous works on Chinese politeness all emphasize modesty (humbleness, self-denigration, elevation of oth-
ers) as the most important guiding principle of Chinese communicative behaviors as observed in the system
of historical honorific forms of address and practiced in the Confucius rituals (Gu, 1990; Pan & Kádár, 2011).
Many trace the origin of li ‘rites’ and limao ‘politeness’ to the Liji ‘Book of Rites’. However, li ‘rites’ was already
under threat when the Liji was canonized. Most of the honorific forms have disappeared in everyday speech.
Some even claim that Chinese lack negative face to counter Brown & Levinson’s (B&L’s) politeness theory (1987).
Very little is said about Chinese impoliteness. In this study I reexamine Chinese (im)politeness through a careful
reading of the most ancient and influential classic, the Yijing ‘Book of Changes’, which predates the Liji, and is
a collective work of ancient sages’ wisdom including that of Confucius. Though the word li ‘rites’ did not stem
from the Yijing, the unfolding of the line-statements in the qiān‘humbleness’ hexagram reveals that Chinese
possess both positive and negative face and that both politeness and impoliteness are motivated by the pursuit
of auspiciousness.
Based on the teachings of the Yijing and B&L’s work, my study reexamines the notion of “self-face” in Cheng’s self-
politeness model (2001) and challenges his approach, which discards B&L’s factors (power, distance, and rank
of the imposition) that influence the assessment of a face-threatening act (FTA) when calculating the degree of
self-face loss. Under his account the threat to a speaker’s face is evaluated depending on the confrontationality
of a communicative event, the gravity of the threat which consists of two aspects: the severity and directness of
the FTA such as a complaint, and the severity and consequence of doing a self-FTA (SFTA) such as an apology.
The greater the self-face loss, the higher the number of a super strategy one would choose and vice versa (with-
holding an apology being the highest and boldly apologizing being the lowest). However, it is unclear how the
confrontationality of an event, the severity of a FTA, and the consequence of a SFTA should be calculated. While
Cheng would apologize to his wife in response to her complaint: “you left the shoes in the living room again,”
a husband who is in a bad mood, with a tremendous ego, or sees his wife as an inferior would not. During the
2021 U.S.-China summit in Anchorage, Secretary Blinken went boldly on record to admit faults even without
being asked to do so, while Chinese delegates avoided questions raised, risking being perceived as rude, despite
a high level of confrontationality and the gravity of the threat. Without stipulating a separate model for self-
politeness, I propose to add a dynamically calculated weight to evaluate self-face (mianzi ‘face’) which varies
depending on one’s status, power, emotions, urgency, goals, etc., as revealed in the Yijing.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Code-switching and Code-mixing in Parsi Gujarati: A


Structural Analysis

Lecture

Ms. Scherezade Dastur 1 , Dr. Anindita Sahoo 1


1. Indian Institute of Technology Madras

The present study focuses on the constraint-based structural analysis of code-switching (CS) and code-mixing
(CM) between Parsi Gujarati (a variety of Gujarati), and English, based on the observations of Parsi (Indian
Zoroastrian) speech, using the Interactional Linguistics framework (Ford, 1993; Ochs, Schegloff & Thompson,
1996; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2001). The objectives are three-fold. First, to identify the syntactic characteriza-
tion of CS and CM in Parsi Gujarati (PG) discourse. Second, to explore which aspects of the English grammatical
system are morphologically and syntactically integrated into the grammar of PG. Third, to examine whether the
formal aspects sufficiently describe and explain the occurrences of CS and CM in PG.
The present study deals with four major constraints: the size-of-constituent constraint, the complementizer con-
straint, the conjunction constraint, and the determiner constraint (Kachru, 1978). The data for the current study
was collected using audio-visual recordings of naturally-occurring conversations among Parsis. Our analysis
reveals that the determiner and the size-of-constituent constraints (1-2) are adhered to but the complementizer
and conjunction constraints (3-4) are violated. Regarding the second objective, it is observed that occurrences
of morphological and syntactic integration of English elements into PG, are manifested (5).
(1) *tu this bicaar-i chokr-i-n-i vaat
2SG this poor-SGF girl- SGF-GEN- SGF talk
kar-t-o-t-o?
do-IMPFV-SGM-COP.PST-SGM
‘Were you talking about this poor girl?’
(2) that is the reason aapre diu-thi sanjaan aav-ii g-y-aa
that is the reason 1PL Diu-ABL Sanjan come-PST go-PFV-PL
‘That is the reason we came to Diu from Sanjan.’
(3) I’m glad ke my grandmother made me learn Gujarati.
(4) e-ne 12th commerce ki-dh-u but e-ne nai
th
3SG-ACC 12 commerce do-PFV-SGN but 3SG-ACC NEG
gam-y-u
like-PFV-SGN
‘She did 12th in commerce but she did not like it.’
(5) ma-ne gam-e eTle hu mang-aa-u papeT-aa-n-aa
1SG-ACC like-3 that’s why 1SG bring-CAUS-1SG potato-PL-GEN-PL
ne aa-n-aa te-n-aa
and this-GEN-PL that-GEN-PL
‘I like (fritters) that’s why I make (him) bring them (for me), of potatoes and the like.’

To analyse the examples given above, we have used the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton and Jake,
2009) which has been tested favourably against the data that are presented here. The model reflects the Uniform
Structure Principle that motivates an explanation for which structures occur and do not occur in CS. Therefore,
a thorough study, using this model, on the formal account of code-switching and code-mixing along with the
structural constraints of PG would provide insights to understand the communicative process and language
behaviour of bilinguals better.

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References
Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2001). Introducing interactional linguistics. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & M. Selting
(Eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics (pp. 1-22). John Benjamins.
Ford, C. E. (1993). Grammar in interaction: Adverbial clauses in American English conversations. Cambridge
University Press.
Kachru, B. B. (1978). Toward structuring code-mixing: An Indian perspective. International Journal of the Soci-
ology of language. 16.
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J. (2009). A universal model of code-switching and bilingual language processing and
production. In B. E. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching (pp.
336-357). Cambridge University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Coherence and common ground in Facebook ‘group tagging’


interactions: Approaching platform-specific communicative
practices

Lecture

Mr. Vinicio Ntouvlis 1


1. University of Vienna

This study presents a sociopragmatic approach to ‘group tagging’, a platform-specific communicative practice
that is unique to Facebook (FB). When engaging in group tagging, FB users tag the titles of FB groups in posts
and comments, so that these tagged titles may effectively constitute utterances. This results in stretches of
interaction consisting of tagged FB group titles, which appear in hyperlink format and thereby differ from plain
typed text. These titles functioning as utterances typically belong to pre-constructed FB groups, which are seen
as existing primarily for the purpose of being tagged, and are thereby labeled ‘tag groups’. In (1), commenter A
tags a group (marked in bold) intended for mocking unsupported claims, and B responds also tagging a group.
(1) A: Source: Dude, trust me.
B: Hey I’m in that group
[Screenshot: https://ucloud.univie.ac.at/index.php/s/l0fVFIUgWziAr14]

The extensive reliance of this communicative practice on platform infrastructure (v. FB groups, tagging), which
is mobilized in a unique way for interactional purposes, invites questions concerning how (or whether) group
tagging interactions may function as conversations for users engaging in them.
In this vein, the present study asks how group tagging interactions are treated as coherent by FB users. For this
examination, coherence is understood from a discursive pragmatic perspective as an interactional achievement
(Bublitz 2011) with a particular emphasis on common ground as a key factor in coherence establishment. Given
the study’s sociopragmatic orientation towards the ‘local’ characteristics of interactions, special attention is paid
to the platform’s infrastructural elements since they are central to group tagging. The routine achievement
of coherence in group tagging interaction is thereby also treated as connected to the platform’s affordances,
inspired by recent developments in (Digital) Conversation Analysis (cf. Jucker 2021).
Methodologically, the analysis is based on data from a digital ethnographic study of two FB groups thematically
focused on ‘tag groups’. The observational data is treated with an analytical apparatus inspired by Conversation
Analysis, and the approach is additionally informed by interview data from semi-structured interviews with FB
group administrators familiar with group tagging.
The findings suggest that group tagging engenders coherent multi-party interactions for users on the basis of
common ground established through the users’ shared histories of socialization on FB. Specifically, to partici-
pate in group tagging conversations, users rely on: (a) shared learning concerning FB’s affordances; (b) dynamic
communicative repertoires which include FB groups as stylized communicative resources; and (c) media ide-
ologies (Gershon 2010) concerning FB’s infrastructure.
By examining a unique, platform-based communicative practice, the study illustrates how user-oriented, local-
ized approaches can start from turn-by-turn micro-analysis to reveal how the dynamic (re)interpretations of
social media infrastructure birth new forms of interaction that are uniquely meaningful for niche communities
of social media users.
References
Bublitz, Wolfram. 2011. “Cohesion and Coherence.” In Discursive Pragmatics, ed. by Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola
Östman, and Jef Verschueren, 27-49. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gershon, Ilana. 2010. “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (2): 283–93.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Jucker, Andreas H. 2021. “Methodological Issues in Digital Conversation Analysis.” Discourse, Context & Media
42 (August): 100520.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Common ground updates do not depend on how information


is conveyed: a recognition memory study

Lecture

Ms. Eleanor Miller 1 , Prof. Mikhail Kissine 1


1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Assertions and implicatures typically convey new information, whereas presuppositions reference given con-
tent. But any content can be syntactically asserted, implicated or presupposed. Assertion, implicature, presup-
position and conventional implicature are classically distinguished in the literature according to contributions
to truth values, projection, and at-issueness (Beaver et al., 2017).
One seminal theoretical distinction is that of Stalnaker (2002): conversations take part against a backdrop of
shared information, or common ground, made up of true presuppositions. Assertions are candidate common
ground propositions. Speakers can presuppose those propositions which are in the common ground, but may
also act as if they are presupposing content that is not in the common ground. Hearers are expected to accommo-
date these informative presuppositions, adding them to the common ground only to understand the utterance.
Accordingly, presupposed content is not expected to update the common ground like asserted (or implicated)
content. Results from the experimental literature vary: while some results indicate that accommodation is
minimal (Tiemann et al, 2015), others show that informative presuppositions are not ignored (Bacovcin et al.,
2019).
In three experiments conducted in English, we compared common ground updates across forms, using recog-
nition memory as a proxy, because content that can be referenced in future conversation is necessarily re-
membered. We constructed a short story in which 12 targets were either asserted (“The driver was texting”),
presupposed (“The driver stopped texting when their eyes met”), conventionally implicated (“the driver, who
was texting, met her eyes”), or conversationally implicated (“Who still texts and drives? She wondered”). Par-
ticipants read this story and, either immediately or after a delay of several days, completed a recognition test.
Half of all participants were further distracted while reading the story. We found no significant differences in
recognition memory across forms.
We then hypothesized that content may update the common ground quantitatively but be qualified differently.
We replicated the first experiment with a within-participant design and collected certainty ratings per answer.
Experiment 2 replicated our initial results and certainty ratings showed no significant differences. We then
asked whether presupposition may trigger better verbatim memory, leading participants to derive the content
only when cued by the recognition test. Experiment 3 found very low and similar verbatim recognition across
forms. It thus appears that participants do indeed accommodate and remember presupposed contents similarly
to assertions, implicatures and conventional implicatures.
References
Bacovcin, H. A., Zehr, J., & Schwarz, F. (2019). To accommodate or to ignore?: The presuppositions of again and
continue across contexts. Glossa, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.402
Beaver, D. I., Roberts, C., Simons, M., & Tonhauser, J. (2017). Questions under discussion: Where information
structure meets projective content. Annual Review of Linguistics, 3, 265–284. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-
linguistics-011516-033952
Stalnaker, R. (2002). Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy, 25(5–6), 701–721.
https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1020867916902
Tiemann S., Kirsten M., Beck S., Hertrich I., Rolke B. (2015) Presupposition Processing and Accommoda-
tion: An Experiment on wieder (‘again’) and Consequences for Other Triggers. In: Schwarz F. (eds) Exper-
imental Perspectives on Presuppositions. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 45. Springer, Cham.

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_2

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Complex structures in real communications between pilots


and air traffic controllers: making a case for a pragmatic
analysis of Aviation English

Lecture

Dr. Malila Prado 1 , Dr. Adriana Porcellato 2


1. BNU-HKBU United International College, 2. Universidade de Sao Paulo

International radio communications between pilots and air traffic controllers are held in English and are highly
prescribed, so as to guarantee flight safety. This prescriptive language consists of Standard Phraseology, a set of
fixed phrases to be used in determined phases of flight, and what the UN agency International Civil Aviation Or-
ganization (ICAO) regards as plain language (ICAO, 2010), a more conversational language employed when the
unexpected – such as engine failures, bird strikes and flight control issues – happens. In order to be licensed for
international operations, pilots and controllers undergo aviation English tests that are presumably based on the
Language Proficiency Requirements (LPRs – ICAO, 2010), put forth by ICAO to establish proficiency levels and
parameters for language teaching and testing. To understand the language used in communications between
pilots and controllers, corpus pragmatics studies were carried out through the Radio Telephony Plain English
Corpus (RTPEC, Prado & Tosqui-Lucks, 2019), which contains transcriptions of 130 pilot-controller communica-
tions over abnormal situations, with a total of 110,737 words. We automatically tagged the corpus for parts of
speech (POS) to investigate it quantitatively for items that are listed in the LPRs complex structures glossary
(Prado & Porcellato, 2021). Now focusing on a qualitative examination of the complex grammar of the plain lan-
guage, this paper investigates clause combination, more specifically those listed in the LPRs glossary as relative
clauses, participle clauses, and adverbial clauses.The study reveals, on the one hand, the use of aeronautical lex-
icon combined with ellipsis, such as ‘until established’, ‘when able’, ‘as soon as possible’, among others, and, on
the other hand, complex utterances with chunks of phrases grouped together with a view to serving pragmatic
functions such as giving reasons, predicting a future action or event, or stating possible consequences of an ac-
tion. The findings also resonate with studies on the regular patterning of professional discourse that go beyond
specialized lexicon and focus on regular patterning/language patterns used to perform specific pragmatic func-
tions (see McCarthy, 2020). We conclude with a discussion on how the study of complex structures employed in
authentic communications can inform pedagogical materials in this field by promoting a pragmatic perspective
on aviation English teaching and bridging the gap between the language taught in the classroom and the real
language used by pilots and air traffic controllers.
References
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). (2010). Manual of implementation of the language proficiency
requirements (DOC9835-AN/453) (2nd ed.). Montreal: International Civil Aviation Organization.
McCarthy, M. (2020). Innovations and Challenges in Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.
Prado, M., & Tosqui-Lucks, P. (2019). Designing the radiotelephony plain English corpus (RTPEC): A specialized
spoken English language corpus towards a description of aeronautical communications in non-routine situa-
tions. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 7 (2), p. 113-128.
Prado, M., & Porcellato, A. M. (2021). From grammar to pragmatics: a necessary change in the perspective of
aviation English teaching. 17th International Pragmatics Conference (p. 1533). Winterthur: INTERNATIONAL
PRAGMATICS ASSOCIATION (IPrA).

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Concealed Questions and Free Enrichment

Lecture

Dr. Yuji Nishiyama 1 , Dr. Koji Mineshima 1


1. Keio University

It is well known that some NPs can be interpreted as concealed questions (CQs) (Baker 1968). Thus, the capital
of Italy in (1a) can be paraphrased as an embedded question, as in (1b).
(1) a. Ann knows the capital of Italy.
b. Ann knows what the capital of Italy is.
c. The capital of Italy is Rome.
Note that the answer to the embedded question takes the form of a specificational sentence like (1c).
In (1c), the capital of Italy is not a referential NP but a Variable NP and Rome is its value (Higgins
1979).
Some authors argued that it is not possible to interpret sentences like (2) as CQs (Nathan 2006, Barker 2016).
(2) ??Ann knows the linguist.
The reading easily available for (2) is not the CQ reading but the acquaintance reading.
One characteristic of sentences that allow CQ interpretation is that the head nominal is relational. Thus, capital
in (1a) denotes some relation that holds of a pair such as (Italy, Rome). On the other hand, linguist in (2) denotes
a sortal concept whose extension is a set of entities.
This observation suggests the following constraint (Barker 2016):
(3) CQs require relational head nominals.
We argue against (3) by showing evidence that non-relational head NPs can allow CQ interpretation in a suitable
context (cf. Kalpak 2020). Our claim is that the difficulty in interpreting the linguist in (2) as a CQ is due to
pragmatic reasons, rather than semantic ones as suggested in (3).
It has been observed that the non-relational NP the semanticist, which could not be interpreted as a CQ in (4a),
can be if it is combined with a restricted relative clause as in (4b) (Nathan 2006, Barker 2016).
(4) a. *John told me the semanticist.
b. John told me the semanticist who teaches there.
If it were possible to pragmatically enrich (4a) as in (4b) in a suitable context, then (4a) should also allow a CQ
reading. The fact that (4a) does not allow a CQ reading is explained by an inaccessibility of the semanticist to
pragmatic enrichment. In contrast, the semanticist in (5a) can be easily enriched as in (5b) in a suitable context.
Such a pragmatic process is “free enrichment” (FE) (Carston 2002).

(5) a. The semanticist is eccentric.


b. The semanticist [who teaches there] is eccentric.
This raises the question why (4a) cannot be enriched as in (4b), whereas (5a) can be enriched as in (5b). To
answer this question, we claim that FE cannot apply to Variable NPs such as the semanticist in (4a). Note that
the predicate nominal a painter in (6a), which is a non-referential NP, cannot be enriched as in (6b).
(6) a. John is a painter.
b. John is a painter [Bob likes].
These examples suggest that FE cannot apply to non-referential NPs in general. We also argue that some appar-
ent counter-examples can be avoided if we distinguish two types of CQ sentences.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Considering pragmalinguistic infelicities in persuasive


writing: The case of Albanians writing in Greek

Lecture

Ms. Alexandra Vasilopoulou 1


1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Alexandra E. Vasilopoulou
Philologist, MA Teaching Greek to Speakers of Other Languages
alexandravsl125@yahoo.com
George S. Ypsilandis
Professor of Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
ypsi@itl.auth.gr
It has been abundantly documented that pragmalinguistic failure complicates intercultural communication in
both productive (Thomas, 1983) and receptive (Riley, 1984) modes. In addition, it has been suggested that this
phenomenon of failure creates in others an impression concerning the individual who commits it at a language
and, erroneously, at a social level (Leech, 1977; Blum-Kulka and Olhstain, 1986). These consequences are re-
ported to be mostly due to pragmatic differences between the L1 and the L2 and, as such, are based on a transfer
hypothesis. This paper concentrates on the persuasive strategies used by Albanian learners of Greek in written
discourse (scholarship application letters), and the overall suitability score these received when assessed by
Greek professional primary and high school teachers (n=176). The evaluation body (who acted as judges) pro-
vided their scores through an internet-constructed evaluation tool and based their judgment on a purposefully
created protocol sample which included three representative examples of each one of the three Aristotelian
types of persuasive strategies used by the subjects. The suitability of persuasive strategies was examined by
using a continuous scale (bar/rod) so as to increase the measurement sensitivity of the dependent variable con-
sidered. In addition, whether the educational level (Bachelor, Master, Doctorate) and the teaching experience
of the judges (as independent variables) influenced their overall judging ability was explored. Scores registered
concerning persuasive strategy suitability seem to have depended upon the type of strategy used. In more de-
tail, scores for logical arguments concentrated around the mid-scale of the instrument, while scores for pathos
and ethos tactics were lower and were thus found unsuitable to be employed for this purpose (scholarship ap-
plication writing). It needs to be pointed out that, the exact same types of ethos and pathos arguments were
recorded to be being employed also by Greek postgraduate learners of English (in a similar context, design,
and procedure in an earlier study, by James, Scholfield, and Ypsilandis, 1992). This new research findings may
indicate that: a) Greek and Albanian persuasive argumentative deployment are to some extent related (compar-
isons with other similar studies may also suggest suitability and acceptability of certain persuasive universals),
and b) there seems to be an inconsistency between the recorded employment of ethos and pathos persuasive
arguments by Greeks who used it in their L2 letters, in the study by James, Scholfield and Ypsilandis mentioned
above (and thus thought it was suitable to be used in this context), and the evaluation of the same argumentative
types (ethos and pathos) as unsuitable by individuals of the same culture and the same educational level. Is this
an instance showing that individuals become stricter when they act as evaluators or is this a case displaying
that individuals behave linguistically differently, depending on the side of the hill they are found on, in each
occasion?
Keywords: Pragmalinguistic failure, persuasive strategies, pragmatic suitability, written discourse

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constraints on complaints: complementation in English and


Dutch DCTs

Lecture

Dr. Caroline Gentens 1 , Dr. Bram Vertommen 2


1. KU Leuven, 2. Utrecht University

For Present-day Germanic languages, the structure and function of different subordinated constructions is rel-
atively well-studied. Less attention has been devoted to variation in complementation when it comes to use
across individual speakers (but see e.g. Cuyckens et al. 2021), varieties (but see e.g. Van Driessche & Cuyckens
2019) and registers (but see e.g. Biber 1999). In this study, we will chart inter- and intralinguistic differences in
the choice of complementation patterns, and examine whether these choices covary with situational variables
and language- or variety-specific tendencies.
To keep the situational contexts constant, the primary data set consists of responses to discourse completion
tasks (DCTs, see Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Ogiermann 2018) from native speakers of British English, Flemish Dutch
and Dutch Dutch. The respondents form a relatively homogeneous group of about 40 university students in the
UK, Belgium and the Netherlands each. The DCTs present situations that are designed to vary in situational
variables related to the relationship between the participants (power, acquaintance, closeness), as well as for
written vs. spoken contexts of use. In terms of speech acts, the focus is on eliciting different expression patterns
of complaints (cf. Nguyen 2013; House & Kasper 1981; Decock & Depraetere 2018), because these expressive
speech acts lend themselves well to including the reason for an emotive reaction in the form of a complement
clause.
In our talk, we first examine the degree of explicitness of the complaint components (Decock & Depraetere
2018) in relation to the specific language variety and the formality of the situational contexts. We then zoom
in on attested differences for specific complementation patterns (e.g. the fact that-/het feit dat-clauses; object
extraposition). Finally, we evaluate the validity of DCTs as a tool for eliciting complementation patterns in
different languages.
References
Biber, D. (1999). A register perspective on grammar and discourse: Variability in the form and use of English
complement clauses. Discourse Studies 1(2). 131–150.
Cuyckens, H., L. Fonteyn & P. Petré. (2021). Complexity in complementation. In G. Kristiansen, K. Franco, S. De
Pascale, L. Rosseel & W. Zhang (eds), Cognitive sociolinguistics revisited, 264–276. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Decock, S. & I. Depraetere. (2018). (In)directness and complaints: A reassessment. Journal of Pragmatics 132.
33 - 46.
House, J. & G. Kasper. (1981). “Politeness markers in English and German.” In F. Coulmas (ed), Conversational
routine: explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech, 157-185. New York:
Mouton.
Nguyen, T.T.M. (2013). An exploratory study of criticism realization strategies used by NS and NNS of New
Zealand English. Multilingua 32(1). 103-130.
Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (eds), Methods in
Pragmatics, 229-255. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Van Driessche, L. & H. Cuyckens. (2019). Clausal verb complementation in varieties of English. JournaLIPP
2019(7). 72–91.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Constructing a mob: A membership categorization analysis of


accounts for gun use in local and national media

Lecture

Dr. Sarah Creider 1


1. Teachers College, Columbia University

As Wodak (2021) writes, a hallmark of far-right discourse is the construction of “some kind of… minority… as
dangerous” (p. 5). In many cases, such groups are explicitly named. In others, however, cultural norms lead to
the use of coded language in the creation of a “politics of fear” (Wodak, p. 5). For instance, as many generations
of scholars have reminded us, there is a longstanding history of denial surrounding racism in the United States
(Baldwin, 1962; Rawls & Duck, 2020; van Dijk, 1992). Because of this pattern, an analysis of even far-right
discourse related to Race must include an exploration of what is implied just as much as what is explicitly
stated. This study attempts such an investigation, using membership categorization analysis (MCA) to uncover
similarities among three texts, all providing accounts for a situation where a White person carried, aimed, or
fired a gun in response to an imagined threat from African Americans. The texts were broadcast or published
within a one-week period during August, 2020 and include: 1) a transcript of a speech given by Mark and Patricia
McClosky at the Republican national convention and describing an event where aimed guns towards a group
of protestors; 2) press releases sent out via twitter by state police in response to an apparently racially motived
shooting in a rural mid-western county in the United States; and 3) a letter to the editor written by a member of
a group who gathered, openly carrying firearms, in the town square shortly after the same shooting. While the
events accounted for in text 1 may seem unrelated to those explained in texts 2 and 3, the three share striking
similarities. In each case, actions associated with firearms are described in terms of protection of property.
More specifically, category names and associated verbs are used to construct one group of people (citizens and
property owners) who must defend their property against another group (activists and members of mobs). Just
as important as what is said in each text is what is implied. For instance, the letter to the editor uses looting and
burning to imply the existence of a group that would commit such actions, although there was no evidence of the
presence of such a group. In addition, despite clear racial overtones in each situation, Race is not mentioned in
any of the texts. Findings suggest that MCA allows a close look at precisely how imagined categories and actions
are brought into being via the use of “inference-rich” (Sacks, 1992) terms. Findings also offer a case study of an
instance where the same cultural pattern permeated discourse in the national and local texts, and in texts along
a spectrum of institutionality and extremism. Perhaps more importantly, this study suggests that an analysis
of what is said can lead to a better understanding of what is implied — and that comparing local and national
texts can show us what is all too ordinary in both the discourse and the actions of extremist groups.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Construction and preliminary annotation of a telephone


interpreting multilingual spoken corpus for the study of
face-threatening acts

Lecture

Mr. Marcelo Yuji Himoro 1 , Prof. Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez 2 , Prof. Antonio Pareja-Lora 2
1. Universidad de Alcalá / Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2. Universidad de Alcalá

In the last few decades, telephone interpreting services have seen solid growth and consolidation. This is
thought to be due, in part, to the potential of lowering operating costs and ensuring the availability of services
in remote areas or even in emergency situations, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, research on
dialogue interpreting, however, has traditionally focused more on the public service interpreting domain. The
primary goal of this piece of research is to present the first steps of a study on telephone interpreting across
different domains, both within and outside public service interpreting. This contribution focuses on the do-
mains of roadside assistance, and home and auto insurance, and describes the construction and preliminary
annotation of a spoken corpus of interpreter-mediated telephone conversations, geared towards the study of
face-threatening acts (FTAs – Brown/Levinson, 1987). For this purpose, we are using a methodology based on
corpus pragmatics, and our initial assumption, following Lázaro-Gutiérrez (2021), is that a high number of FTAs
of different natures occur in this kind of asynchronous and delocalized interaction.
Thus, we will briefly describe some tasks accomplished so far (Himoro/Pareja-Lora, 2022), namely the compi-
lation, anonymization, initial processing, transcription and translation processes, conversion of the transcripts
to the EXMARaLDA format (Schmidt, 2004) and its synchronisation with the corresponding recordings. The
conversations compiled for the corpus involve Spanish and an additional language, such as German, Chinese,
French, English or Russian, related to a bilateral interpretation between the agent and the client. Besides, we
will discuss the tasks currently being carried out or to be dealt with in the near future within the new PRAGMA-
COR project (Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation, PID2021-127196NA-I00), that is, (1) a deep analysis of
metapragmatic elements and the discourse in the corpus, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to extract fre-
quent discursive patterns (common questions, recurring topics and frequent formulas, among other aspects); (2)
developing a tagset and tagging guidelines for the annotation of discourse and/or FTAs; (3) semi-automatically
annotating the phenomena of interest and evaluating these annotations; and finally, as an ultimate goal, (4) cre-
ating of training and practical materials, such as glossaries and guides, for professionals in this field aiming at
improving the quality of telephone interpreting services offered. The deliverables to be produced in the PRAG-
MACOR project will address the need for telephone interpreter training and the lack of materials, inevitable
due to the newness of this modality.
References
Brown, Penelope/Levinson, Stephen C. (1987): Politeness Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Himoro, Marcelo-Yuji/Pareja-Lora, Antonio (2022): Codificación y anotación preliminar de un corpus oral mul-
tilingüe de conversaciones telefónicas interpretadas para el estudio de los ataques a la imagen. In: Pragmal-
ingüística 30, 413-432.
Lázaro Gutiérrez, Raquel (2021): Analysis of Face-Threatening Acts against Telephone Interpreters. In: The
Interpreters’ Newsletter 26, 195-212.
Schmidt, Thomas (2004): Transcribing and annotating spoken language with EXMARaLDA. In: Proceed-
ings of the LREC [2004] Post-Conference Workshop on XML-Based Richly Annotated Corpora, pp. 69-74.
Lisbon, Portugal, 29th May 2004. Paris: European Language Resources Association. https://ids-pub.bsz-
bw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2317 (Retrieved on 03/12/2021).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Contingent (dis)agreement and emotional expressiveness in


online sociopolitical talk

Lecture

Prof. Mei-Ya Liang 1


1. National Central University

This study explored online participants’ expressions of (dis)agreement in response to controversial sociopoliti-
cal issues about the TikTok ban and the Mulan boycott. Online participants often express opinions and positions
and judge the perspectives and actions of their interlocutors to construct identities and fulfil social-emotional
functions in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC). CMC cues, such as emoticons, multiple
exclamation marks, and figures of speech, can be used with verbal emotive devices to mitigate, aggravate, or
mock disagreement in online discussions (Langlotz & Locher, 2013; Vandergriff, 2013). A number of studies
have investigated the use of online (dis)agreements (e.g., Angouri & Tseliga, 2010; Baym, 1996; Bolander, 2012;
Fernández-Amaya, 2021; Graham, 2007; Harb, 2020; Shum & Lee, 2013) and in English as a lingua franca (ELF)
(e.g., Harbib, 2008 ; Maíz-Arévalo, 2014). While sociability and emotional support can be achieved through
agonism or ritualized forms of disagreements and disputes in playful or humorous socialization, disagree-
ments may lead to conflicts and oppositions while negotiating knowledge, identity, views or relationships
(Georgakopoulou, 2001; Harb, 2008; Kakava, 2002; Schiffrin, 1984; Tannen, 2002). In addition, CMC cues, such
as emoticons, multiple exclamation marks, and figures of speech, can be used with verbal messages to mitigate,
aggravate, or mock disagreement in online discussions (Langlotz & Locher, 2013; Vandergriff, 2013). However,
fewer research studies have explored university students’ employment of (dis)agreement and multimodal
discursive strategies in an online intercultural group. This study focused on emotional expressiveness of
(dis)agreement through emojis and verbal strategies by linguaculturally diverse students who socialized and
communicated with one another on Facebook.

The data were selected from online comments made by 43 students (3 moderators, 20 Taiwanese undergradu-
ate students, and 20 international graduate students) who participated in moderated discussions in a private
Facebook group as extracurricular activities. International students were composed of different nationalities,
including Haitian, Indian, Indonesian, Pakistan, Paraguayan, Russian, Swazi, Thai, and Vietnamese. The par-
ticipants shared their perspectives mainly in ELF with emojis. This study analyzed their comments in an on-
line intercultural context of debates about geoeconomic and sociopolitical conflicts. To identify the partici-
pants’ disagreement strategies, the study adopted and adapated the analystic frameworks from previous stud-
ies (Fernández-Amaya, 2021; Harb, 2020; Shum & Lee, 2013). The results showed that all participants tended to
mitigate (dis)agreements and provide supporting grounds and, in particular, personal and emotional reasons
based on their knowledge about the ban and boycott. While both Taiwanese and international students always
gave contingent (dis)agreements, indicating that they claimed no responsibilities for showing approval or dis-
sent, the moderators frequently used reported speech, gave opposite opinions, and questioned the claims to
encourage debates and discussions. It is interesting to note that the graduate students also made more sugges-
tions compared to the Taiwanese undergraduate students. Further discourse-pragmatic analyses of a series of
comments that contain cohesive and emotive moves with or without emojis demonstrate how the participants
interactively managed (dis)agreements in the socioemotionally supportive ELF interactions while negotiating
relational identities and political stances.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Conventional meaning and conventional implicature:


non-truth-conditional meanings of conditionals

Lecture

Dr. Alex Reuneker 1 , Prof. Arie Verhagen 1


1. Leiden University

In this paper, we address the terminological confusion that surrounds the notion of conventional implicature
in the pragmatics literature. Grice’s (1989: 25-26; 86, 88) remarks on the notion are very brief, and therefore,
admittedly, involve a risk of obscurity. Indeed, different authors have understood and used the term conven-
tional implicature in very different ways, ranging from non-truth-conditional aspects of the functions of words
(e.g. Levinson 1979; Birner 2013; Potts 2005) and presuppositions of sentences (e.g. Karttunen & Peters 1979) to
complete dismissal of the notion in Relevance Theory (e.g. Carston 2006).
First, we will argue that there is definitely a ‘niche’ in the theory of language use for a notion of conventional
implicature, provided we recognize the necessity of fixing the meaning of terms in scientific theories more
tightly than in everyday communication, especially in relation to the terms meaning and convention (Verhagen
2019, 2021). We begin with a fresh ‘close reading’ of the original remarks by Grice, concluding that these actually
indicate a need for distinguishing, in rather specific ways, between a) conventional meaning and conventional
implicature, and b) meaning at the level of items (words, but also grammatical constructions) and at the level of
sentences and utterances. Most importantly: a combination of conventional meanings of items in an utterance
may license an implicature (an interpretation of the utterance that does not affect its truth conditions) that is
not co-dependent on knowledge beyond the conventional items involved. Second, we characterize common
interpretations of the notion conventional implicature in the pragmatics literature and the more or less radical
failures to recognize these distinctions.
Finally, we will demonstrate the usefulness of the distinctions we propose by means of a case study of con-
ditional constructions in natural language, based on a corpus study of Dutch (Reuneker 2022). Our concep-
tualization of the difference between conventional meaning and conventional implicature allows us to assign
the most common Dutch conditional construction (‘als p, (dan) q’, “if p, (then) q”) the function of indicating
unassertiveness and connectedness as components of its conventional meaning, which contribute to various
non-truth-conditional aspects of the interpretation of conditional sentences in discourse, such as specific types
of unassertiveness (e.g. uncertainty or hypotheticality, Declerck & Reed 2001), and specific types of connections
between p and q (e.g. causal, epistemic and speech act, Dancygier & Sweetser 2005). Although the corpus data
show some grammatical features to be statistically correlated with certain implicatures, none of these relations
is strong enough for an implicature to be called ‘conventional’ in the sense we are proposing (Reuneker 2022).
This implies a relatively large role for pragmatics, and perhaps lexical semantics, in explaining the ways in
which conditionals are interpreted.
So, while the notion of conventional implicature does not appear to be instantiated in the grammar of Dutch
conditionals, we show it is precisely our act of distinguishing between conventional implicature and conven-
tional meaning that allows for an analysis of natural language conditionals in terms of two general (non-truth-
conditional) aspects of conventional meaning and more specific conversational implicatures.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Converging evidence for time-space conflation in Mandarin


Chinese

Lecture

Prof. Zhengguang Liu 1 , Ms. Ziyan Zhang 1


1. Hunan University

Contrary to the popular conception of unidirectional cross-domain mappings from space to time in thought and
language, as demonstrated by an overwhelming list of studies on English (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Clark,
1973; Boroditsky, 2000, etc.), this paper proposes a new view of space-time conflation in Mandarin Chinese.
Starting from the basic grammatical categories of nouns and verbs, which involve a conceptualization of spatial
and temporal features respectively (Langacker 1987), we will focus on the distinctive grounding (Langacker,
1987, 2008; Brisard, 2002) of nouns and predicate verbs or clauses and their functional fusion in Chinese.
We argue that, unlike in English, time-space conflation can be demonstrated by the optionality of grounding
nouns and predicate verbs or clauses, which leads to a typical features of Chinese, viz. the abundance of nominal
predicate sentences and sentences without verbs. By extension, the multifunctionality of grounding elements,
including conflation in the use of classifiers and aspect markers, also serves to support our hypothesis. Not only
can nouns be used as predicates and are verbs optional for a sentence, nominal and verbal classifiers in Chinese
can denote both spatial and temporal meanings and aspect markers, like “着 ” （Zhe), expressing continuation,
can trigger both existential and ongoing process readings.
Furthermore, we discuss the functional fusion of nouns and verbs, serving as important evidence for our time-
space hypothesis, on the basis of Shen Jiaxuan’s (2016) Noun-Verb Inclusion Theory in Chinese, which regards
verbs as a special subcategory of nouns: verbs can be used as subjects and objects without any grammatical
marking and markers to modify or signify verbal expressions can be substituted by nominal ones. Despite these
observations, we point out Shen Jiaxuan’s overemphasis on the status of nouns and argue against regarding
them as a basic category by discussing nominal and verbal constructions where both temporality and spatiality
coexist, as with the combination of both NP and VP + locative words, such as “前” (Qian) (front), “后” (Hou) (back)
and “中” (Zhong) (middle), etc., to express spatial and temporal meanings.
Based on this converging evidence, we argue that our time-space hypothesis can offer coherent accounts for var-
ious alleged “idiosyncrasies” in Chinese grammar, including subjectivity, topic-prominence, and the integrative
cognitive style of Chinese thinking as well as its effects reflected in actual language use.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Corpus analysis of negative emotive words in Discourse


Grammar Framework

Lecture

Prof. Károly Bibok 1 , Dr. Martina Szabó 2


1. University of Szeged, 2. University of Szeged and ELKH CSS-RECENS

Theoretical background. The term negative emotive word (henceforth: NEW) refers to words having a prior
negative semantic content, but they can lose it partly or totally in certain cases, e.g. terribly nice or The party
was terrific! (Szabó and Bibok 2019). The previous literature mainly discussed NEWs as intensifiers, not con-
sidering the pragmatic aspects in detail. However, they have several other pragmatic-related functions. In the
function of intensifiers, they can be examined as polarity losers in a framework of lexical pragmatics. NEWs ex-
pressing positive evaluation (polarity shifters) can be considered a specific type of enantiosemy. What is more,
being markers of positive politeness, evidentiality and attention, NEWs are able to fulfill a third – interjective –
function (Szabó and Otani 2022).
Aims. Aims of the present paper are twofold. First, relying on corpus data, we analyze the above-mentioned
functions within Discourse Grammar Framework, which distinguishes two domains of discourse organization,
namely Sentence Grammar and Thetical Grammar (Heine 2013). For this investigation, the Hungarian durva
(lit. ‘harsh’) and durván (lit. ‘harshly’) have been annotated in three corpora, representing (i) official texts
published on a news web portal, (ii) informal texts of tweets, and (iii) spontaneous oral texts. Second, in the
three examined corpora we compare domain-dependent peculiarities of NEWs, not discussed in the literature
so far.
Conclusions. Based on our investigation, we can formulate the following conclusions. First, the polarity loser
and polarity shifter functions of NEWs are related to Sentence Grammar since they are grammatically depen-
dent, and, from a semantic point of view, contribute to the propositional meaning of utterances (Heine et al.
2013). At the same time, NEWs in their interjective function is related to Thetical Grammar since they are syn-
tactically autonomous and positionally mobile, as well as their meaning is basically procedural rather than
conceptual (Ahn and Yap 2022). Second, the frequency distribution of functions of NEWs is highly domain-
dependent. What is more, the thetical usage is clearly underrepresented in the corpus of news. It can be proba-
bly argued that the thetical function is extremely subjective (Heine 2013). Therefore, it does not fit in the official
text domain.
References
Ahn, M. and Yap, F.H. 2022. On the evolution of a multifunctional discourse marker: A Discourse Grammar
analysis of Korean com. Journal of Pragmatics 195, 31–47.
Heine, B. 2013. On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics,
51(6), 1205–1247.
Heine, B., Kaltenböck, G. and Kuteva, T. 2013. On the origin of grammar. In: Lefebvre, C., Comrie, B. and Cohen,
H. (eds.), New Perspectives on the Origins of Language. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 379–405.
Szabó, M.K. and Bibok, K. 2019. Értékvesztésre és értékváltásra képes lexémák újabb vizsgálata [A novel analysis
of the lexemes undergoing polarity loss and polarity shift]. Argumentum 15, 639–649.
Szabó, M.K. and Otani, N. 2022. Corpus analysis of Japanese and Hungarian negative emotive words from a
discourse interactional perspective. The 25th Annual Meeting of Pragmatic Society of Japan, Kyoto University.
Abstract accepted for presentation.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Correlations between pronominal elements referring to


persons and things. A case study of third person and
demonstrative pronouns in Hungarian

Lecture

Dr. Krisztina Laczkó 1 , Dr. Szilárd Tátrai 1


1. Eötvös Loránd University

In this talk, we examine correlations between Hungarian third-person singular personal pronouns and demon-
strative pronouns referring to things from the perspective of Cognitive Grammar and functional pragmatics.
From the point of view of our study, it is a key theoretical insight that third-person personal pronouns and
demonstrative pronouns that can be classified as deictic expressions do not typically function either as proto-
typical deictic or as prototypical grounding elements.
Hungarian, like other Uralic languages, does not differentiate between grammatical genders, and natural gen-
ders are not formed in the personal pronoun system either, so there is no differentiation between masculine,
feminine and neuter genders. By default, the third-person deictic personal pronoun (ő ‘he/she’) refers to a per-
son, that is a human being, regardless of gender. Inanimate things are denoted by demonstrative pronouns (ez
‘this’, az ‘that’) in the default case, with the spatial near-far mapping always at work.
In the framework of a corpus-based study, we ask to what extent this generic schema prevails in the non-gestural
use of third person personal and demonstrative pronouns. Our research questions are as follows:
Q1: In which cases does the generic schema outlined above not apply, that is, in which cases do third-person
pronouns refer to things and demonstrative pronouns to persons?
Q2: To what extent is the validity of the generic schema influenced by the focal prominence of the designated
entity in the sentence, that is, whether it functions as trajector or landmark in the sentence?
Q3: To what extent does it affect the validity of the generic schema if the pronoun appears at the beginning of
the sentence, functioning as an anchor for the conceptual processing of clausal information?
For this study, we used the Hungarian National Corpus, focusing exclusively on singular realizations of the
pronouns, and we did not set up any statistical hypotheses. From the corpus, we retrieved a sample of 250
occurrences for each of the three pronouns in 50-word contexts. In the case of demonstrative pronouns, we
marked constructional uses separately, that is to say, constructions in which the pronoun co-occurs with a de-
terminer, e.g.: ez a könyv ‘this book’, lit. ‘this the book’, abban a házban ‘in that house’, lit. ‘in that the house’, so
the results contain data on constructional and independent uses both collectively and separately.
Based on the corpus-based study, we can conclude that the singular forms of personal and demonstrative pro-
nouns only partially follow the generic schema based on gestural use. Their use is fundamentally influenced
by how they play a role in the grounding and anchoring process.
References
Brisard, Frank 2021. Grounding. In: Xu Wen and John R. Taylor (eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive
Linguistics. New York, London: Routledge. 344–358.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2002. Deixis and subjectivity. In: Brisard, Frank (ed.): Grounding. The epistemic footing
of deixis and reference. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1–28.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2015. How to build an English clause. Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied
Linguistics 2(2): 1–45.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Covert Communication in Japanese Advertisements

Lecture

Prof. Shigeyuki Suzuki 1


1. Tokyo Kasei University

The presenter will demonstrate, with the help of actual advertisements in Japan, how and why covert commu-
nication is frequently used in Japanese advertisements. In his presentation, it will be shown that that covert
communication is employed in Japanese advertisements with some sexual innuendo being used in them. In
covert communication, advertisers try to accomplish their purpose without making their informative intention
manifest to the audience. Tanaka says in her book that the use of sex and the exploitation of the notion of snob-
bery in advertisements appear to boost sales. As a result, advertisers want to continue to use them, but they
simultaneously wish to avoid taking any responsibility for so doing (Tanaka 1994: 36). It is understood that
advertisers are trying to boost sales, implicitly telling their intentions that they want to sell their products.
Hall (1976) talks about ‘high-context cultures’ and ‘low-context cultures’ in his book and also discusses the impor-
tance of context in communication. In his book, Japan is categorized as one of the countries with high-context
culture. In such a country as Japan, rather than relying on explicit verbal skills, less-direct verbal and nonverbal
communication prevails in the discourse of everyday conversation. This is considered to be the opposite of the
countries with low-context cultures, where explicit verbal communication is needed to properly understand a
message being communicated.
This idea is also true in the case of advertisements since they are regarded as part of communication. In this
way Japanese people are used to looking at advertisements and thinking that the captions in them are not telling
them everything and that there could be some kind of hidden agenda behind them.
This is one of the reasons why the use of covert communication is accepted in advertisements in Japan, which
will be discussed concretely in the presentation.
With the help of actual examples from Japanese advertisements, the presenter will demonstrate how and why
covert communication is frequently used in Japanese advertisements.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Covid 19 and Death Talk: A Conversation of Change

Lecture

Dr. Gulab Chand 1 , Dr. Urjani Chakravarty 2


1. Manipal University Jaipur, 2. Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya

Indians have long practiced socialization through conversation. From birth to death the Indian community
makes use of one social interaction or the other to celebrate or cope. The event as small or large required the
participation of family and friends. In the last few years many such typical institutions were made (a) typical
due to the difficult nature of the pandemic. It was heart wrenching to do- away with age-old practices and
adapt to a situation never faced by all the living generations in the country. The current investigation looks at
the changing practices of death and mourning in the context of Covid 19. Among the several social practices one
major change was in the way that conversation related to death was handled among the directly involved and
the extended list of people. The conversation of loss and rituals were changed forever as each family created
their own way of coping. We see how the theme of death was part of the conversation and distinguish between
a regular conversation and a conversation of death i.e. death talk. Conversation is considered as both pleasant
and unpleasant depending on the context wherein the latter can cast a shadow on the relationship between the
participants.
The approach adopted for data collection is comparative autoethnography with the first author as the collector
of data from the local community in Kota, Rajasthan and the second author giving her own data from Patna
Bihar. The cultural base of the discussion will try to answer the questions given below:
Is there any comfort in the conversation related to death? Does it help the participants to cope? Thus, the paper
discusses the changing nature of a special kind of conversation i.e. death talk within the specific situation of
Covid 19 in India.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Cross cultural issues within a dialect context in the Orkney


Islands

Lecture

Dr. Tom Rendall 1


1. Orkney College UHI

Cross cultural issues within a dialect context in the Orkney Islands


Dr Tom Rendall November 2022
This paper will focus on the way in which the incomers to the North Isles of Orkney perceive the use of the
local vernacular spoken by the indigenous people. Based on Scots English, the dialect also has influences from
Nordic countries with lexical inferences and non-standard idioms.
Situated at the Northern tip of Scotland, Orkney has a population of 22,000 dispersed through the 15 inhabited
islands, Research was carried out employing interviews with the local inhabitants and people who have moved
to the islands.
The main research question asked whether or not the informants were dialect speakers and, if not, did they
engage with the vernacular and understand the nuances and vocabulary.
From the perspective of cultural differences, it became clear that the use of dialect did not appear to adversely
affect the integration between islanders and incomers. There was evidence of co-operation and collaboration
within communities with unexpected high levels of assimilation and accommodation.
Some of the aspects of the culture of the islands may have been challenging for people moving to Orkney but
those aspects appear to have been overcome through the willingness of incomers to accept and embrace the
concepts of island life along with the meanings and idiosyncrasies of the vernacular.
There are some examples of conversational implicature where the “new” islanders will know what the local
dialect speakers mean in their utterances even it is not explicitly enunciated in the speech acts.
The paper will give examples of comments from the interviews where the migrant population have exhibited
high levels of understanding within an unfamiliar cultural context. As one of the informants commented:
“I’m not a speaker of dialect because I think that the dialect and the language is so part of life here, I think that if
I attempted it, it would be so bad that I really wouldn’t want to offend anybody…… I do use Orcadian words all
the time, but I don’t try and do it in an Orcadian accent because that would be awful and nobody needs to listen
to that but I certainly text and email in Orcadian and as I say, we speak Orcadian words certainly in everyday
language.” ( Caroline, Shapinsay )
The main focus of the paper is on the way in which folk such as Caroline perceives the dialect and understands
the lexicology without engaging in the vernacular in speech situations. This research in the Orkney Islands
should provide a brief synopsis of the ways in which island communities with distinctive linguistic variations
co-exist and also highlight features of conversational implicatures where incomers are able to identify meanings
and conventions without adopting the words and phrases used by the local people.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Crossover Phenomena and Echo Questions

Lecture

Mr. Takeshi Tsurusaki 1


1. None

Since Postal (1971), varied explanations have been offered (and then discarded) to account for a class of
unacceptable anaphora data, known as “crossover” examples:
(1) Strong Crossover:
a. * Who did he shave t ?
b. * Who does he say Mary likes t ?
c. * [Whose mother] does he love t ?
(2) Weak Crossover:
a. * Who does [ his mother] love t ?
b. * Who did [the girl he hated] describe t ?
c. * [Whose mother] did you talk to [the girl who likes him ] about t ?
(The distinction between strong and weak crossover is due to Wasow (1979).) In these examples, the wh-phrase
is dislocated (or at least it “appears” to be dislocated) from its original position, crossing over an anaphoric
pronoun, to the clause initial position.
To account for these data, Tsurusaki (1995) proposed a pragmatic constraint on anaphoric dependency:
(3) Presupposedness Constraint on Interpretation (PCI):
Elements constituting the “presupposition” of a sentence must be interpreted
independently of (i.e., without reference to) the elements constituting the
“focus” of the sentence.
Given (3), we can offer a convincing explanation for a wide variety of crossover effects. Consider, for example,
the Focus-Presupposition structure of (2a):
(4) F-P Structure of (2a):
a. Focus: [ Who ]
b. Presupposition: [ […] does his mother love t ]
According to this F-P structure, “his” constitutes part of the Presupposition of the sentence, and the PCI pro-
hibits “his” from being anaphorically dependent upon “Who,” the Focus element. The unacceptability of (2a),
therefore, is readily explained.
Unfortunately, there are a number of systematic “counterexamples” to our PCI-based account:
(5) a. ? Which picture did [the man who painted it ] refuse to sell t ?
b. ? How many dachshunds does [your friend who breeds them ] own t ?
c. ? What building was [the witness who claimed he had never seen it ] walking
towards t ?
These weak crossover examples (from Wasow (1979)) are fairly good, contrary to our prediction. In our view,
(5a) has the following F-P structure, and the PCI predicts its unacceptability:
(6) F-P Structure of (5a):
a. Focus: [ Which picture ]
b. Presupposition: [ […] did [the man who painted it ] refuse to sell t ]
In this paper, I argue that (5a-c) need not be seen as genuine counterexamples to the PCI. The crucial point
to notice is that these are not ordinary wh-questions. Consider the following hypothetical exchange:
(7) A: John refused to sell a picture.
B1 : Which picture did he refuse to sell?

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

B2 : He refused to sell WHÍCH picture?


In this exchange, B1 is not a run-of-the-mill wh-question. It is a variant of a special type of echo-question (some-
times referred to as a legalistic question clause). Thus, we can use B2 in place of B1 without inducing any notice-
able difference in meaning. If (5a-c) are echo-questions disguised as ordinary wh-questions, it is not surprising
that they are outside the regulative domain of the PCI.

1343
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Culture as a tool for identity work: an exploration of L2


Japanese learners’ autobiographic accounts

Lecture

Ms. Hiroko Ohashi 1


1. RMIT University

This study demonstrates a novel interpretation of the use of the term ‘culture’ used by L2 language learners.
The study stems from the author’s PhD research on L2 Japanese language learners’ autobiographic accounts of
their learning experiences. The impetus for the study came from the frequent use of ‘culture’ by the L2 Japanese
learners in reflecting on their learning experiences. Culture is one of the most important concepts in L2 language
teaching and learning, and Kramsch (2013) gives an overview of how culture has been discussed in language
education since the 1970s. Monolithic understanding of “one language = one culture” prevailed and “cross-
cultural pragmatics and sociolinguistic appropriateness of language use in its authentic cultural context” (p.66)
had been the major research topics until the postmodernist perspectives were introduced in L2 teaching and
learning around the turn of the century. In postmodern perspectives, L2 learners’ subject positioning through
interaction over time represents the discursive practice of ‘culture’, or ‘third place’ (Kramsch 2013). Therefore,
culture is not only reflected in language but is created in conversation with others (Kramsh 2003). The present
study investigates how former students of Japanese language in Australian universities (five+ years after their
completing a university degree) construct narratives in their autobiographical accounts of their language learn-
ing, and the impact that these experiences have had on their sense of ‘who they are’. It is found that ‘culture’
is one of the most frequently used lexical entities in their personal accounts. Various images are created and
assigned to Japanese ‘culture’ from the outsider vantage points of individual former students. They are used for
a cultural comparison which may be based on the already available common discourse of culture of mine (C1)
and culture of others (C2) (Menard-Warwick, 2011), or their specific personal experiences. Their reflections on
language learning experiences suggest that language learning process represents an intermedial/intercultural
space that stimulates their identity work possibly because they react to and evaluate the given Japanese culture
and position themselves in relation to it. By using the term ‘culture’, they position themselves inside/outside of
what they imagine to be Japanese culture, and thus, it is a tool of identity work that sheds new light to the study
of intercultural learning and pragmatics.
Kramsch. C (2003). Teaching language along the cultural faultline, In Lange, Dale L. Paige, R. Michael (eds).
Culture As the Core: Perspectives on Culture in Second Language Education, p. 19-35.
Kramsch. C (2013). Culture in foreign language teaching. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1 (1),
57-78.
Menard-Warwick, J. (2011). A methodological reflection on the process of narrative analysis: Alienation and
identity in the life histories of English language teachers. TESOL Quarterly 45(3). 564–574.

1344
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Deideophonization of Korean ideophones: Focusing on


monosyllable words in spoken resister

Lecture

Dr. Jiyeon Park 1


1. Jilin International Studies University

This paper investigates deideophoization in Korean monosyllabic ideophones (also known as sound symbolic
words and expressive) by focusing on three factors in everyday language. Previous studies have claimed that
monosyllable ideophones are limited to attaching verbal suffixes, such as ha-ta ‘do, be,’ -keli-ta ‘keep doing,’ -tay-
ta ‘keep doing too much,’ -i-ta ‘keep doing, be’ (Park 1994, 1997). However, earlier works have been concerned
with written language, and they overlooked how monosyllable ideophones are used in spoken language.
This paper proposes several monosyllable ideophones that can attach to the -i-ta suffix and function as predi-
cates in the spoken register. Furthermore, the current paper argues that these predicative monosyllable ones
are highly conventionalized. The current study attempts to show that three factors are related to the dei-
deophoization of monosyllable ideophones: morphosyntactic integration, subjectification, and intersubjecti-
fication.
This paper found eight monosyllable ideophones that confirm progressed deideophoization. All eight ideo-
phones share the same phonetic and semantic features. They have a tense sound in their initial consonant and
describe metaphorical meanings. Their meanings are based on language-specific and universal form-meaning
correspondences. In the first stage, ideophones that are morphosyntactically much more integrated into the
sentences show higher deideophoization. For example, ppang theci-ta ‘cracks someone up’ shows lower lex-
icalization, the ideophone functions as an adverb and is combined with a prosaic verb. On the other hand,
ppeng-i-ta ‘full of hot air’ shows higher lexicalization in which the ideophone functions as a predicative by
combining i-ta. In the second stage, ideophones that imply subjectivity exhibit higher lexicalization. For ex-
ample, ttayng-i-ta ‘it’s over’ describes a state that is everything finished and nothing more. On the other hand,
ttak-i-ta ‘I am sure’ conveys the speaker’s strong attitude of certainty and the truth value of the proposition (Park
2022). In the third stage, an ideophone that implies intersebjectivity and accompanies by a specific intonation
pattern shows most higher deideophoization. There are two predicative forms ttak-i-ta and kkok-i-ta, which
express necessity, that show higher degree in morphosyntactic integration. ttak-i-ta and kkok-i-ta both begin
with a high tone. However, ttak-i-ta falls to a low pitch at the end, whereas kkok-i-ta raises to a high pitch.
In a speech, ttak-i-ta functions as a speaker-oriented marker, while kkok-i-ta functions as an agent-oriented
marker (Park 2021). In Contemporary Korean, the intonation pattern is that the falling boundary tone rises to
a peak before the last syllable and falls during the last syllable, most common in declarative and wh-questions
(Jun 2000: 151). On the other hand, the intonation pattern is that a falling-rising boundary tone is used when
a speaker is confident and expecting the listener’s agreement in a conversation. It can thus be suggested that
kkok-i-ta, which has an extraordinary intonation pattern, conveys intersebjectivity and it is the most highly
deideophoized.
The findings of this paper confirm that the association between semantic features could be one of the factors that
measure the system integration of ideophones (Akita 2022). Furthermore, the findings highlight the importance
of exploring the use of ideophones in the spoken register.

1345
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Delimiting senses: core issues in the polysemy of prepositions

Lecture

Ms. Michelle Weckermann 1


1. University of Augsburg

This paper is part of a corpus-based project investigating the polysemy of prepositions through a cognitive
semantic lens, employing image schemas and semantic networks. There are numerous cognitive linguistic ap-
proaches to the polysemy of over (Lakoff, 1987; Tyler & Evans, 2003), which, however, differ in various respects.
The aim of this paper is, therefore, to address some theoretical issues that relate not only to unresolved points
of debate in the literature, but also to polysemy more generally.
The first point of debate concerns whether a polyseme should have a central sense, as most approaches to prepo-
sitions have posited. However, the opinions diverge regarding how the central sense should be determined and
what the central sense is, for instance, whether the spatial central sense of over is dynamic (Lakoff, 1987) or
static (Tyler & Evans, 2003).
Another point of debate is the definition of polysemy itself. While most researchers seem to agree that poly-
semy involves one lexical form associated with multiple distinct yet related senses, there is disagreement as to
what constitutes a sense and where the line is to be drawn between a conventionalised sense and contextual
influences. Thus, while some researchers argue that over has a motion sense (Lakoff, 1987), Tyler and Evans
(2003) claim that it is the preposition together with a motion verb like jump that provides this dynamic meaning.
Given this inconclusive literature, Tyler and Evans (2003) set methodological criteria for the identification of
the central sense. This should be the first sense from an etymological perspective and the most frequent sense
(among other criteria). While I agree with the necessity for methodological criteria, I argue that these criteria
are partially contradictory. In contrast to over, the first attested sense of other prepositions like by and for is not
the same as the most frequent sense nowadays. I would go even further and raise the question, does there have
to be a single central sense or could we have multiple central senses of spatial, temporal and abstract nature in
a semantic network?
Furthermore, Tyler and Evans (2003) also posited two criteria to define and distinguish senses, namely that any
sense has to express a distinct nuance of meaning, and has to do so independent of context. I adopted both
criteria, specifying them with ideas from Cruse (2000) on where the line is to be drawn between a convention-
alised sense and pragmatic/contextual modifications. Should every minor change in a spatial scene constitute
a distinct sense (e.g. whether a bee hovers over a flower or a pond) and how much influence can contextual
information have on the meaning of a sense (e.g. the direct object or verb accompanying a polyseme)?
References:
Cruse, D. A. (2000). Meaning in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Tyler, A. & Evans, V. (2003). The Semantics of English Prepositions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1346
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Deontology of assertion

Lecture

Prof. Marina Sbisà 1


1. University of Trieste

The nature and functioning of assertion are discussed in the philosophy of language (speech act theory in
particular) and epistemology, but also constitute a topic of great social relevance. Utterances of any declarative
sentence may be taken to be assertions, but not all such utterances are meant and understood as committing
the speaker to the same extent (what about a guess? or a white lie?) or expressing the speaker’s knowledge
about how things are (what about expressions of belief? or bullshit?) and are suitable to be assessed as
true/false without intermediate shades (what about exaggerations?). However, there is a pragmatic core of
assertion which I shall try to identify. My purpose is not to delimit ‘typical’ cases of assertion as opposed to
‘atypical’ ones (on a statistical basis, ‘atypical’ cases are certainly the great majority), but to single out some
aspects of the practice of assertion that endow it with epistemic value and social significance. I shall also
consider how some communicative habits that are widespread in the Western and globalized world and show
deep disregard of those core features exploit the forms of assertive language for purposes that do not match
the ‘deontology of assertion’. Of course, I am aware that the analysis and stigmatization of such communicative
habits do not suffice to contrast them. However, theories of language and discourse, including pragmatic
theories, may sometimes be accomplices of the damages those habits engender, by fostering views of assertion
or truth that directly or indirectly legitimize them. Theories should, instead, provide a characterization of
assertion accounting for its deontology and foster the awareness of the social function of the latter.

References
Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd edition by J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisà. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Austin, John L. 1979a. ‘Other Minds’. In J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 3rd edition, pp. 76–116. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Austin, John L. 1979b. ‘How to Talk. Some Simple Ways’. In J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 3rd edition, pp.
134–153. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goldberg, Sanford (ed.) 2020. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Labinaz, Paolo and Marina Sbisà. 2021. ‘The problem of knowledge dissemination in social network discus-
sions’. Journal of Pragmatics 175: pp. 67–80.
Sbisà, Marina. 2019. ‘Varieties of Speech Act Norms’, in Witek, M. and I. Witczak-Plisiecka (eds.) Normativity
and Variety of Speech Actions (Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Volume:
112), pp. 23-50. Leiden: Brill. Reprinted in M. Sbisà. Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

1347
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Developing Idiomatic Competence among Chinese EFL


learners: An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness of a
Self-designed Ediom Mobile App

Lecture

Dr. Siying Li 1 , Dr. John Liontas 2


1. Xi’an International Studies University, 2. University of South Florida

For many Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, their development of idiomatic abilities is
critical and challenging, not least because native speakers’ idiomatic knowledge is both natural and intuitive.
However, for Chinese EFL learners, their idiomatic knowledge cannot be developed without explicit instruc-
tion. It is most unfortunate that idioms are infrequently addressed in the teaching-and-learning of English
across the language curriculum in China, perhaps because most instructors have not yet acquired the requisite
idiomatic knowledge properly. And because idioms are ubiquitous in daily conversations, not knowing their
inherent figurative meaning may also lead to misunderstandings, frustration, and even breakdowns during
conversations. The development of idiomatic competence among Chinese EFL learners is thus paramount.
Moreover, the use of mobile technologies has long been considered a useful tool in enhancing the learning
abilities and enthusiasm of English learners. Toward these two ends, the researchers of the study reported
here developed a customized mobile app—Ediom—for Chinese EFL learners to spearhead the development of
idiomatic competence. In so doing, the researchers employed a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design.
One hundred and eight student volunteers from a Chinese university participated in the study. Three research
questions guided this study:

1. To what extent does the use of Ediom app impact the acquisition of idioms by Chinese EFL learners?
2. To what extent does the Ediom app motivate Chinese EFL learners to learn English VP idioms more than those
who do not use this app?
3. In what ways do Chinese EFL learners describe their ensuing idiom learning experiences?
Participants were randomly divided into two groups, an experimental group and a control group. The former
learned 20 English Vivid Phrasal (VP) idioms via the Ediom mobile app, while the latter learned the same number
and type of idioms, but in a more “traditional” classroom setting. The treatment session for both groups lasted
four weeks. An English VP idioms pre-test was first administered, followed by a four-week period treatment
session, and concluded with the English VP idioms post-tests and the completion of an Instructional Materials
Motivation Survey (IMMS) to evaluate students’ motivation. Qualitative data were collected via semi-structured
interviews with six participants representing high-, medium-, and low-performing students.
Data analysis showed that not only did Chinese EFL learners achieve statistically significant higher scores when
learning idioms via the Ediom mobile app, but their motivation towards idiom learning was also equally very
high. Accordingly, the results provide strong empirical evidence that corroborates previous research findings:
(1) Chinese EFL learners had positive attitudes towards mobile technologies; (2) use of mobile technologies can
significantly improve the comprehension and retention of English VP idioms; and (3) achievement of English
VP idioms is greater in classrooms that use digital technologies than in classrooms where traditional methods
and materials remain supreme. Motivation is a confounding factor that impacts second language acquisition.
Indeed, higher motivation can lead to better second language learning because they are positively correlated.
Pedagogical implications for teaching and learning English VP idioms will be shared dialogically with all atten-
dees.

1348
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Developing pragmatic fluency for study abroad: A targeted


instructional intervention

Lecture

Dr. Jiayi Wang 1 , Dr. Nicola Halenko 2


1. University of DeMontfort, 2. University of Central Lancashire

We define L2 pragmatic fluency as the type of fluency which allows learners to ‘gain automatic control in
processing linguistic information’ and to rapidly ‘process pragmatic knowledge and convey speech intentions’
(Taguchi 2007: 117). Pragmatic fluency has been measured in the form of planning time (amount of time taken
for preparing the oral response) and speech rate (number of syllables/words produced per minute). Prior re-
search has demonstrated that the acquisition of pragmatic fluency can be improved by consciousness-raising
techniques such as giving learners explicit meta-pragmatic information (House 1996), and that the study abroad
(SA) context alone does not always lead to pragmatic gains for all learners (Taguchi 2014).
This study focuses on the use of formulaic language in a SA context. Formulaic language is described as fixed
or semi-fixed syntactic strings that are closely tied to recurrent situations and communicative events (Kecskes
2000), have well-known functional use to perform everyday tasks, and they are crucial for L2 speakers to suc-
ceed in a SA context. However, research continues to show that formulaic language is underused and remains
a challenge even for those with advanced proficiency (Halenko and Economidou-Kogetsidis 2022; Taguchi, Li
and Xiao 2013; Wang and Halenko 2022), calling for L2 pragmatics instruction before and/or during SA. This
study answers this call. It investigates the immediate and sustained effects of a pre-departure SA training on
the oral production of L2 Chinese formulaic language. Eighteen upper-intermediate learners of Chinese were
assigned to either an instructed or non-instructed group to determine the efficacy of instruction designed to
enhance their study abroad year in China and beyond. A pre-post-delayed longitudinal experimental design
was adopted to examine instructional effects over an academic year, elicited by means of a computerised oral
task.
The assessment was based on appropriateness, planning time and speech rate. Results show that the instructed
group outperformed the control group immediately after the pre-SA instruction, as well as after the year
abroad. The significant difference between the two groups, however, decreased after the period abroad as
the control group also showed significant improvement without the pre-SA instruction. Nevertheless, the
sustained effect of the instruction enabled the experimental group to retain their competitive edge, even after
a year in the target language country. The findings show the longitudinal benefits of pre-SA instruction.

References
Halenko, N and Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. 2022. Japanese learners’ spoken requests in the study abroad con-
text. The Language Learning Journal 50(4), 506–520.
House, J. 1996. Developing pragmatic fluency in English as a foreign language: Routines and metapragmatic
awareness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18(2), 225–252.
Kecskes, I. 2000. Conceptual fluency and the use of situation-bound utterances in L2. Links and Letters 7, 145–61.
Taguchi, N. 2007. Task difficulty in oral speech act production. Applied Linguistics 28(1): 113–135.
Wang, J. and Halenko, N. 2022a. Developing the use of formulaic language for study abroad. The Language
Learning Journal 50(4), 409-426.
Wang, J. and Halenko, N. 2022b. Conclusion. In N. Halenko and J. Wang (eds.) Pragmatics in English Language
Learning (pp.228–232). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1349
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Developmental trajectories in the use of self-repair by a


Japanese learner of English studying abroad

Lecture

Dr. Seiko Harumi 1


1. SOAS, University of London

This longitudinal case study explores how an intermediate Japanese EFL learner develops the use of self-repair
over 16 weeks during study abroad in the UK while being active in social network development both inside
and outside the L2 classroom. Adopting conversational analysis (CA) as a core analytical framework, this study
aims to extend our understanding of developmental trajectories in self-repair practices seen as enrichment of
L2 interactional repertoires.
This is a CA-informed applied pragmatic study which, as an analytical scope, draws on various types of elicited
data. The data includes an initial questionnaire survey, five interviews investigating the learner’s social network
development focussing on oral participation in L2 interaction and five free dyadic L2 discussions involving the
participant and the researcher with a combined length of 5.8 hours. Further, five stimulated recall interviews
were conducted, involving the use of repair after each dyadic talk to explore the learner’s perception of the
use of self-repair. While identifying the learner’s social network development, this study’s main objective is to
examine developmental changes in the learner’s use of self-repair in L2 dyadic talk.
Through the detailed analysis of self-repair by a Japanese learner of English focusing on the use of self-initiated-
self-repair (SISR) (Sacks et al., 1974), this study identified a clear developmental process and an emerging pattern
of interactional trajectories over the 16 week evaluation period. At the initial stage, the participant frequently
used self-repair within her turn to construct the talk. The use of SISR included a wide range of resources used
to maintain interaction, including nonverbal cues such as: (1) gestures, (2) semiotic visual resources, (3) self-
directed talk and (4) reformulation of own utterances, although lexical repair was usually involved.
Towards the end of study abroad, the use of SISR shifted to the phrasal and sentential level of reformulations.
Although the participant’s lexical level of SISR, especially at their turn-beginning, continued beyond the eighth
week, the frequency of its use gradually diminished. In parallel, the participant’s use of clarification requests
to address interactional needs and the degree of ‘granularity’ in the L2 talk further improved.
This study demonstrates developmental trajectories in the use of self-repair, helping to deepen our understand-
ing of enhancement in L2 interactional repertoire and also suggests that the use of self-repair can function as
a useful signpost for the improvement of interactional competence. It also illustrates the use of interactional
resources, ways in which the use of linguistic competence was finely interwoven with improvements in the
learners’ ability to self-monitor and coordinate various interactional elements during ongoing interaction in L2
collaborative interaction.
Reference
Sacks, E., Schegloff, A and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in
conversation. Language, 50 (4), 696-735.

1350
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Diplomatic criticism/condemnation: A cross-cultural


pragmatic perspective

Lecture

Dr. Jun Ohashi 1


1. University of Melbourne

Diplomatic criticism/condemnation is an effective way to explicitly position nation states in relation to aggres-
sors’ act of violation of the norms in the international system. It is also significant in foregrounding moral obli-
gations of international community and establishing and upholding international laws and orders (Pattison,
2015). A series of nuclear tests and missile tests conducted by North Korea have attracted diplomatic criticism
from South Korea, Japan, the US and the Western allies, and the current geopolitical tension will predictably
increase the frequency and visibility of the expressions of diplomatic criticism through the media. However,
few academic studies have examined diplomatic criticism/condemnation from a perspective of cross-cultural
pragmatics, and the present study will seek to help fill this knowledge gap. Diplomatic criticism/condemnation
is both publicly announced by the leaders of sovereign states and/or published through official statements. The
study focuses on the announcements/statements of criticism/condemnation made by Japan and the US after
North Korea’s testing nuclear bombs (2006 - 2017) and missiles (2021 - 2022) and it analyses them through the
lens of speech acts and cross-cultural pragmatics. While, speech act theory presents some weaknesses and limi-
tations, which include its prescriptive and addresser-oriented construct, it has proven itself to be a useful tool to
comparatively investigate political discourse and apology in war crimes from the perspectives of cross-cultural
pragmatics (Kadar & House, 2021; Kampf, 2021). The study identifies formulaic and strategic nature of diplo-
matic criticism/condemnation announced/ issued by Japan and the US and discusses the role and significance
of coordinated diplomatic measures to deal with aggressors.
Kadar, D. & House, J. 2021.War crime apology: A contrastive pragmatics study. Journal of Pragmatics, 177, 109-
121.
Kampf, Z. 2021. Political speech acts in contrast: The case of calls to condemn in news interviews. Journal of
Pragmatics, 180, 203-218.
Pattison, J. 2015. The ethics of diplomatic criticism: The responsibility to protect, just War Theory and presump-
tive last resort. European Journal of International Relations, 21(4), 935-957.

1351
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse Functions of Japanese Turn-final Use of Kedo ‘But’


in a Question-answer Sequence

Lecture

Dr. Suhong Hu 1
1. Institute of Linguistics, CASS

Question-answer is well-known as an adjacency pair (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Thompson et al. (2015) ex-
plores the morphosyntactic and prosodic design of responsive actions in four sequential environments which
include information-seeking sequences (initiated by question-word (QW-) interrogatives) in American English.
Yokomori and Endo (2022) focuses on the use of Japanese contrastive conjunction kedo ‘but’ in responsive turns
and argues that turn-final kedo ties the utterance retrospectively to the prior turn. This study aims to use 245
conversations (about 53 hours) from “Corpus of Spoken Japanese by BTSJ (Transcription and Audio Recordings)
ver. 2011” to show the functions of turn-final kedo in question-answer sequences.
From our data, we totally collected 268 cases of turn-final kedo that were used in answers to the prior turn by the
interlocutor. Through analyzing these cases, we find that, firstly, the number of turn-final kedo used to answer to
a yes-no interrogative (175 cases) is about twice that of a question-word interrogative (93 cases). For this reason,
we suggest that turn-final kedo, as one of the ways to talking politely in Japanese, tends to be used to answer
a yes-no interrogative to avoid a direct denial and thus to save the listener’s face. Secondly, there are roughly
four types of question-answer sequences where turn-final kedo can be used: (1) question→direct answer (115
cases); (2)question→indirect answer (57 cases); (3) question→pre-answer→convince of the pre-answer→direct
answer (3 cases); (4) question→direct answer + additional information (93 cases). It is clear that turn-final kedo
tends to be used in question→direct answer sequences. Finally, we find that besides the function of speaking
politely, there are other four functions that were not mentioned in previous studies: (1) changing the topic; (2)
resuming the main topic; (3) expanding the current topic; (4) let the listener have a psychological preparation
for speaker’s answer.
On the whole, it is clear that turn-final kedo tends to be used to answer a yes-no interrogative to avoid a direct
denial and to perform various functions in different answer-question sequences.
References
Schegloff, Emanuel Abraham and Sacks, Harvey, 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 7: 289-327.
Thompson, Sandra A., Fox, Barbara A., Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, 2015. Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building
Responsive Actions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Yokomori Daisuke and Tomoko, Endo, 2022. Projective/retrospective linking of a contrastive idea: Interactional
practices of turn-initial and turn-final uses of kedo ‘but’ in Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 196: 24-43.

1352
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse marker jiushishuo ‘(that) is to say’ as a preface of


formulating others’ talk in Mandarin Chinese

Lecture

Dr. Li Chen 1
1. kanda university of international studies

Jiushishuo is a ubiquitous token in Mandarin conversation, which literally means ‘(that) is to say (that)’. It
consists of the backward-linking adverb jiu , the copula shi ‘is’, and the verb shuo, ‘say’. The canonical use
of jiushishuo is to indicate an elaboration or clarification of something previously commented on. In previ-
ous literature, jiushishuo was described as a floor holder positioned before the (re)formulation of its speaker’s
own utterances (e.g., Biq, 2001; Fang, 2000). However, little attention has been paid to the interactional use of
jiushishuo prefacing formulations of others’ talk. While Guo & Yu (2022) referred to ‘jiushishuo＋X’ as a turn
format to address problems of understanding the prior turn, the interactional payoffs of jiushishuo-prefaced for-
mulations vary and depend on the local context of their deployment. This study aims to present a descriptive
analysis of jiushishuo-prefaced formulations that occurred in different sequential contexts.
By adopting conversation analytic methods, the current study explores the interactional functions of jiushishuo-
prefaced formulations of other people’s talk and demonstrates how the placement and compositions of these
formulations relate to their interactional import. The data were collected from 12-hour-long video-recorded
face-to-face conversation and 18-hour-long audio-recorded telephone talk-in-interaction. Based on the exami-
nation of jiushishuo-prefaced formulations that repeatedly occurred in three different sequential environments,
I outline the interactional roles of these formulations as follows.
(1)In the third position following question-answer sequences, jiushishuo-prefaced formulations indicate the
speaker’s problems with understanding the prior talk. By deploying these formulations, the speaker provides
a candidate understanding of the prior talk to make a (dis)confirming response and a further explanation rel-
evant. Most of these formulations are designed as interrogatives, ending with a question particle (ma) or a tag
question (duiba ‘right?’), with a rising final intonation.
(2)When placed after one of TCUs in a multi-unit turn, jiushishuo-prefaced formulations are used to provide the
gist of the preceding utterances. These formulations function as declarative questions, ending with a falling
intonation indicating an expectation of confirmation. Through these formulations, the speaker demonstrates
their understanding of what the other has said before while minimizing the degree to which progressivity is
hindered.
(3)At the possible completion point of a turn, especially where an affiliative/aligning response (Stivers, 2008)
is relevant, jiushishuo-prefaced formulations can be used to implement disaffiliation and display the speaker’s
problems of expectation/acceptability (Svennevig, 2008) instead of problems of hearing/understanding.
References
Biq, Yung-O. 2001. The Grammaticalization of Jiushi and Jiushishuo in Mandarin Chinese. Concentric: Studies in
English Literature and Linguistics 27: 53-74.
Fang, Mei. 2000. Reduced conjunctions as discourse markers. Chinese Language 5: 459- 470.
Guo, H & Yu GD. 2022. On granularity of doing other-initiation: Nǐ yìsi shì X ‘Your Meaning is X’ in Mandarin
Chinese. Discourse Studies (online first):1-17.
Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation During storytelling: When Nodding Is a Token of Affiliation.
Research on Language and Social Interaction 41(1), pp.31-57.
Svennevig, Jan. 2008.Trying the easiest solution first in other-initiation of repair. Journal of Pragmatics 40:
333-48.

1353
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Discourse, collective action and women’s rights groups in


Nigeria and Germany: A comparative analysis of online
campaign discourses

Lecture

Prof. Innocent Chiluwa 1


1. Covenant University, Ota

This study investigates online activism by women’s rights groups in Nigeria and Germany especially exploring
their online advocacy and campaign approaches. Applying the new social movement theories with method-
ological insights from pragmatics and discourse analysis, this study will examine and compare how gender
issues such as political participation, women trafficking, rape and violence against women are mediated dis-
cursively. The study will further assess the roles of social media in the campaign programmes of the women’s
rights groups under study. Two women’s rights groups (WRG) each from Nigeria and Germany are selected
for the study. Some of these WRG exist exclusively on the Internet and engage in some unique and interesting
discursive practices that campaign for women’s political empowerment.
Data will comprise messages on the websites and social media platforms of the WRG under study. Campaign
messages that reflect collection action, radical opinion, populist demands or protests will be of particular in-
terest to this study. Analysis at the micro level will then pay attention to language choices, pragmatic acts and
discourse structures of the campaign messages. At the macro level, political and cultural factors that are re-
flective in the language data that have had some significant impact on women’s participation in government in
Nigeria and Germany will be analysed. Keywords: discourse, collective action, social media, women’s rights
groups, political participation, Nigeria, Germany.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Displaying uncertainty and avoiding disaffiliation with


Estonian response particle mhmh ‘uh-huh’

Lecture

Ms. Kirsi Laanesoo 1 , Mr. Tiit Hennoste 1 , Mrs. Andriela Rääbis 1 , Ms. Andra Rumm 1 , Ms. Andra
Annuka-Loik 1 , Ms. Piret Upser 1
1. University of Tartu

In the paper we will analyze the usage of the Estonian particle mhmh ‘uh-huh’ as response to the polar questions.
In previous studies English uh-huh (equivalent of Estonian mhmh) has been analyzed primarily as a continuer
(e.g. Jefferson, 1984). As a response particle it is categorized as ‘unmarked’ response and treated as equivalent
to yes and yeah
(e.g. Stivers, 2018; Enfield et al, 2019).
Our analysis reveals that Estonian particle mhmh as a response particle is not equivalent to the other Estonian
response particles jah and jaa ’yes, yeah’ (see Hennoste et al, forthcoming). In our presentation we will show
that mhmh as a response to polar questions has several functions.
Firstly, mhmh displays user’s uncertainty, without explicitly highlighting it.
Secondly, mhmh is used in contexts where the user has the knowledge to answer the question confidently. In
those cases, mhmh downgrades the dispreferred information and it is used to deal with possible social issues that
might come about when using strong confirmation with other response particles such as jah or jaa (Hennoste
et al, forthcoming).
Thirdly, mhmh is used to distance the user from the topic initiated by the partner. With mhmh the speaker
indicates that she is not interested in continuing this topic.
Our data come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of University of Tartu and is analyzed applying the method-
ology of conversation analysis. For this research 75 everyday face-to-face and telephone conversations (106 500
words) were randomly selected from the corpus and 39 mhmh ‘uh-huh’ responses were analyzed.
References
Enfield, N. J., Stivers, T., Brown, P., Englert, C. (2019). Polar answers. Journal of Linguistics, 55(2), 277–304.
Jefferson, G. (1984). Notes on a systematic Deployment of the Acknowledgement tokens ‘Yeah’ and ‘Mmhm’.
Paper in Linguistics, 17(2), 197–216.
Stivers, T. (2018). How we manage social relationships through answers to questions: The case of interjections.
Discourse Processes 56(3), 1–19.
Hennoste, T. Rääbis, A, Rumm, A, Laanesoo, K (forthcoming). The division of labor between the particles jah and
jaa ‘yes’ as responses to requests for confirmation in Estonian. In Bolden, Galina, Heritage, John, & Sorjonen,
Marja-Leena (Eds.), Responding to polar questions across languages and contexts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Distinctiveness of Procedural Expressions in Sequences

Lecture

Prof. Takahiro Otsu 1


1. Kyushu University

Discourse markers (DMs) comprise one of the most intriguing topics discussed in corpus-based pragmatic re-
search. There is an ongoing debate regarding the combinations of DMs that may occur in a single utterance. This
study attempts to provide a comprehensive account of how pragmatic markers, including primary discourse
markers (PDMs), secondary discourse markers (SDMs) (Fraser’s (2015) classification of DMs), fillers (FLs), and
interjections (IJs), contribute to sequences. The framework of this paper is based on relevance theory, in which
these pragmatic expressions fall into the category of “procedural expressions,” which are expressions that acti-
vate the route of inference or procedures which leads toward the interpretation of the utterance that includes
them. This study uses spoken data from the British National Corpus (BNC), the Wordbanks corpus, and the Cor-
pus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to ensure the validity of the pragmatic research that explores
and theorizes how procedural expressions are sequenced in a particular order.
Theoretically, four types of procedural expressions (PDMs, SDMs, FLs, and IJs) could construct 16 sequence pat-
terns (PDM-PDM, PDM-SDM, PDM-FL, PDM-IJ, SDM-SDM, SDM-PDM, SDM-FL, SDM-IJ, FL-PDM, FL-SDM, FL-FL,
FL-IJ, IJ-PDM, IJ-SDM, IJ-FL, and IJ-IJ). The corpus observations have created a rough sketch of the sequences
of procedural expressions (Otsu 2021): (1) SDMs are combined in PDM-SDM sequences, but rarely combine
with other procedural expressions (i.e., SDM-FL, FL-SDM, SDM-IJ, and IJ-SDM are infrequent sequences) and (2)
PDMs, fillers, and interjections are combined with each other without difficulty. This is presumably because
SDMs encode a distinctive procedure compared with other procedural expressions. From a procedural point
of view, SDMs primarily impose constraints on constructing a higher-level explicature (i.e., a higher-level de-
scription such as a speech-act description, a propositional attitude, or some other comment on the embedded
proposition). SDMs add comments to the proposition communicated by the subsequent utterance, whereas
other procedural expressions do not involve such a conceptual construction. PDMs activate the direction of
inferential comprehension, fillers contribute to precluding the utterance from being misinformed, and inter-
jections activate “a range of attitudinal descriptions” associated with emotional activities (Wharton 2003, 2009),
which suggests that these procedural expressions are likely to show some affinity with each other when they
are sequenced.
This study proposes that the preferrable sequences of these procedural expressions in a single utterance are
reduced to the legitimate order and hierarchy of the activation of domain-specific modules: mindreading, emo-
tion reading, social cognition, and epistemic vigilance, as well as inferential comprehension (Wilson 2011: 26).
Epistemic vigilance comprises two aspects of cognitive mechanisms geared to evaluating the reliability of the
speaker and the reliability of the communicated information (Wilson 2016:15). The former epistemic vigilance
mechanism—conducted by fillers—and the latter—conducted by SDMs—have an order of activation. Combi-
nation is essentially an effort-consuming verbal act, especially for the addressee. This means that procedural
expressions are sequenced to achieve a presumption of optimal relevance (i.e., to be relevant enough for the
combination to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ellipses in Advertising Communications and Brand Strategies


of Luxury Experience Businesses

Lecture

Prof. Nami Arimitsu 1


1. Toyo University

This study reveals that different types of ellipses and multiple rhetorical devices are amalgamated in the ad-
vertisements of luxury experience businesses. Leech (1966) has mentioned that there are frequently used im-
perative forms of verbs that appear in the advertisements. Goatly (2000) mentions the relationship between
advertising and consumerism and the psychology of consumers. Myers (1997) discusses the issues of pronouns
in advertisements. However, the previous studies have not fully discussed the different types of ellipses em-
ploying multiple rhetorical devices in luxury experience businesses. Compared to advertisements of daily items,
those of luxury experience businesses are more complex. Their brand strategies do not use persuasion via im-
peratives to buy something, but “Pre-Suasion,” which is an idea Cialdini (2017) proposed in his book.
This study first examines the advertisements for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The tagline “I am a fan” has two
meanings. The first is a rhetoric of personification with the hotel symbolized with the logo of a folding fan. It
simultaneously conveys that the lady in the advertisement is a fan of the hotel. The sentence “I am a fan” is
grammatically correct, but pragmatically lacks information. The listener generally wants to know the following
part: what is she a fan of? This pragmatic ellipsis makes the advertisement appealing.
The second is the advertisement of Chicago Booth, the University of Chicago School of Business. It states: “ARE
YOU AFRAID TO MAKE A BOLD MOVE?” Then, in a smaller font written is “NEITHER ARE WE.” This advertise-
ment addresses the reader, but does not write the reply of the reader. Instead, it anticipates the reader’s reply,
which will be “No, I’m not,” and responds proactively. It employs the ellipses in the discourse where people
expect that the communication between two parties generally follows the pattern ― A questions, B responds, A
reacts, etc. This advertisement leaves the response unsaid for not being intrusive.
The third is the advertisement of a Swiss watchmaker, Richard Mille. The tagline is “A Racing Machine On
The Wrist.” The literal interpretation is difficult, and the reader might find this expression meaningless or
unintelligible without the accompanying visual. The major rhetoric employed here is a metaphor. However,
we can also analyze this from the perspective of ellipses. It refrains from explicitly stating “Buy this product,
and you can have a luxury experience just like you are the owner of a racing machine.”
This study reveals that these ellipses are blank spaces for the readers, who are given the pleasure of filling-in,
rebuilding, and interpreting them. In the advertisements of luxury experience businesses, leaving empty spaces
via ellipses functions as a positive rhetorical device through which the companies convey their brand strategies.

References:
Cialdini, Robert (2017) Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, Random House Business.
Goatly Andrew (2000) “Advertising and Consumerism.” In Critical Reading and Writing, London: Routledge,
2000, pp.183-211.
Leech, Geoffrey (1966) English in Advertising, London: Longman.
Myers, Greg (1997) “’You in the Shocking Pink Shellsuit’ Pronouns and address.” In Words in Ads, London:
Arnold, pp.77-89.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

English expressions of ‘love’ in Japanese subtitles and dubbing

Lecture

Dr. Christopher Long 1


1. Tohoku Gakuin University

Direct expressions of ‘love’ in English (e.g., ‘I love you’) are used more frequently and among a wider range
of relationships compared to the semantically equivalent Japanese expression ‘aishiteiru’ (e.g., Kimura, 1998;
Yasutake, 2010). Given these differences, the current research seeks to (1) identify how such expressions are
translated in Japanese subtitling and dubbing and (2) consider the significance of such translation practices. To
this end, all examples of ‘love’ as a transitive verb with human subject and object were analyzed in a sample of
50 movies selected from the Cornell Movie-Dialogue Corpus (Chang, et al., 2020) (n=607).
Results revealed an overall greater use of ’aishiteiru’ compared to other expressions in both subtitles (435 vs.
172) (X²=113.95, df =1, p<.000) and dubbings (460 vs. 147) (X²=161.39, df =1, p<.000). Similar results were found
for the following relationships: romantic/kinship, non-romantic/kinship, and romantic/non-kinship. No signif-
icant difference, however, was found for non-kinship/non-romantic relationships.
The fact that ’aishiteiru’ was used significantly more than other expressions overall, as well as for three of the
four relationships investigated, provides evidence that subtitling and dubbing of English ‘love’ expressions over-
whelmingly fails to undergo transformations via a cultural filter (House, 2006) and thus violate Japanese norms
of usage. Because, this was not found to be the case for non-romantic/non-kinship relationships, however, the
breaking of norms appears to be mediated by degree of potential for misunderstanding.
Most importantly, however, the fact that ‘love’ expressions tended to be translated as ’aishiteiru‘ in subtitles and
dubbing suggests that the representation of non-Japanese as speaking in an unnatural manner is not simply
the result of constraints related to audiovisual translation (AVT). Rather, I argue that because AVT is a type
of ‘documentary translation’ (Nord, 2005) (i.e., target culture (TC) members are aware it is a translation), the
systematic use of unnatural expressions, a seemingly straightforward example of ‘foreignization’ (Venuti, 1995),
because it aligns with TC expectations of source culture (SC) behavior, in fact represents a form of ‘localization’
(Jimenez-Crespo, 2013). Ultimately, any evaluation of translation strategies must consider media type and
the nature of TC/SC relations. Because SC ‘visibility’ is inherent in AVT, emphasizing foreignness via the use
of unnatural forms in unnecessary; It merely reinforces stereotypes and creates potential misunderstanding.
This applies to Japanese subtitles and dubbing, if not AVT in general.

References
Chang, J., Chiam, C., Fu, L., Wang, A., Zhang, J., & Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. (2020). Convokit: A toolkit for the
analysis of conversations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.04246.
House, J. (2006). Text and context in translation. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 338-358.

Kimura, T. (1998). Cultural Differences Between Americans and Japanese in Meanings of Love. Doctoral
Dissertation. Cornell University, Department of Human Development and Family Studies.

Jiménez-Crespo, M. (2013). Translation and Web Localization. New York: Routledge.

Nord, C. (2005). Text analysis in translation: Theory, methodology, and didactic application of a model for
translation-oriented text analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility. Routledge: New York.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Yasutake, T. (2010). Communication and Style Shift in Japanese. Aichi Kyouiku Kenkyuu Houkoku (Jinbun Kagaku
Hen), 59, 7-14.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Entering the voluntary arts: methodological approaches to


examining group membership in an amateur dance group

Lecture

Ms. Naomi Smart 1


1. King’s College London

The Community of Practice (CoP) model (Lave and Wenger, 1991) has held significant impact on the ways in
which we consider and examine groups. Whilst the model and processes of increasing membership discussed
in the core literature have received much attention, however, it is not designed to gain a close look at interac-
tion and negotiation to meaning within these sociological spaces. Beneficial, then, is a combined approach to
investigation, operating through a multiplicity of methods within a shared theoretical stance to get closer to the
day-to-day running of these groups as rich, sociolinguistic spaces.
Adopting such an approach, this project examines understandings of role and membership within a volun-
tary, dance-based CoP, combining ethnographic participant observation, carnal sociology (following Wacquant,
2004), and multi-modal conversation analysis as a means of fuller investigation.
Positing the existence of groups with a common craft or goal, the CoP model highlights the role of practice and
communicative involvement in the achievement of both group aim(s) and increasing membership. Through a
process of Legitimate Peripheral Participation, members move from a position of relative ignorance as a ‘new-
comer’ towards one of ‘full participation’ as an ‘old-timer’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991, pp.36-7). Identities develop
both within the group context and for the individual as this process continues, and competence in both the
craft and the ‘being’ of a group member emerge in parallel. The strength of this model is its ability to examine
broader, long-term processes of growing involvement and membership, however its ethnographic approach
leaves several challenges around closer attention to interaction/s within these spaces.
Criticised for its harmonious, broad-brush approach to group membership, the CoP model is seen to overlook
the messy actualities of conflict, clash, and power within groups, particularly those which aren’t attached to
careers. The current project seeks to overcome these critiques through the simultaneous application of multi-
modal Conversation Analysis (CA), an analytic method known for its close, micro-attention to the moment-by-
moment unfolding of interaction, and exploration of a voluntary dance group.
As a data-driven, micro-analytic approach, CA holds that participants’ own orientations and negotiations to
meaning within unfolding interaction shape communication. Looking closely at a minute level of detail, CA
offers much to develop the CoP model.
Focussing on the value of a multiple-scale approach to analysis, this presentation discusses the framework em-
ployed for data collection and analysis within this project. Initially considering the shortcomings of a single
framework perspective on CoP research, the discussion then turns to an example from the data to exemplify,
empirically, the merits of this close, multi-modal approach in exploring participants’ own understandings in
these overlooked voluntary contexts.
This research will stimulate conversations around the application of crafted multi-method approaches for in-
vestigating voluntary groups, interactions, and individuals’ orientations or perspectives within these. Through
an investigation that operates across scales and levels, it becomes possible to approach analyses of meaning
and involvement within these spaces from a range of analytically rich methods, united by a shared theoretical
perspective.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Establishing Common Ground in Multilingual Video-Mediated


Interactions

Lecture

Dr. Budimka Uskokovic 1


1. The Ohio State University

This paper concerns practices of establishing common ground (Clark, 1996; Enfield, 2006; Garfinkel, 1967;
Tarasaki, 2004) – mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions – in multilingual conversations in
a digital environment. Using analytical frameworks of conversation analysis and multimodality, it investigates
talk and embodied practices utilized by L1 speakers of German to establish common ground with L2 speakers of
German prior to demonstrating their firsthand experience and expertise in videoconferencing conversations.
One of the main rules in talk-in-interactions is: “Don’t tell others what they already know!” (Sacks, 1995). Fol-
lowing this rule, L1 speakers may not always position L2 speakers as non-experts (K-) in terms of their cul-
tural expertise when asked to provide more information about their own culture. Rather, they first check on
L2 speaker’s epistemic status and provide either status-based or source-based information about the cultural
products, perspectives, or practices, based on how shallow or how deep L2 speaker’s epistemic status might be.
Consider the following example between the language learner of German (Emma, EMM) and the L1 speaker of
German (Amber, AMB):
1 EMM: ist ahm ist wichtig auch ist ahm für die kult(h)ur
is important for German culture
2 hehe Fussba[ll,?
hehe socc[er,?
3 AMB: [ähm also ich kann das mal erklären=habt
[uhm well I can explain that=have
4 ihr über den film das wunder von bern gesprochen.=
you ever watched the movie the miracle of bern
5 EMM: [=*nein*
*no*
*shakes head*
In lines 1-2, Emma poses a polar question. In doing so, Emma positions herself as a less knowing co-participant
who attempts to elicit more culturally relevant information by posing a question to the more knowledgeable
speaker and, thereby, she challenges her to elicit her cultural knowledge about this domain of expertise and
provide some details about the importance of soccer for the German culture. By responding to the question,
Amber displays her knowledge and thereby her ability to explain. She then poses a follow-up question (lines
3-4) to check whether Amber and Emma share common ground. Since Emma uses the minimal disconfirming
token in line 5 (Imo, 2017), to signal to Amber that she is not familiar with the movie, Amber starts to unpack
her epistemic status and to provide her account about the importance of soccer for German culture (not shown
above). In doing so, she positions herself as a more knowledgeable speaker whose responsibility is to inform
the L2 speaker about her domain of expertise by providing source-based information.
Analyzing practices to establish common ground based on three examples in semi-pedagogical conversations
via video-conferencing, my paper demonstrates the ways in which L1 speakers establish common ground with
L2 speakers, namely 1) by asking follow-up questions (as presented in the example above), 2) by co-constructing
the meaning of the word without even having direct epistemic access to a particular cultural product, and 3)
by ratifying assumptions about cultural products. In addition, I present how L1 speakers monitor and ratify L2
speakers’ cultural knowledge to help them improve their cultural knowledge.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ethnopragmatics of Emotions in Pakistani culture: A Case of


Urdu Affect Lexicon

Lecture

Ms. Saima Mubashra 1 , Dr. Ghazala Kausar 2


1. Higher Education Department Pakistan, 2. National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan

Challenging the notion of universality, the Ethnopragmatic studies of emotions have highlighted the close prox-
imity between how emotions are labelled and how emotions are processed in a given culture. Cultural expec-
tations about regulating emotions during social interactions solidify in the form of emotion terms and their
meaning. The study exploits this correlation between language and emotions to build the affect lexicon of the
Urdu language and uses it to gain insight into how emotions are expressed and processed in Pakistani culture.
The Urdu affect lexicon was built in two steps. In the first step, a list of lexical items denoting emotional ex-
perience was culled from three Urdu dictionaries, Farhang-e-Asfia, Naseem-ul Lughat and Ilmi Urdu Lughat.
In the second step, key informants, who were cultural insiders and native speakers of the Urdu language, val-
idated the amassed collection of affect categories. They based their judgement on the salience, entrenchment
and relevance of the categories for the theme. This exercise generated the final list of almost 300 emotion
terms/expressions, which were expected to reflect the speakers’ day-to-day language use. The final list of emo-
tion terms was then analyzed using the theory of cultural scripts. The findings were explicated in Natural
Semantics of Metalanguage (NSM). The linguistic data revealed that Urdu emotion terms are mainly based on
somatic images than solid or concrete words and ascribe little or no volition to the experiencer. These multi-
word units situate emotions externally as a physiological activity located almost in every part of the body, in-
cluding the prototypical heart, mind and face, as well as atypical body parts like armpits, corner of the lips
and the bottom of the foot. Moreover, with a greater number of verbs than adjectives and nouns for emotions,
the Urdu language exhibits a general tendency towards describing emotions as a process rather than a state.
Furthermore, an exuberant collection of verbs that denote the severity of emotions may be symptomatic of a
cultural allowance to be expressive about one’s emotion states.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Evaluative adjectives and the problem of collocation

Lecture

Prof. Marija Liudvika Drazdauskiene 1


1. Wszechnica Polska, Academy of Applied Sciences in Warsaw

Evaluative adjectives, defined as the adjectives which express an opinion, value or quality of something differ
from substantive adjectives in their meaning, spheres of use and collocation. Adjectives of this kind (wonderful,
marvellous, fantastic, splendid; awful, terrible, appalling, ghastly, etc) are most common in trivial conversation.
The richest material of the function of evaluative adjectives has been drawn from the phatic use of English in
which overstatement and evaluative qualification are current (It‘s ages since we met! How on earth did you hear
all this? You look gorgeous. Christ, what an armful! I feel wonderful. …, how enchanting to see you, how very kind
of you to come! …she looked marvellous in it. God, he‘s adorable! It‘s lovely. You look knockout, SallyO! etc)
The syntactical structure of existential and exclamatory utterances in the phatic use form the context for the
use of single evaluative words. The question of combinability does not arise at this point. But this condition also
creates a psychological effect which forms a false impression that evaluative adjectives have no restrictions on
their collocation, which may turn into a problem for foreign speakers of English. Foreigners happen to use
curious units, if judged by comments of native speakers. E.g.: (1) My stockings were a nightmare. (2) I was
terribly happy to see her. (3) Great thanks go to amazing team… (4) Thank you, amazing people of the
North… (5) What a crazy week has just ended…
It is not always that evaluative adjectives express an overstatement. Praiseworthy statements in studies of
literature use evaluative adjectives in their direct sense. But even in the phatic use of English, the choice and
use of evaluative adjectives is not wholly random. Cf.: (6) This was, of course, the most fascinating remark…
(7) I‘m lucky because I can find marvellous people who are brilliant makers of the things that I appreciate...
(8) … it‘s full of fascinating stories and terrific insights, … (9) „Amazing display of street art, theatre, music,
sport and more… What a joyous occasion!‘ (10) This must have been a splendid house, sir.
The semic analysis of the highlighted collocations discloses their semantic motivation. For instance, amazing
story, amazing display, amazing experience. The first and/or the second seme in ‚story‘, i.e. the meaning of a
description of events or an account of them, combines with the second seme, meaning very impressive, excel-
lent, speaking informally, in ‚amazing‘. This explanation also holds true for ‚amazing display‘ and ‚amazing
experience‘. But ‚thanks to amazing team‘ is not a customary collocation in English even if it may be acceptable
in global English.
Similarly, ‚a fascinating story‘ and ‚a fascinating remark‘ are semantically motivated in the semic analysis. Ad-
ditionally, Emily Post‘s warning to women not to exaggerate their compliments to men adds a reason: you can
say ‚Thank you for a fascinating evening‘ only if there was something really fascinating about it. Even though
the currency of collocations is frequency-dependant in native speech, the semic analysis displays semantic links
which motivate their combinability.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Everyday is like war: The tensions and anxieties of Japanese


youth negotiating typical and atypical masculine pronouns
and identities

Lecture

Dr. Ayumi Miyazaki 1


1. Japan Women’s University

This presentation, based on metapragmatic accounts (e.g., Silverstein 1976) collected from an ethnography at a
junior high school and surveys at universities, explores how Japanese male-identified youth choose their first-
person pronouns from the diverse repertoire of masculine pronouns in the Japanese language and how they
negotiate their identities, masculinities and power through these pronouns in their social context. Connell’s
framework of hegemonic masculinity (1995), the most influential theory in research on men and masculini-
ties, illuminates how multiple masculinities - hegemonic and marginal, or typical and atypical, masculinities -
are practiced every day in constructing complex power relationships. In the Japanese language, different pro-
nouns represent different kinds of masculinities (e.g., SturtzSreetharan 2009). This facet of Japanese pronouns
provides an effective tool to analyze the linguistic construction of social identities and the ethical life (Keane
2016) of Japanese youth, who are constantly seeking who they are and who they ought to be in their social
relationships.
In a Japanese junior high school where I conducted fieldwork, boys negotiated their metapragmatic meanings
about masculine pronouns, such as ore, boku, jibun, and wai, while gauging their power and their masculinities
in their social world. Boys in “strong” groups explained that maintaining their power was like an everyday
war: They needed to maintain powerful and typical masculinities in their moment-to-moment discourses. Boys
in “weak” groups, on the other hand, generally used the pronouns that are indexed as atypical and undesir-
able pronouns in the social world of junior high schools. They tried to achieve a higher status, or defend their
position, however, through occasionally employing powerful speech, but exhibited anxieties about what pro-
nouns they were allowed to use in different contexts. At universities, young people also exhibit anxieties and
tensions regarding their choice of masculine pronouns, in particular, between boku, which indexes politeness,
gentleness and childishness, and ore, which indexes vulgarity, masculinity, and aggressiveness. They search
for different pronouns between those two extremes, such as jibun, but often hesitate to use them because they
feel that these pronouns are rather atypical and not yet banalized.
Thus, everyday politics of masculine pronouns illuminates ethical consciousness about oneself and others as
to what kind of masculine identities Japanese youth want to construct and what kind of men they want to be
perceived as in their social relationships. Their negotiations with their masculine speech and identities in their
social context, however, are not an easy process. The anxieties and tensions exhibited in their negotiations
show multiple voices and struggles (Bakhtin 1981) that reside not only within juxtaposed ideological positions,
but also within an individual who is constantly trying to resist gendered moral evaluations and typifications
(Keane 2011) that are imposed on them.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Examining pitch range, gender, and politeness in Spanish


polar questions

Lecture

Mr. Bruno Staszkiewicz Garcia 1


1. Purdue University

Seminal works on the fields of phonetics (Ohala, 1984; Ladd, 2008) and politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987) have
broadly suggested that suprasegmental features can be employed as indicators for formal or informal speech.
Recent research on diverse languages have found that pitch is one of the prosodic mitigators used to show
politeness or formality. While much of this work has focused exclusively on the social variable of the power
difference between interlocutors, there has been little systematic analysis of the differential impacts of power,
distance, and imposition on suprasegmental phonetic features, and more specifically of gender differences.
Given the general lack of systematic analysis of power, distance, and imposition, and suprasegmental features,
the current study investigates how female and male speakers use the pitch range of the final intonational con-
tours of polar questions in Peninsular Spanish – the most conventionalized way of performing a request in
Spanish – as an indicator of politeness. The hypothesis for this experiment accounts for an increase in pitch
range in those situations that are more face-threatening following Ladd’s (2008) perspective on the paralinguis-
tic use of pitch range across genders.
To answer these research questions, 35 Spanish native speakers (M = 26.5, SD = 2.39) from Madrid, Spain com-
pleted a contextualized sentence reading task where they read aloud 16 paragraph-length contextualizing sit-
uations, followed by polar questions (see Example 1 and 2). The 16 situations were balanced for two levels of
power (high/low), distance (high/low), and imposition (high/low). Each polar question followed the same struc-
ture (i.e., ¿Me puedes…? ‘Can you…?’) and contained the same number of syllables. The final lexical item was
always CVCV. Each utterance was repeated three times, in randomized order. Analysis, using Praat, focuses on
and the pitch range of the final contour. A linear fixed-effects model was conducted for both female and male
speakers.
The linear model for the pitch range analysis showed that variable of distance was the only significant variable
(p < 0.05) for all participants. The linear model for male speakers showed that distance was the only significant
variable (p < 0.05), whereas the analysis for female speakers showed that there were no significant variables.
Male subjects increased their pitch when performing a request with higher pitch range when addressing some-
one that they do not interact frequently, whereas female speakers did not use pitch to index any type of contex-
tual relationship. The findings of this project shed light on (a) the effect of pitch range that can trigger different
pragmatic meanings related to politeness, and (b) the variable of distance was only found to be significant for
the use of pitch range on male speakers, not female speakers.
References
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge University
Press.
Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational Phonology, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ohala, J. (1984). An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice. Phonetica, 41,
1–16.

1365
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Experts and novices: Examining academic email requests to


faculty during study abroad

Lecture

Dr. Nicola Halenko 1 , Dr. Jiayi Wang 2


1. University of Central Lancashire, 2. De Montfort University

This study directly addresses the conference theme of atypical language by analysing the difficulties learners
face with (mis)mapping L1 communication styles on to L2 email composition during study abroad (SA).
Communicative interaction at university level is increasingly undertaken using some form of online commu-
nication and email is typically the go-to option for expediting academic matters. For students, contacting and
accessing information from academic staff is most efficiently achieved via this medium, but a particular set of
skills is required to successfully achieve communicative goals in this unique, hybrid form of oral and written
interaction. This longitudinal investigation aims to contribute to a shortage of email studies examining expert
(L1) and novice (L2) email practices and examines to what extent SA plays a facilitative role in shaping learners’
understanding and production of L2 emails to faculty. Drawing on language socialisation theory (Schieffelin &
Ochs, 1986), which contends that by interacting with expert members of a community, novices can develop into
more competent members themselves, the study specifically examines two research questions: i) the distinc-
tive features of expert and novice English users’ email requests, and ii) evidence of change in novice L2 English
request emails over one academic year. What sets this study apart from existing email research is its longitudi-
nal focus of one academic year, observing development change in the SA environment, the UK-based research
context, and the comparison of expert and novice email practices.
The email corpus consisted of 315 archived request emails sent to the two authors who were members of fac-
ulty interacting with either the L1 (expert) users of English (n= 153) or L2 (novice) Chinese students of upper
intermediate English proficiency (n= 162). The emails were categorised as requests for meetings, requests for
information or requests for assistance. To maintain internal validity, ensuring the corpus was authentic and
organically grown, a passive consent approach was adopted. This provided a means for subjects to document
permission to use their emails in the study, after the emails had reached the faculty members, at the end of
the research cycle. A mixed-methods approach, analysing the data from quantitative and qualitative perspec-
tives, focused on a unique combination of three features not found in existing email studies: request strategies,
internal lexical modification, and request perspective.
Findings firstly indicated that the choices of request strategies, internal modification and request perspective
showed much variation between the two groups due to different approaches to projecting politeness. Secondly,
exposure to the L2 and engagement in email writing seemed to have minimal impact on pragmatic performance
over the academic year. Non L2-like features identified in the first half of SA, mostly remained at the end of
the academic year. The findings conclude with a consideration of the pedagogical implications, in addition to
practical solutions for classroom application.

1366
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Explicit and Implicit (Im)politeness: A Corpus-based Study of


the Chinese Formulaic Expression “Nikezhen+X”

Lecture

Prof. Shaojie Zhang 1 , Ms. Keyuan Wang 1


1. Northeast Normal University

This paper aims to investigate the specific realisation and recognition of explicit and implicit (im)politeness
in interpersonal communication by drawing on the corpus-based data analysis of a metapragmatic expression
“Nikezhen+X” (lit. ‘You really +X’ in English), commonly used for evaluations in Chinese. The data was collected
from the BCC (BLCU Corpus Center) corpus (http://bcc.blcu.edu.cn), an online corpus made available by the
Corpus Center of the Beijing Language and Culture University.
For example, in a situation in which someone did a good favour for a friend, then his/her friend may say,
“Nikezhen bang” (‘You are really great.’). By saying “You are really great” in this situation, the speaker is praising
his/her friend for the good favour, and in this sense, literally, the speaker makes a polite judgment of his/her
friend’s behaviour. This formulaic expression is generally employed to explicitly refer to the acts of making
evaluations, and thereby, it constitutes an assembly of evaluative resources that guide people’s making evalua-
tions.
The results of the study reveal that this formulaic expression can be used to make both explicit and implicit
(im)politeness evaluations, residing in the literal meaning (what is said) and implied meaning (what is impli-
cated) respectively. From an addressee-oriented perspective, the explicit (im)politeness is recognized based on
the conventional meaning accepted by default. The implicit (im)politeness is recognized by dint of inferences
drawn from the speaker’s intention in situational contexts. The recognition of (im)politeness is dependent on
how the speaker uses the expression to represent his/her intention with consideration of the politeness ele-
ments, namely, friendliness, attitudinal warmth, respectfulness, etc., which are highly valued in the Chinese
Politeness Principle.
Through an empirical analysis of the realisation and recognition of explicit (im)politeness and implicit
(im)politeness, the present study can shed new light on the interaction of politeness and implicatures and pose
a challenge to indirectness as politeness.
Keywords: Nikezhen + X; formulaic expression; explicit (im)politeness; implicit (im)politeness; intention; po-
liteness elements

1367
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring Illocutionary Force of Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM)


Specified Canonical Constructions: A Collostructional
Approach

Lecture

Dr. Yoshiyuki Notohara 1


1. Doshisha University

This paper explores and confirms illocutionary force of tense-aspect-modality (TAM) specified canonical con-
structions (CCs) in native English spoken corpus through collostructional analysis. In cognitive grammar, con-
structions (form-meaning pairings) are assumed to be pragmatically grounded and developed through social
interactions (Langacker, 2008; 2009). In pragmatics, constructions can be considered salient linguistic features
in daily conversations to be pragmatically noticed, processed and conceptualized (i.e., a heuristic pragmatic
analysis) (e.g., Verschueren & Frank, 2009). In usage-based construction grammar, there have so far been much
discussion on the syntax-semantics interface in constructions, but relatively a few on the syntax-pragmatics
interface although there are some theoretical (esp. image-schematic) discussions on the relationships between
syntactical constructions and indirect speech acts (ISAs) (e.g., Panther & Thornburg, 2003; Ruiz de Mendosa
Ibañez, 2003; Stefanowitsch, 2000). Traditionally, the syntax-pragmatics interfaces have been discussed refer-
ring to modal expressions-based illocutionary indicating devices (IFIDs) and illocutionary force potential (e.g.,
Searle, 1969, 1975, 1983, 1995; Searle & Vanderveken, 1985; Stefanowitsch, 2003 Vanderveken,1990). Recently,
some researchers in both cognitive linguistics and pragmatics have been investigating a wider range of IFIDs
and the degree of illocutionary force salience in combined illocutionary force effects (e.g., Ruytenbeek, Os-
tashchenko, & Kissine, 2017; Ruytenbeek, 2021; Sbisà, 2001, 2009; Zufferey, Moeschler, & Reboul, 2019). Then,
the current study tries to explore the actual realisation of TAM markers in three material world event schema
and multi-functional illocutionary force constructions (States/SVC, Location/SV, Possession/SVO) (e.g., Radden &
Dirven, 2007) and compare the degree of illocutionary force salience in terms of its collostructional strength
(e.g., Gries, 2015, 2019; Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2004; Gries, Hampe, & Schönefeld, 2005, 2010; Hampe, 2013;
Schmidt & Küchenhoff, 2013; Stefanowitsch, 2013; Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003). The procedure was as fol-
lows: (1) randomly selected 1000 examples of three representative verbs of three constructions (States/SVC/BE,
Location/SV/BE, Possession/SVO/HAVE) were respectively extracted from the Spoken BNC2014 corpus (Love et
al., 2017); (2) all the examples were coded in terms of three perspectives considering sequences of spoken in-
teraction: canonical constructions, TAM markers, and ISAs; (3) the collostructional strengths between TAM
specified canonical constructions and frequent ISAs were confirmed through collostructional analysis. As a
result, the following seven tendencies were confirmed: (1) the States/SVC/Present tense construction (identify-
ing (defining), expressing pleasure, expressing dissatisfaction, correcting, asking, and expressing certainty); (2)
the States/SVC/Past tense construction (reporting, asking, and correcting); (3) the States/SVC/Modality construc-
tion (expressing probability and expressing certainty); (4) the Location/SV/Present tense construction (report-
ing, correcting, asking); (5) the Location/SV/Past tense construction (asking); (6) the Possession/SVO/Past tense
construction (reporting, expressing probability, and asking); (7) the Possession/SVO/Perfect aspect construction
(correcting, reporting, and asking). Based on the empirical results, the relationships between TAM specified
event schemata of three canonical constructions and illocutionary force realization in English spoken interac-
tion are theoretically discussed.

1368
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring the relationship between information structure


and intersubjectivity in spoken Mandarin: A corpus-based
approach

Lecture

Dr. Carmen Lepadat 1


1. RomaTre University

The way in which information is tailored within a discourse unit to fit the addressee’s presumed state of mind
is inherently connected with the relationship existing between the speaker/writer and the addressee (Van Valin
& LaPolla, 1998): intersubjectivity – intended as “the locutionary agent’s expression of his or her awareness of
the addressee’s attitudes and beliefs” (Traugott, 2010: 33) – is clearly at stake in the very same definition of some
information-structure (IS) related constructions, including right-dislocated topics. The latter have been defined
in functional linguistics as involving “an implicit request from the speaker to the hearer to put the propositional
information on hold until the antitopic is uttered” (Lambrecht, 1994: 203) or even as “a grammaticalized device
for creating an affective bond with the hearer” (Aijmer, 1989:150). A massive amount of research has been
produced in the area of IS over the past century, but seldom in the light of (socio)pragmatic factors such as
(inter)subjectivity, speaker/hearer gender or social contexts, with the exception of very few theoretical-based
accounts (e.g., Van der Wal, 2015).
This study proposes a new way of operationalising the relationship between IS and intersubjectivity in spoken
Mandarin from a corpus-based perspective. 250 utterances containing right dislocations (RDs) were identified
and compared with 250 instances of topic-focus utterances from the CallFriend Corpus in terms of intersub-
jectivity, referent activation, illocutionary force and speaker/hearer gender. Multiple correspondence analyses
show that utterances containing RDs are significantly marked by the presence of right peripheral expressions
of intersubjectivity such as sentence-final particles, indicating that encoding of the “speaker’s attention to ad-
dressee self-image” (Traugott, 2010: 60) might be a prerequisite for the use of RDs. Furthermore, intersubjectiv-
ity was found to be at play more often in male than in female productions of RDs, contrary to previous findings
on gendered use of sentence-final particles (Chan, 1997). Finally, referential RDs had fully active referents sig-
nificantly more often than referential utterance-initial topics, confirming that a phatic, intersubjective value
may be ascribed to the former construction rather than a mere referential integration function (Lepadat, 2021).
Aijmer, K. (1989). Themes and Tails: The Discourse Functions of Dislocated Elements. Nordic Journal of Linguis-
tics 12 (2): 137–54.
Chan, M. K. (1997). Gender Differences in the Chinese Language: A Preliminary Report. In H. Lin (Ed.), Proceed-
ings of the Ninth North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-9), Vol. 2 (pp. 35–52). Los Angeles:
GSIL Publications.
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of
Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lepadat, C. (2021). Not Just Postposed Topics: An Integrated Pragmatic Account of the Sentence-Final Slot in
Mandarin Chinese. PhD. Diss, Sapienza University of Rome.
Traugott, E. C. (2010) “Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization”, in K. Davids, L. Vande-
lanotte, & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: a reassessment (pp. 29-70). Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Van Valin, R, & LaPolla, R. J. (1998). Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Function. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Van der Wal, J. (2015). Information structure, (inter)subjectivity and objectification. Journal of Linguistics 51:
425–464.

1369
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exploring unfamiliar ingredients in instructional cooking


activities of foreign cuisines

Lecture

Ms. Shu-Yu Huang 1


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Bodily sensing is one of the most fundamental methods human beings use to explore unknowns. Through mo-
bilizing different senses with various ways of object manipulation, the materiality of an object can be obtained
and revealed to others in socially recognizable manners in interactions. As ethnomethodological and conver-
sation analytic studies have shown, inspecting sequences shape and are shaped by the wider activities they are
embedded in. For example, in tasting sessions, participants achieve objective descriptions of tasting samples
through negotiating judgements in more or less standard procedures (e.g., Fele, 2019). In contrast, in shop en-
counters, customers’ physical engagements with food are occasioned for making buying decisions, and their
assessments are general and subjective (e.g., Mondada, 2021).
Building on the above-mentioned studies of multisensorial practices with food, this study investigates how stu-
dent participants in a recreational cooking class explore unfamiliar ingredients. Cooking class is a perspicuous
setting for investigating the relations between multimodality and multisensoriality because the materiality of
ingredients is consequential to how participants sense and transform them. The data come from 12.5-hour
video recordings collected at an adult learning center in Taiwan where four Southeast Asian immigrant teach-
ers took turns teaching local students food from their hometowns. The interactions are conducted in Mandarin
and Taiwanese.
This study investigates how participants initiate and conduct sensing actions that are recognizable as doing ex-
ploration of unfamiliar ingredients and how they make their sensorial experiences intelligible in interactions.
First, sensing actions predominantly follow questions about what the focal ingredient is or specifically about its
sensorial features. Their sequential positions indicate that sensing is deployed as a key method to make sense
of unknown ingredients. Second, in terms of sensing conduct, participants maximize their sensorial access
with distant (sight, smell) senses by leaning toward the ingredient or bringing it close to themselves. However,
with contact senses (touch, taste), they minimally expose themselves to ingredients by taking only small bites or
touching it with the tip of one or two fingers. The differentiated sensing practices display participants’ dual ori-
entation of apprehending unfamiliar food with senses and minimizing potential undesirable outcomes resulting
from sensing unknown ingredients. Finally, participants produce intelligible sensorial outcomes by describing
the material features of the sensed ingredients and making analogies with multimodal resources. Through de-
lineating the interactional organization of sensing activities, the findings contribute to the understanding of
how multisensorial exploration of materiality is interactionally achieved and made locally relevant.
Fele, G. (2019). Olfactory objects: recognizing, describing and assessing smells during professional tasting ses-
sions. In D. Day and J. Wagner (Eds.), Objects, bodies and work Practice (pp. 250–284). Multilingual Matters.
Mondada, L. (2021). Sensing in Social Interaction: The Taste for Cheese in Gourmet Shops. Cambridge University
Press.

1370
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expressing anger in Spanish speaking online service


interactions: The case of Cabify customer complaints

Lecture

Dr. H Powell 1 , Prof. Maria Elena Placencia 1


1. Birkbeck college, London

In a previous work Powell and Placencia (2021) analysed complaints made on Twitter against taxicab companies
from the point of view of Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) Rapport Management framework. As discussed by Locher and
Langlotz (2008) the appropriateness of rapport management strategies in a given situation involves subjective
judgements in which emotional response is key – inappropriate strategies or impoliteness are likely to produce
negative emotions. The links between emotion and (im)politeness are still, however, an underdeveloped area in
research relating to the Spanish-speaking world (but see, e.g., Arancibia y Montecino 2017; Kaul de Marlangeon
2018; Maíz-Arévalo 2018; Fernández Vallejo, 2020). We hope to contribute to this growing body of work with
a study within a service context, focussing on the ways in which users of Cabify, an online taxicab service
operating in Latin America and Spain, express their anger due to unsatisfactory service experiences.
The study adopts a qualitative perspective and uses examples from a corpus of 93 complaints on Twitter con-
cerning Cabify. As observed in McColl-Kennedy et al.’s (2009) study of customer rage episodes, complainers in
this corpus display a range of anger intensity and expressed this employing a variety of lexical choices such as
negative adjectives or profanities, and shouting - indicated in our online context using the prosodic stand-in
(Androutsopoulos 2000) of capitalisation. Complainers also reference retaliatory behaviour they may engage in
or attempt to displace their own anger by ridiculing the object of their complaint. Interestingly, complainers in
our corpus rely very little on the particular affordances of the medium (emojis or hashtags). Also, complainers
rarely describe how events make them feel but rather perform their anger through emotive language.
Bibliography
Androutsopoulos, J. K. (2000). Non�standard spellings in media texts: The case of German fanzines. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 514-533.
Arancibia, M.C. y Montecino, L. (2017). “The construction of anger in comments on the public behavior of mem-
bers of the social elite in Chile”. Discourse & Society, 28, 595-613.
Kaul de Marlangeon, S. (2017). “Tipos de descortesía verbal y emociones en contextos de cultura hispanohab-
lante”. Pragmática Sociocultural, 5, 1-23.
Fernández Vallejo, A. M. (2020). “Comunicar emociones en Facebook: análisis discursivo en la página corpora-
tiva de empresa Dia”. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (RESLA), 33, 55-83
Locher and Langlotz (2008). Relational work: at the intersection of cognition, interaction and emotion Bulletin
Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée (VALS-ASLA), 88, 165-191, 2008
Maíz Arevalo (2018) Emotional self-presentation of Whatsapp: Analysis of the profile status, Russian Journal of
Linguistics, 22(1) 144-160
McColl-Kennedy, J.R., Patterson, P., Smith, A.K. and Brady, M.K. (2009). Customer rage episodes: Emotions, ex-
pressions and behaviors . Journal of Retailing, 85 (2) 222-237.
Powell, H and Placencia, M.E (2021). Customer complaints directed towards private taxi-cab companies on Twit-
ter: a comparison of strategies used in Spain and Mexico. 17th International Pragmatics Conference, Winterhur,
Switzerland, 27th June – 2nd July
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: cul-
ture, communication and politeness theory (2nd ed. ed., pp. 11-47). Continuum: London

1371
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Expressions of responsibility in the last statements by


inmates on death row

Lecture

Prof. Jan-Ola Östman 1 , Prof. Helena Halmari 2


1. University of Helsinki, 2. Sam Houston State University

In this study we investigate the linguistic manifestations of responsibility in a highly atypical genre: the last
statements by Texas inmates who are about to be executed by their state. The data consist of transcribed last
statements (ca. 48,000 words) from the period 1982–2021, during which 573 executions took place in Texas. Our
general question is the following: How—and how often—do the inmates express responsibility for their crimes
in this last moment of their lives?
Concepts of responsibility (Östman and Solin 2016) and complicity (Verschueren 2022) are rapidly gaining a
status comparable to that of ideology in discourse analysis and narrative analysis. We exploit the means of
traditional approaches to responsibility, distinguishing between moral (personal), legal (formal), interactive
(interpersonal), and collective (socio-cultural) responsibility. While this categorization may seem clear, some
types of discourse present challenges right from the start.
In our analysis of the last statements by the inmates, we tease out expressions of either taking or avoiding
responsibility. The following patterns appear: (1) Those inmates who take moral/personal responsibility for
their crimes tend to do so on-record: I know I was wrong; I accept full responsibility like a man; There is so much
hurt that I have caused you all. They often use the head phrases of an apology (I apologize; I am sorry), and they
may directly address the victim’s family to apologize. The word sorry often clusters: it may be repeated multiple
times within one short statement. Religious content is heavily present, and it tends to be indexical of taking
responsibility for the crime committed. (2) Those inmates who do not express the act of taking responsibility
may insist on their innocence or transfer the responsibility of what is happening at the moment (execution) to
a broken system—the death penalty as a wrongful institution: What is happening to me now is unjust and the
system is broken; I have no ill will towards anyone carrying out this so-called justice. Expressions of interactional
responsibility may also surface, as in people seeking revenge towards me. (3) Inmates in both categories (those
who convey responsibility and those who do not) may express compliance (This is destiny, this is life) or self-pity
(I wanted to kill myself ).
We couple the analysis of the expressions of responsibility, or avoidance of it, with narrative analyses, especially
Level-3 analysis (cf. De Fina 2013). This approach opens up the possibility for discourse analysts to use inmates’
last statements as forceful criticisms of the system of executions. We also argue that a detailed analysis of this
atypical, peripheral genre of last statements may lead to a better understanding of more mundane kinds of
discourse—especially in relation to notions of responsibility and its linguistic manifestations.
References
De Fina, A. 2013. Positioning level 3: Connecting local identity displays to macro social processes. Narrative
Inquiry 23 (1): 40–61.
Östman, J.-O., and A. Solin (eds). 2016. Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings. Sheffield: Equinox.
Verschueren, J. 2022. Complicity in discourse and practice. London: Routledge.

1372
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Fallacies of war metaphors in the COVID-19 pandemic: a


diachronic approach

Lecture

Dr. Maria Stroinska 1 , Dr. Grażyna Drzazga 2


1. McMaster University, 2. University Medical Centre, Groningen

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we communicate and produced its own set of public discourses. We
review the use of - arguably the most frequently used - war metaphors in government medical discourse and
compare it to public discourse on social media, including the fake news.

We look at three countries: Poland, with a very high rate of COVID related deaths, Canada – an example of
model vaccine mandate compliance, and the Netherlands, a country with high vaccination rates which went
into lockdown as a response the Omicron wave.
The most common metaphor in the discourse about illness has been that of war (Sonntag 1978), with focus on
individual patients fighting the disease (Casarett et al. 2017). The pandemic shifted the emphasis to addressing
entire societies and influencing their behaviour towards a new health hazard. Doctors no longer talked about
individuals fighting a disease: is was the healthcare system’s struggle with the virus and patients were reduced
to battleground and casualties. However, at different times, a competing narrative emerged, one about the peo-
ple struggling to regain their personal freedoms lost as governments imposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Both narratives employ the same war metaphor but assign the roles differently.
War metaphors simplify complex issues and communicate the seriousness of the confrontation, encouraging
others to fulfill their duty in the fight against the enemy. And yet, war metaphors may have both positive and
negative connotation depending on how one is being cast and how much agency one has (Rohela et al 2020).
War metaphors for COVID�19 used by the healthcare authorities tend to cast people as a passive battleground
in the fight against the disease waged by the medical profession. In the COVID-19 social media conspiracy theo-
ries, people are cast as the fighters for freedom against corrupt governments and profit greedy pharmaceutical
companies. The 2nd Freedom Convoy planned for 2023 may change or confirm this script.
Recasting ordinary people as freedom-fighters and returning their agency helps conspiracy theories gain sup-
port in situations where the official discourse gives them no active role. Despite it being the same war, it is the
casting that determines which side people may feel more likely to align with.
Within the war metaphor frame, the recent idea that we need to learn to live with the virus is akin to trea-
son, adding fuel to the growing conspiracy theories proclaiming the virus as a hoax. The final blow to the war
metaphor for COVID was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In the face of a real war, metaphor-
ical wars require immediate reframing.
Sonntag S. Illness as Metaphor. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux; 1978.
Casarett, David et al. “Can Metaphors and Analogies Improve Communication with Seriously Ill Patients?” Jour-
nal of Palliative Medicine 13.3 (2010): 255–260. PMC. Web. 1 Oct. 2017.
Rohela, Pallavi et al. “Must there be a “war” against coronavirus?” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. Volume V,
number 3: 222-226, 2020.

1373
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Fighting for democracy: Ideological implications embedded in


the scenarios of WAR

Lecture

Dr. Hsiao-Ling Hsu 1 , Prof. Huei-ling Lai 1 , Prof. Jyi-Shane Liu 1


1. National Chengchi University

This study investigates the ideological implications embedded in the scenarios of WAR metaphor on DEMOC-
RACY in Taiwanese presidential addresses between 1948 and 2021. Four main steps are involved in the analy-
sis: determining and extracting metaphorical cases of mínzhǔ ‘democracy’ according to MIP (Pragglejaz Group,
2007) and MIPVU (Steen et al, 2010), verifying source domains according to source domain verification proce-
dures (Ahrens & Jiang, 2020), analyzing the scenarios profiled in the source domains, and discussing the ideo-
logical implications based on DHA (Wodak2001, Reisigl, 2017).
Among the four main source domains verified (i.e., WAR, BUILDING, JOURNEY, and ORGANISM), WAR is the
most dominant, accounting for 31.8 percent of the total metaphorical expressions on DEMOCRACY. In WAR,
four scenarios are profiled: offensive and defensive processes in war, avoiding military/armed attacks and seek-
ing peaceful reconciliation, alliances forged in war, and a desirable outcome in war. Offensive and defensive pro-
cesses in war is manifested significantly and constantly throughout all presidents’ addresses. Its prevalent status
concurs with a constant theme of fighting for democracy within the political background of internal transition
from authoritarian regime to democracy and of external long-standing geopolitical tensions. The other three
scenarios mainly occur occasionally after 1990. This year marks a turning point in Taiwan’s political history:
the Wild Lily student movement for democracy is successful and the indirect presidential election is abolished
after this year. Avoiding military/armed attacks and seeking peaceful reconciliation is profiled to indicate that
democracy could serve as a means to sustainable peace. Alliances forged in war points out that democracy can
forge strong alliances with worldwide partners and fight against threats from authoritarianists. Mainly profiled
after the success of the first party alternation, a desirable outcome in war relays that in the fight for democracy,
a victory is earned. Further exploration of the manifestation of offensive and defensive processes in war reveals
that it carries different messages in different stages. Before 1990, the primary concern of the ruling party is
to fight against the communists and reclaim their lost territory. To distinguish themselves from the commu-
nists, the government regards democracy as an offensive and defensive strategy which can be carried out to
protect the country. This also implies that democracy is not the government’s priority but a means to their le-
gitimacy in Taiwan. The absence of freedom of speech in that period further bears out this implication. After
1990, the success of seven direct presidential elections and three party alternations signifies the advancement of
democracy. However, with ongoing geopolitical threats, the governments emphasize the importance of democ-
racy: democracy is the essence of Taiwan, and offensive and defensive processes should be employed to defend
democracy. More specifically, it is highlighted that defending democracy is essential to safeguard Taiwan. The
role of democracy has thus shifted from a means to a primary goal. This study demonstrates the function of
metaphor and scenarios and exemplifies how ideological implications can be scrutinized based on linguistic
manifestation and contextual information, particularly the historical and socio-political circumstances.

1374
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Food as a Source of Intercultural Communication in Virtual


Exchange: Japan and China

Panel contribution

Mr. Martin Parsons 1 , Dr. Mikel Garant 2


1. Hannan University, 2. Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai

This presentation will introduce an ongoing, multimodal, virtual exchange project between university student
in Japan and China that seeks to enhance learners intercultural, digital literacy and English as a Foreign Lan-
guage proficiencies.
We will also describe the results from a particular project which is being undertaken in the latter half of 2022.
In this project, as part of their English courses, students from each country formed small groups to collaborate
in the production of a short video on an aspect of the food culture of their respective nations. Students wrote
a script, recorded video, took photographs or acquired copyright free images, to enhance the script with vi-
sual representations. They narrated their script, adding copyright free background music to create an original
multimodal, digital artefact. The completed videos were then made available to all students in both countries
via a password-protected, bespoke website. A rubric designed for the project allowed students to provide one
another with written feedback, which was used to re-edit the videos to complete the project. All interaction
between students was conducted in English.
As is well known, relations between the two countries have been fractious for several decades, presenting prob-
lems in communication between both the nations and their citizens. Recent global political trends and events
may also prove to be a source of further tension. Discussing food culture, however, offers a possible nexus point
for communication. In fact, both Japan and China can lay claim to unique and popular culinary traditions of
which they are justly proud. Presenting these traditions to one another may lead to opportunities for reflection
and deeper understanding. In short, we theorise that if students have the opportunity to meet, even in a virtual
exchange, their attitudes towards the other country may improve.
In the presentation, we will outline the project, show examples of the videos produced by students and discuss
their impressions of the other country based upon pre- and post-project questionnaires and written reflective
comments. Using the students’ own words, we will examine how students used the cuisine of their nations to
communicate in this intercultural environment in order to make meaning of the task before them.

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From the universal impairment hypothesis to the double


empathy problem: Theory of Mind and pragmatic skills in
autism as a case of epistemic injustice

Lecture

Dr. Eleonora Marocchini 1


1. Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE)

Experimental pragmatics has extensively focused on pragmatics in atypical development. However, only a few
works addressed the epistemic limits that specific theoretical approaches to these populations put forward,
sometimes affecting decades of research. In fact, while research on neurotypical populations has shifted
towards a view of pragmatic and cognitive abilities in terms of individual differences, tackling concepts such as
co-constructed discourse and meaning negotiation, research on autism has mainly framed specific pragmatic
phenomena into a wider view of autistic pragmatic abilities as impaired.

The hypothesis of a universal Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit in autism has been one of the most impactful in
pragmatics. While this idea prompted a wealth of studies, some autistic people passed the false-belief task that
was created to test it, leading to the development of more advanced tasks and, even, removal from some tests
of items on which autistic performances were neurotypical-like (Chevallier, 2012). Subsequent studies were
so strongly based on the assumption of an impairment, that tests not revealing it were considered unsuitable
rather than revealing of a bias towards autistic people (Rajendran & Mitchell, 2007).
Similarly, literature in pragmatics has risen from the biased root of a unitary pragmatic deficit in autism, only to
find several pragmatic abilities, such as lexical ambiguity resolution, scalar implicatures, metaphor, and indi-
rect speech acts comprehension to be “preserved”. However, the interpretations of these findings often suggest
we should not interpret surface level performance as actual competence. Autistic comprehension strategies
are framed as “compensatory”, suggesting a supposed superiority of the “normal” strategies, and framing neu-
rotypical strategies as a single standard route to comprehension, losing insights on individual differences and
cognitive diversity.
Recent contributions from autistic academics enriched the field focusing on differences rather than impair-
ments, and drawing hypotheses on communication difficulties between neurotypes rather than within a spe-
cific neurotype, such as the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) and its potential application to mutual
(mis)understanding in pragmatics (Williams, 2021). However, such contributions are hardly ever cited.
The present work reports on a critical analysis of classic and contemporary approaches to the topic, highlighting
potential biases and epistemic injustice, and suggests insights from 2 virtual focus groups with (n=22) autistic
adults on cross-neurotype communication. Preliminary results seem to be in favor of the double empathy the-
ory and suggest that the subfield would benefit from a thorough review of the tools we use, higher levels of
attention to autistic-led and participatory research and an epistemological perspective shift within the mostly
neurotypical academic community.
References

Chevallier, C. (2012). Theory of Mind and Autism: Beyond Baron-Cohen et al.’s Sally-Anne Study. In A. M. Slater
& P. C. Quinn (Eds.), Developmental Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies (pp. 148–163). Sage.
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the double empathy problem. Disability & Society. 27(6):
883-887.
Rajendran, G. & Mitchell, P. (2007). Cognitive theories of autism. Developmental Review, 27(2): 224-260.
Williams, G.L. (2021). Theory of autistic mind: A renewed relevance theoretic perspective on so-called autistic

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pragmatic ‘impairment’. Journal of Pragmatics, 180: 121-130.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender neutralizing processes in Brazilian Portuguese: style


and indexicalization in a feminist corpus

Lecture

Mrs. Rafaely Carolina da Cruz 1 , Dr. Anna Bentes 1


1. University of Campinas

Gender marking in Brazilian Portuguese is performed in a binary way, that is, feminine and masculine. For
Mattoso Câmara ([1969] 2002) the masculine -o is an unmarked form and the feminine -a is a specialization,
for example, jarra (jar) is a specialization of jarro (jug). Morphologically, gender marking happens similarly to
other Romance languages: in adjectives, nominals, determiners (quantifiers, demonstratives, possessives and
numerals) and third person pronouns. Despite that, gender marking is still considered a sensitive aspect for
linguistic studies, especially in recent years when sexism in language is discussed and when the creation of
neutralization gender processes and/or of inclusive language can reveal solidarity in relation to a social mi-
nority. Within this perspective, this work intends to present the phenomenon of gender marking in Brazilian
Portuguese in the texts of a feminist corpus. The corpus consists of 149 texts collected from self-identified fem-
inist and/or nonbinary social media pages, covering a time span of 3 years (2019-2021. )We consider feminism
social movement as a discursive field of action (Alvarez, 2014) that is sensitive to social demands, we agree
with Blommaert (2005) when he says that any “order of indexicality” is organized by regimes related to feel-
ings of belonging and controlling processes of certain groups. In this sense, the results of our research reveal
that we have four metalinguistic actions to neutralize gender marking and/or to produce an inclusive language:
a) coordination of binary gender inflections (amigo, amiga); b) coordination of masculine, feminine and non
binary gender inflections (amigo, amiga, amigue); c) replacing binary gender markers (amigue); d) gender spec-
ification/vizibilization (amiga). We propose that these metalinguistic actions are part of a process of stylization
(Eckert, 2000) through which writers index meanings, values, and contexts that are cultivated by the various
feminists collectives observed. The gender-neutral stylistic work we have analyzed are conditioned by textual
and discursive features such as genre, intended audience, and speech acts. For instance, in the feminist corpus,
gender-neutral forms tend to appear more frequently in informative texts and are concentrated in the opening
and closing sections, serving thus an emblematic function.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender Prejudices and Identity Contestations in Nigerian


Police-Civilian Encounters

Lecture

Dr. Felix Ogoanah 1


1. University of Benin

This study examines the effects of verbal aggression as employed by Nigerian police officers in their interactions
with civilians in non-criminal contexts such as stop-and-search at authorized and unauthorized checkpoints
and how their performance of these impoliteness events is marked by gender prejudices, identity contestations
and power abuses. In this context, impoliteness is unidirectional and because victims are usually presumed
guilty until they are proven innocent, much of the encounter is a demonstration of power and legitimation.
The study investigates these impoliteness events in order to identify those marked gender prejudices, and reac-
tions and inaction the strategies provoke from the other interlocutor(s). The multimodal datasets utilised in this
research were sourced from ten naturally-occurring interactions recorded spontaneously by third parties and
published on various social media platforms, (particularly YouTube and Twitter) between the years 2010-2020.
These videos were subjected to content and critical analysis. The study discovers that of the five impoliteness
strategies proposed by Jonathan Culpeper, Nigerian police officers use four namely, bald on record impolite-
ness, off record/mock impoliteness, positive impoliteness, and negative impoliteness. The findings also reveal
that in deploying these impoliteness strategies, the police officers attack the face of their male and female vic-
tims with gender stereotypes of fraud and promiscuity, respectively. They deploy these strategies to perform
two of Culpeper’s impoliteness functions – the affective and the coercive impoliteness functions and they do it
to intimidate, harass and force their targets into compliance for personal gains. More importantly, the study
underscores the horrific impacts of these impoliteness events, and their unanticipated risks, which culminated
in the 2020 tragic #EndSARS protest among Nigerian youths.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

General extenders in university classroom talk:


discourse-pragmatic and register variation

Lecture

Dr. Federica Barbieri 1


1. Swansea University

Over the past three decades, sociolinguistics and pragmatics have witnessed growing interest in markers of
vagueness, specifically clause-final pragmatic markers (e.g., or whatever, and stuff like that; Traugott, 2016), best
known as ‘general extenders’ (GEs). Previous research on GEs has focused on their metapragmatic functions,
sociolinguistic distribution, and grammaticalization processes. Most studies have focused on conversational
data from sociolinguistic interviews (Cheshire, 2007; Tagliamonte & Denis, 2010), while a handful studies have
looked at GEs in radio phone-in programs (O’Keefee, 2004), formal interviews (Stubbe & Holmes, 1995), and
TV political debates (Overstreet & Yules, 1997). To date, however, research on GEs use in non-conversational,
institutional contexts is very limited.
This study addresses this gap by comparing GEs in casual conversation and classroom discourse, an institu-
tional register “at the interface of an oral-literate continuum” (Csomay, 2006, p. 119). Specifically, it examines
GEs use in a large corpus (1.3 million words) of American university classroom discourse representing three
major disciplinary domains (Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences), in order to examine the role of
disciplinary and intra-register variation on the type, frequency, and discourse-pragmatic functions of GEs in
university classroom talk. Patterns are compared with use in a corpus of American conversation (ca. 500,000
words) from the same period.
Findings reveal that GEs are nearly twice as common in conversation than in classroom discourse. GEs were
found to vary across disciplinary domains: GEs are most common in the Social Sciences, followed by the Hu-
manities. Taken together, these findings reveal that GEs vary both across registers and within registers. This
suggests that, in institutional registers, situational factors (e.g., academic discipline) may be stronger predic-
tors of variation than social factors. Analyses also reveal differences in the particular types of GEs favored in
conversation and in different disciplinary domains within university classroom discourse (e.g., Conversation
favors or something, and stuff, or whatever; university talk favors and so on, and something like that).
References:
Cheshire, J. (2007). Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2),
155-193.
Csomay, E. A. (2006). Academic talk in American university classrooms: Crossing the boundaries of oral-literate
discourse? Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 117-135.
O’Keeffe, A. (2004). ‘Like the wise virgins and all that jazz’: Using a corpus to examine vague categorisation and
shared knowledge. In U. Connor & T. S. Upton (Eds.), Applied Corpus Linguistics (Vol. 52, pp. 1-20). Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Overstreet, M., & Yule, G. (1997). On being inexplicit and stuff in contemporary American English. Journal of
English Linguistics, 25(3), 250-258.
Stubbe, M., & Holmes, J. (1995). You Know, Eh and other ‘exasperating expressions’: An analysis of social and
stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communi-
cation, 15(1), 63-88.
Tagliamonte, S., & Denis, D. (2010). The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English
Linguistics, 38, 355-367.
Traugott, E. C. (2016). On the rise of types of clause-final pragmatic markers in English. Journal of Historical
Pragmatics, 17(1), 26-54.

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Gestural discourse markers in multimodal topic-shifting

Lecture

Dr. Schuyler Laparle 1


1. University of California, Berkeley

Topic-shifting as a discourse structural phenomenon remains a subject of debate, especially in regards to shift-
types (Garcia & Joanette 1997) and the relationship between topic-shifts and digressions (Bordería & Arguedas
2009). Similar complications arise in analyses of lexical discourse markers (LDMs) used to signal topic-shifts,
such as “anyway” in English and its cross-linguistic equivalents (e.g. Takahara 1998). In this work, I consider
topic-shifting from a multimodal perspective, looking in particular at hand gestures co-occurring with the LDM
“anyway”. I demonstrate the ways in which variation in the gestural mode can be accounted for by reconsid-
ering variation in discourse structure, especially in regards to shift-type. Through this analysis, I argue that
gestural discourse markers (GDMs) can meaningfully contribute to our understanding of contentious concepts
in discourse analysis, including the meaning of LDMs and the nature of between-utterance relations.
All data comes from the American talk show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, gathered through UCLA’s
Communication Studies Archive in collaboration with the Red Hen Lab. I consider 150 examples of “anyway”,
which include 111 instances of LDM “anyway” and 39 instances of distinct attitude and semantic senses. In
describing accompanying gestures, I take an action-schematic approach, in which the meaning of a gesture is
derived from primary motor routines compatible with its formal features (e.g. Müller 2017). I identify and
discuss three classes of GDMs with this methodology: (i) removal gestures in which a virtual object is removed
from the interlocutors’ interaction space (25 instances); (ii) presentation gestures in which a virtual object is in-
troduced into the interaction space (32 instances); and (iii) locating gestures in which a virtual object is referred
to in the interaction space (10 instances).
Each class of gestures serves to express different properties of the topic-shift that are left underspecified by
the LDM. Removal gestures emphasize topic dismissal, and are strongly associated in the data with ‘full shifts’
(shifts that begin a new discourse topic). Presentation gestures emphasize topic initiation, and are associated
with ‘partial shifts’ (shifts that continue a discourse topic but change how it is being discussed) and ‘return
shifts’ (shifts that continue a discourse topic after a digressive segment). Locating gestures also emphasize topic
initiation, but are most closely associated with return shifts only.
The systematicity of GDMs with “anyway” is exposed by carefully considering other discourse structural fac-
tors. These GDMs thus express discourse structural meaning independently from the lexical item they are most
closely affiliated with. This independence of contribution suggests that GDMs can serve as another tool for
testing our theories of discourse structure.
References
Garcia, L. J., & Joanette, Y. (1997). Analysis of conversational topic shifts. Brain and language, 58(1), 92-114.
Bordería, S. P., & Arguedas, M. E. (2009). Expressing digression linguistically. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(5), 921-
936.
Müller, C. (2017). How recurrent gestures mean. Gesture, 16(2), 277-304.
Takahara, P. O. (1998). Pragmatic functions of the English discourse marker anyway and its corresponding
contrastive Japanese discourse markers. Pragmatics and beyond new series, 327-352.

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Greek political discourses in the years 2019-2022:


instrumentalizing impoliteness and aggression

Lecture

Prof. Marianthi Georgalidou 1


1. University of the Aegean

The aim of this presentation is to discuss impoliteness, aggression and derogatory forms of speech attested in
Greek political discourse since 2008 (Georgalidou, 2011), focusing on the years 2019-2022. Within the framework
of im/politeness research (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010; Culpeper 2011; Lorenzo-Dus, et al. 2011; Erjavec and
Kovačič 2012; Mitchell and Haugh 2015), I investigate the correlation between impoliteness, or else strategic
rudeness (Keinpointer 1997), and abusive verbal discourse in institutional communities of political practice
(Harris, 2001). I explore the potential of the said strategies to address not only immediate recipients, i.e., MPs,
but also the electorate, and to establish a common ground in viewing political issues and determining ideological
polarizations (Tracy, 2017; Georgalidou, Frantzi and Giakoumakis, 2020; Georgalidou, 2020). Within ongoing
research (2008-2022), the language material examined consists of the Minutes of Plenary Sessions of the Hellenic
Parliament between the years 2019-2022.
The questions posed in the analysis are twofold. Firstly, incidents containing sequences of personal attacks-
defense/counterattacks against adversaries in the Greek Parliament are structurally examined as discursive
practices in the context of parliamentary combat and political divisions. Secondly, in a macro-level approach,
the incidents are examined within the political context that has evolved in Greece, after a long post-junta
era (1974 onwards) and the years of the economic crisis (2008 onwards). The study adopts an emic ethno-
graphic/interactional approach. Discourse units are analyzed as there and then social actions. Moreover, a
combination of interactional and critical frameworks is applied so that complicated distinctions between ex-
pected political rivalry and verbal abuse can be approached.
Analysis focuses on establishing coherence among excerpts that form sequences embedded in long stretches of
parliamentary speeches. In such episodes, forms of debasing discourse are examined as part of the aggravated
confrontational style dominating Greek politics (Archakis and Tsakona, 2011; Boukala, 2014, 2019; Georgalidou
2011, 2017; Hatzidaki 2017; Georgalidou, Frantzi and Giakoumakis, 2020). This tendency forms part of a long
history of divisions between the (far-)right and left-wing political polars of the past century which thematically
fuel confrontations reintroducing recurring patterns of opposition (Boukala, 2014; Kostopoulos, 2021). Another
question the study attempts to tackle concerns the negotiation of preferences in political combat and the poten-
tial normalization of debasing choices attacking the personality of adversaries which could render such choices
expected, if not preferred. Strong reactions and rebuttals on the other hand, are examined as indications of a
dispreferred act having been committed, at least as far as the perspective of the attackee is concerned. All in
all, the study puts forth questions of the sequential organization of parliamentary interactions embedded in the
context of contemporary Greek politics.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How do scholars understand (im)politeness? An analysis


using computational methods

Lecture

Dr. Xi Chen 1 , Dr. Mian Jia 2


1. University of Central Lancashire, 2. The University of Texas at Austin

In the recent development of politeness research, pragmatics scholars have made increasing efforts to concep-
tualize (im)politeness (second-order politeness) through analyzing the emic and individual understanding that
are provided by laypersons (first-order politeness). This process, namely, identifying regularities from discur-
sive understanding, has generated a dynamic range of scholarly explanations for (im)politeness, affected by the
cultures, the situations, the languages, and the research targets that are investigated in the studies. This study
explores both the variations and common features in scholarly understanding of (im)politeness, using com-
putational methods. The findings aim to open an avenue for politeness researchers to learn from the other’s
perspectives and potentially help them to gain generalizable definitions of (im)politeness for future studies.
Specifically, this study used data scraping techniques to glean full sentences, where the keywords ‘politeness’,
‘impoliteness’, ‘im/politeness’ and ‘(im)politeness’ were used, from three hundred journal publications in the
field of pragmatics between 2018 and 2022. In total, 11701 sentences were extracted. The data were then pro-
cessed using KeyBERT and BERTopic. The former helps to obtain representational expressions that describe
each sentence the best, while the latter identifies patterns across different sentences.
Based on self-attention neural networks, the computational models split the data into eight different topics (clus-
tering of expressions). Each topic provided 30 representative expressions, which were listed by their strength
of association with the topic. All the topics contain both keywords ‘politeness’ and ‘impoliteness’, except the
one described by ‘prosody’. It seems that prosody has primarily been related to politeness only, indicating a
potential research gap. More interestingly, there is not a single term that has been used to define (im)politeness
across the eight topics. The most common descriptions related to (im)politeness are ‘social’ and ‘use’, which
appear in six and five topics, respectively. Other common, but less topic-widely used, terms include ‘context’,
‘linguistic’, ‘face’, ‘strategies’ and ‘evaluation’. The topic-unique descriptions demonstrate interesting pairs of
co-occurrence, such as ‘norms’ and ‘markers’, ‘discursive’ and ‘moral’ ‘order’, ‘genuine’ and ‘intended’, ‘identity’
and ‘rapport’ and many others. In addition, ‘Greek’ and ‘Chinese’ top two separate topics with Egyptian included
under Greek and Japanese under Chinese. Their topic descriptions, however, differ saliently, reflecting culture-
specific interpretations of (im)politeness.
The found clusters of expressions might not be a surprise to politeness researchers. Their studies might have
used some of them to describe their own understandings of (im)politeness. Indeed, what each topic in this study
presents is the distinguishable ‘segments’ that different (im)politeness scholarships collectively share between
them. These findings of the different ‘segments’ are expected to contribute to mapping the complex conceptu-
alization of (im)politeness towards its wholeness and scientificity.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

How to dismantle Responsibility in the Public Apology of the


Diet of Japan — From the Perspective of Local Grammar

Lecture

Dr. Huiling Chen 1 , Mr. Hengcong Li 2 , Dr. Jianying Du 1


1. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2. Osaka University

In a public apology compared to a private apology, the question of who should be held responsible is at the
center of academic and public concern (Alice MacLachlan, 2015; Qi et al., 2019). And in what is considered
a serious public event, an apology that contains a clear statement of responsibility seems to be a taboo for
apologizers. Therefore, apologies in public arena will always be done in creative ways. This paper takes public
apology in the Diet of Japan as the research object and attempts to explore which language structures Japanese
politicians use when making public apologies and their relevance to dealing with the responsibility speech. The
research method mainly uses local grammar analysis (Barnbrook, 2002), combining quantitative research with
qualitative investigation.
This survey used the online full-text database of the Minutes of the Diet, jointly produced by the National Diet
Library of Japan and the upper and lower houses of the Diet. Firstly, the stereotyped expression of apology is
used to automatically retrieve the apology examples and manually delete the examples without apology inten-
tion. After that, on the basis of local grammar analysis of all examples, 27 different apology functional labels
are extracted, and 291 different apology local grammar patterns are determined. According to the combination
pattern of functional labels in each local grammar pattern, it can be divided into three types: “weak informa-
tive apology”, “strong informative apology” and “non-informative apology”, among which “weak informative
apology” is the most frequently used type.
By analyzing the correlation of events and responsibilities in specific instances, this paper summarizes three
progressive stages and eight corresponding pragmatic strategies for Japanese politicians to cover up their re-
sponsibilities. The three stages are “whether to apologize, whether to choose to be responsible for the event it-
self, and whether to accept punishment”. The eight strategies were “avoid apology while taking responsibility”,
“take responsibility for compensation”, “use objective reasons as an excuse”, “attribute responsibility to broad
concepts”, “emphasize indirect responsibility”, “refer to past achievements”, “arouse sympathy”, “weaken the
crime of the events while taking responsibility”.
This paper adopts a new method, local grammar, to analyze the unique apology speech acts of Japanese politi-
cians from a microscopic perspective and finds out the main language means to dismantle their responsibilities,
thus filling the gap in the research of public apology in Japanese political discourse. At the same time, this paper
also opens up a new path of local grammar analysis for the study of speech acts in Japanese.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

I AM criticizing you when I say “I am not criticizing you”: A


multimodal analysis of the Chinese metapragmatic structure
bushi wo shuo ni 不是我说你

Lecture

Mr. Zepeng Wang 1


1. Nanjing University

Although the Chinese metapragmatic structure bushi wo + V + (NP) contains a negation marker, bushi “not”,
literally meaning “I am not performing the speech act of V (to NP)”, the sequences following it are often doing
its opposite (Ran, 2015). This controversy serves as the departure point for the present study that takes the
Chinese metapragmatic expression bushi wo shuo ni “I am not criticizing you” as a case, which has been widely
used in the interaction and received continuous attention from scholars due to its conflicting property. One
influential argument in this line of research is that bushi wo shuo ni mainly functions as a rapport-oriented
mitigating device used to reduce or soften the possible unwelcome effects of the speech act of criticizing (Ran,
2015; Yang, 2021). Nonetheless, such studies remain narrow in focus dealing only with written data retrieved
from novels, TV dramas, etc. Questions like how verbal language and nonverbal resources such as prosody,
gesture, and facial expression jointly construct the speaker meaning are yet unanswered.
It is well acknowledged that human communication, as a multimodal system, is composed of both verbal and
nonverbal components, of which the latter plays a more critical role in the interaction. As such, the present
study adopted a multimodal approach to advance our understanding of the metapragmatic awareness of the
speaker when saying bushi wo shuo ni and how such awareness is manifested through the coordination of
multimodalities by answering the following two research questions:
(1) what are the prosodic features of the Chinese metapragmatic structure bushi wo shuo ni?
(2) what are the speaker’s facial expressions when saying the Chinese metapragmatic structure bushi wo shuo
ni?
The data were collected from 30 native Chinese speakers who participated in two recording sessions designed
by the author. The preliminary results of the prosodic analysis of bushi wo shuo ni show that shuo “to criticize” is
the focus of the prosodic unit bushi wo shuo ni in the sense that the character shuo has the largest duration ratio.
In addition, the initial analysis of the facial expression indicates that speakers’ facial expressions are mostly sad
and angry when uttering bushi wo shuo ni. Thus, it might be concluded that the speaker, indeed, is criticizing
the listener when saying bushi wo shuo ni. In this case, the metapragmatic negation marker bushi could be seen
as a mitigator fulfilling its unique interpersonal function.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

IAW phrases with attributive question words in German

Lecture

Dr. Steven Schoonjans 1


1. Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt & KU Leuven

IAW phrases, also called aggressively non-D-linked phrases in more formal frameworks, are a group of expres-
sions that can be used especially in wh-questions to express “incomprehension from the side of the speaker
with regard to the sentence proposition” (Stefanowitsch 2011:190, my translation). Typical German examples
include in aller Welt ‘in all world’, zur Hölle ‘the hell’ and um Himmels willen ‘for heaven’s sake’, as illustrated
in (1–2):
(1) Warum in aller Welt sollte man ein Rockkonzert besuchen? (Stefanowitsch 2011:190)
‘Why IAW should you visit a rock concert?’
(2) Wieso zum Teufel habt ihr überhaupt gewettet? (Catasso 2021:141)
‘Why IAW did you bet in the first place?’
In English, these phrases have to immediately follow the question word (e.g. Akiyama 2014, Polinsky 2007),
which excludes them more or less from being used with attributive question words such as which, that are
necessarily followed by a (pro)noun, combinations such as which the hell being highly marked. In German, IAW
phrases can also occur later in the sentence, which allows them to be used with attributive question words such
as welch ‘which’, as in (3–4), taken from my dataset:
(3) Und mit welchem Geld zum Teufel wollen Sie das alles in Zukunft sanieren?
‘And which money IAW do you plan to use to renovate all that in the future?’
(4) In welches Paderborner Provinztheater sind wir da zum Teufel geraten?
‘Which Paderborn province theatre did we IAW get into here?’
The aim of this presentation is to get a better view of how IAW phrases behave in wh-questions with attributive
question words such as welch and was für ‘what kind of’, compared to questions with non-attributive question
words such as warum ‘why’ and wie ‘how’. To this end, I present an analysis of the IAW phrases in the German
reference corpus DeReKo (in COSMAS-II). I will show that the range of IAW phrases that can be used in both
conditions is largely the same and that they also show largely the same topological tendencies: although IAW
phrases occur slightly more often in the middle field (i.e. after the finite verb, as in (4)) with attributive question
words, they still show a clear preference for the prefield (i.e. preceding the finite verb, as in (3)), despite still
not being adjacent to the question word as they are with non-attributive question words as in (1–2).
References:
Akiyama, Masahiro. 2014. “A formal characterization of the hell as a marker of bafflement and phase impene-
trability”. Sophia Linguistica 61. 145-164
Catasso, Nicholas. 2021. “Is German warum so special after all?” in: Soare, Gabriela (ed.). Why is ‘Why’ Unique?
Its syntactic and semantic properties. Berlin: De Gruyter. 115-150.
Polinsky, Maria. 2007. “What on earth. Non-referential interrogatives.” in: Hedberg, Nancy & Ron Zacharski
(eds.). The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 245-262
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2011. “Keine Grammatik ohne Konstruktionen.” in: Engelberg, Stefan et al. (eds.).
Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik. Berlin: De Gruyter. 181-210.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Impoliteness of polite disagreement: The perception of


(im)politeness between honorifics and speech acts in Korean

Lecture

Dr. Narah Lee 1


1. The University of Queensland

There has been much research on politeness in Korean, which is often considered as the study of ‘honorific
grammar’ (Kim, 2011:178), and the focus has been on the use of honorifics and speech levels in the expression
of respect and deference towards an elder or superior speaker. However, as Cho (1986) discussed the conditions
of politeness in Korean, an appropriate choice of honorifics and speech levels may not guarantee politeness of
an utterance when the speech act involves an unfavourable or unconcerned attitude towards the interlocutor.
Speech acts that are Face Threatening Acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987) on the surface, such as request, refusal
and apology, have been partly discussed in relation to politeness strategies in Korean (Koo, 2004; Moon, 2017),
but in the cultural context of Korea where consideration of interpersonal relationships in discourse, such as
relative age and social hierarchy, makes a substantial contribution to the perception of (im)politeness, a wider
range of speech acts can be re-examined in the influence of (im)politeness. For example, a younger speaker who
does not show compassion and agreement to an older interlocutor’s opinion or disagrees with the elder may be
seen as impolite even if their utterance is formed with appropriate speech levels and honorifics. Also, as com-
plimenting attributes credit to the interlocutor as a politeness strategy and is positively valued by the speakers
(Homes, 1988), the acknowledgement of epistemic status between speakers would need to be addressed in the
discussion of (im)politeness in Korean. Through the epistemic and discursive perspective, the current research
investigates the mechanism of (dis)agreement and compliment/criticism as (im)politeness strategies in Korean.
An online survey asking the degrees of (im)politeness of a set of utterances combining different speech levels,
honorifics, (dis)agreement and compliment/criticism was conducted on 272 native Korean speakers. The results
reveal that speech acts of agreement/disagreement and compliment/criticism affect the speakers’ perception of
(im)politeness of the utterances more critically than honorifics and speech levels. By analysing empirical data
with the new lens of agreement and compliment as politeness strategies, this study sheds light on the further
understanding of (im)politeness in Korean beyond the ‘honorific grammar’.
Brown, Lucien. 2015. Honorifics and politeness. In The handbook of Korean linguistics, edited by L. Brown and
J. Yeon (pp. 303-319). Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cho, Choon-Hak. 1986. Conditions on politeness, The Journal of English Language and Literature 32(2), 297-316.
Homes, Janet. 1988. Paying compliments: A sex-preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 445-
465.
Kim, Alan Hyun-Oak. 2011. Politeness in Korea. In Politeness in East Asia, edited by D. Kadar & S. Mills (pp.
176-207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Koo, Hyun Jung. 2004. A study on aspects of politeness strategy. Discourse and Cognition 11(3), 1-23.
Moon, Keum-Hyun. 2017. A study on characteristics of politeness expressions in the Korean language by their
generative types: Focusing on the intensity and the use patterns of politeness. Journal of Korean Linguistics 82,
27-66.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

In/directness in requests and refusals in multilinguals: A


linguistic and textual perspective

Lecture

Dr. Ronit Webman Shafran 1 , Prof. Anat Stavans 1


1. Beit Berl Academic College

Pragmatic competence in monolinguals develops fairly late in early childhood. The mastery of pragmatic com-
petence among non-native speakers is also a protracted process even for those with high proficiency (Bardovi-
Harlig 2001) in the language. One of the key forms of interpersonal communication that enters into the mastery
of pragmatic competence is speech acts. Studies on speech act production in first (e.g., Ruiz de Zarobe & Ruiz de
Zarobe, 2012) and second languages (Gass & Neu, 1996) have revealed variability in speech act patterns across
languages, especially among non-native speakers of the language. While numerous studies have dealt with
speech acts in bilinguals and second language learners (Cenoz, 2007), fewer studies have examined speech act
productions of L2 and L3 speakers of a given language (e.g., Safont Jordà, 2011; Stavans & Webman Shafran
2018).
The present study examined the linguistic and textual features characterizing direct and indirect speech act pro-
ductions of requests and refusals in English by two multilingual groups: Arabic speakers for whom English is
their L3 (trilinguals) and Hebrew speakers for whom English is their L2 (bilinguals). Data were collected using a
Discourse Completion Task and a background questionnaire. Results showed that there were no differences be-
tween the groups (bi-/tri-linguals) in the production of either in/direct mode of request and refusal: both groups
preferred the indirect mode for requests and the direct mode for refusals. However, there were differences in
the use of linguistic/textual features between in/direct requests/refusals within each language group and differ-
ences in the use of features across the language groups within the directness mode. The discussion centers on
the role of cultural influences as well as differences in English proficiency, pragmalinguistic competence and
age across groups.
References:
Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2001). Evaluating the empirical evidence: Grounds for instruction in pragmatics? In K. Rose
& G. Kasper (Eds.) Pragmatics in Language Teaching (pp. 13–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cenoz, J. (2007). The acquisition of pragmatic competence and multilingualism in foreign language contexts. In
E. Alcon Soler, and M.P. Safont Jordà, (Eds.), Intercultural Language Use and Language Learning (pp. 123–140).
Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Gass, S. & Neu, J. (Eds.) (1996). Speech Acts Across Cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ruiz de Zarobe, L., Ruiz de Zarobe, Y. (2012). Speech Acts and Politeness across Languages and Cultures. Bern:
Peter Lang.
Safont Jordà, M. P. (2011). Early requestive development in consecutive third language learning. International
Journal of Multilingualism, 8(3), 256-276.
Stavans, A. & Webman Shafran, R. (2018). The pragmatics of requests and refusals in multilingual settings.
International Journal of Multilingualism, 15 (2), 149-168.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Information status and verbal/non-verbal referential acts in


Mandarin mother-child conversation

Lecture

Dr. Kanyu Yeh 1 , Dr. Chiung-chih Huang 1


1. National Chengchi University

During the past decades, increasing studies have demonstrated the influence of information status on adult
speakers’ verbal and non-verbal referential acts (Azar et al., 2019; Debreslioska, & Gullberg, 2019, 2020, 2022).
Earlier research on child language has also suggested that information status (i.e., new and old) is one of the
pragmatic factors that influence children’s referential choices from an early stage (Allen, 2000; Hughes & Allen,
2013, 2015). Children were found to differentiate new and old referents through verbal expressions at around
age two (Allen, 2000; AUTHOR, 2011; Guerriero et al., 2006). While children produce non-verbal devices along
with verbal ones to co-express meaning from early on (Ateş & Küntay, 2018; Goldin-Meadow & Butcher, 2003;
So et al., 2010), few studies have examined the influence of information status on children’s referential acts in
the two modalities. More studies are also needed to gain a clearer picture of children’s multimodal referential
ability throughout their development.
The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children’s referential communication at ages one, three, and
five in relation to information status to understand their increasing sensitivity to that discourse-pragmatic fac-
tor and their developing communicative ability in the two modalities. Their mothers’ verbal and non-verbal
referential acts were also examined to further understand the children’s acquisition of such usage. The data in-
cluded 12 hours of natural conversations between Mandarin-speaking mother-child dyads (one hour per dyad,
four hours per age group). Each of the third-person referents in the conversations was coded for (1) information
status (new and old) and (2) types of referential acts (verbal, cross-modal, and non-verbal). Referential expres-
sions in the two modalities were also categorized (nominal forms, pronominal forms, and null forms for verbal
acts; gestures and communicative functional acts for non-verbal acts).
The results showed that the children differentiated new and old referents in both the modalities and the refer-
ential expressions they used as early as age one and throughout their development. They used cross-modal acts
more frequently to refer to new referents and verbal acts more often to indicate old referents. As for referential
expressions, the children used more informative forms, including nominal forms and pronominal forms with
non-verbal devices, when they indicated new referents, while they frequently chose reduced forms such as null
forms when they referred to old referents. Similar patterns were found in their mothers’ usage. Nevertheless,
the children relied on cross-modal acts more often than their mothers did, especially when they referred to
new referents. The results demonstrated that the children at different ages used both verbal and non-verbal
expressions available in their current repertoire to provide more information to specify new referents. As their
verbal ability developed, cross-modal acts continually played an important role in co-expressing referents in
their interaction with their mothers. It is suggested that the children’s referential choices in both modalities re-
flected not only their communicative and pragmatic abilities but also some characteristics of early mother-child
interaction.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Initiating repair in transition space with the Norwegian


particle “eller”

Lecture

Dr. Marja Etelämäki 1


1. University of Oslo

The paper will focus on the TCU initial use of eller as a repair initiator in transition space (see Schegloff, Jef-
ferson & Sacks 1977). The Norwegian word eller is classified as a disjunctive conjunction in Norsk referanseg-
rammatikk (Norwegian descriptive grammar). It can roughly be translated as ‘or’ in English. In addition to its
use as a conjunction, eller is frequently used as a TCU initial and TCU final particle. In these positions it has the
potential to transform the on-going turn into an alternative question or a list of alternatives. It shares, thus,
some of the uses with, for example, Finland Swedish eller (Lindström 2008), English or (Drake 2015), Finnish
tai (Laakso & Sorjonen 2010), and Finnish vai (Koivisto 2017).
The data consist of approximately 15 hours of audio and video recorded everyday informal face-to-face conver-
sations. Three main uses for eller-initiated TCUs in transition space are found: (1) Modifying but not deleting a
description given in the previous TCU, (2) Offering an alternative that excludes the one given in the previous
TCU, and (3) Emergent listing of one or more alternatives.
Of these uses, (1) the modifying but not deleting and (2) offering an alternative that excludes the one given in
the previous turn are more repair-like because they stop the progressivity of the conversation in order to revise
something in the previous talk (see, e.g. Schegloff 2013). In these cases, eller is produced in a faster tempo than
the surrounding talk, and it is often latched to the following word (>eller vi< kan gå ‘or we can walk’). The listing-
use (3), however, points forward rather than bakwards: alternatives are added without deleting the previous
ones. In these cases, eller is produced in the same tempos as surrounding talk.
The paper will discuss these three main uses with examples. In the end, it will discuss the continuum between
repair and emergent listing, and reflect the findings from Norwegian against findings of similar types of particles
in e.g. Finnish, Finland Swedish, English, and Swedish.
References
Drake, Veronika. 2015. Indexing uncertainty: The case of turn-final “or”. Research on Language and Social
Interaction 48(3): 301-318.
Koivisto, Aino. (2017). On-line emergence of alternative questions in Finnish with the conjunction/particle “vai”.
Combining clauses and actions in interaction, ed. Ritva Laury, Marja Etelämäki, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen,
131-150. Finnish Literature Society.
Laakso, Minna and Marja-Leena Sorjonen. (2010). Cut-off or particle: devices for initiating self-repair in con-
versation. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1151-1172.
Linström, Jan. 2008. Tur och ordning. Inteoduktion til svensk samtalsgrammatik. Norstedts akademisk förlag.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2013). Ten operations in self-initiated, same-turn repair. Conversational repair and hu-
man understanding, ed. Makoto Hayashi, Geoffrey Raymond and Jack Sidnell, 41-70. Cambridge University
Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson and Harvey Sacks. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the orga-
nization of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361-382.

1390
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Innuendo and its Pragmatics on the Path to American Political


Hate

Lecture

Prof. Norma Mendoza-Denton 1


1. UCLA

Recent work in philosophy of language and the discourse/pragmatics of political hate speech has focused on
“dog-whistles,” “fig-leaves,” and “stupefying,” all terms that point to the real world effects of indirectness in the
carrying out of political aims (Dénigot and Burnett 2020; Henderson and McCready 2019 a,b; Saul 2021; Deigan
2022). Variously accounted for by processes of implicature, deniability, in-group identitarian appeals, indexical
field effects, and the at-issue/not-at-issue distinction, these are all types of conversational manipulation that
fall into a broader category that I will here call innuendo. Not only do multiple linguistic strategies involving
speaker, target, audience and interpretant support innuendo; it also happens through other semiotic channels:
for example, the Trump administration’s frequent photo-ops eating KFC, while ostensibly innocuous, were a
veiled sexist dig at Hillary Clinton.
An example of interpretive bifurcation found in a religious dogwhistle is documented in Albertson (2015). Con-
sider the following utterance by George Bush in his 2003 SoTU address: (1). In an experimental setup probing
the phrase’s interpretation, Albertson found that 89% of Pentecostals recognized the reference as coming from
a well-known church hymn, vs. 9% of a more general subject population. This effect suggests differring inter-
pretations for two different categories of people: those who can recover the in-group reference and those who
cannot. Albertson additionally found that for those who did recover the reference, a preference was exhibited
for covert rather than explicit religious appeals, leading to the conclusion that coded religious communication
is particularly persuasive in politics.
Innuendo effects are crucially dependent on background social context: coded religious innuendo obtains in
the United States because it is a normatively (though variably) secular society, with an established-but-barely-
holding norm of the separation of church and state, coexisting with a pervasive religiosity until recently rela-
tively excluded from official government actions. Along with other normatively frowned-upon but pervasive
behaviors (sexism, racism, classism, etc), this creates the conditions for religious, sexist, racist, and classist in-
nuendo.
Here I present examples of racist innuendo (dog-whistles and fig-leaves) alluding to a broader construct of eu-
genics/genetic purity (the so-called “racehorse theory”) from the Trump dynasty-cum-administration and its
followers. While most of the semantic and pragmatic literature cited above aims to examine dog whistles and
fig leaves at the level of a single utterance, I argue that studying them as a system uncovers greater regulari-
ties, historical continuities (like intergenerational transmission) and coordinated acts in general messaging, as
well as elucidating dog-whistles/fig-leaves’ takeup within indexical chains among followers. I see the study of
innuendo as an investigation into the pragmatics of what remains unsaid, and its recoverability beyond the sen-
tence level as of utmost importance for the understanding of political hate speech. Working hand-in-hand with
other semiotic indices, understanding innuendo gives us a chance to describe a broader linguistic aesthetics
(Meyerhoff and Mendoza-Denton 2022) of our current political moment.

1391
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Institutional Crisis Communication: inspiring hope through


verbal and non-verbal strategies

Lecture

Dr. Dorothy Agyepong 1 , Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo 1


1. University of Ghana

Discourses (and narratives) “simplify” economic and political relations. The complex nature of the latter re-
quires “discursive simplification”—a careful selection in terms of what to include and exclude in discourses of
such nature, (Fairclough 2005: 55). On this premise, our study investigates crisis communication management
in Ghana. Between 2020 and 2022, Ghana has experienced two major crises; COVID-19 pandemic and quite
recently an economic crisis—going to the International Monetary Fund for financial support. The COVID-19
crisis was a global one. There was therefore the urgent need to create awareness about the virus as well as
communicate measures to mitigate the effect of the pandemic on the nation’s socio-economic life. To achieve
this, the President of the Republic of Ghana led the communication, delivering an estimated number of twenty-
six televised COVID-19 updates between 2020 and 2021. These periodic updates appeared more deliberate and
multimodal (verbal and non-verbal). For instance, the speeches included synchronous sign language interpre-
tations. To recognize the linguistic diversity of his audience, the President often concluded his speeches with
highlights in at least two local languages. Further, there seemed to be the progression of a few of his speeches in
line with the progression (or otherwise) of the crisis. These updates were subsequently distilled through press
conferences organized by the Ministries of Information and Health.
Ghana is experiencing another crisis— an economic one. After several assurances from key people in govern-
ment that Ghana would not go to the IMF, the country eventually succumbed. Adopting a comparative approach,
we investigate the link between how communication was managed during the pandemic vis-à-vis its manage-
ment during the current economic crisis. We further explore the strategies used in communicating the economic
crisis to citizens by focusing on issues such as who the key communicators are, whether the President has been
involved in the communication process and if he has, at what point in time, the language(s) and stylistic de-
vices employed in the information delivery process, etc. We also examine the extent of deliberateness (in terms
of multimodality) adopted in the communication processes. Critically, we explore the possibility of a bottom-
up approach in contradistinction to the COVID-19 situation. Finally, we investigate how these communication
strategies inspire hope or otherwise in Ghanaians.
Our presentation is based on discourses sourced from various news outlets (media briefings, online articles,
and TV interviews). Of particular interest are the addresses delivered by the President and key members of
government. The data is analyzed using a critical discourse analytic approach (Fairclough 2005), and Van Dijk’s
(2017) socio-economic approach to discourse analysis, with the hope of examining the aspects of CDA or other
modern communication strategies that best appeals to this study. In terms of the analysis, we seek to provide a
deeper understanding through detailed descriptions and interpretations of the texts gathered.
References
Fairclough, Norman (2005). Critical discourse analysis in transdisciplinary research. A new agenda in (critical)
discourse analysis, pp. 53-70.
Van Dijk, Teun A. (2017). Socio-cognitive discourse studies. In The Routledge handbook of critical discourse
studies (pp. 26-43).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interactional Functions of ”Jiu shi” in Mandarin Chinese


Conversation

Lecture

Dr. Yue Guan 1


1. Peking University

The discourse marker ”jiu shi [就是]” , roughly means ”(it) is (just)” in Mandarin Chinese, has a very high fre-
quency as a linking device of two-part utterances. After a long process of grammaticalization from verb to
adverbial conjunction, it developed functions of infer meta-language to describe the language itself in naturally-
occurring spoken language, such as transitions and connections within a given discourse, and to reinforce af-
firmations. In particular, “jiu shi” can be used in interactional situations to show the state of understanding, to
help produce obstructed speech, and to express one’s own point of view. In different cases, ”jiu shi” can syntac-
tically concessional, explanatory, selective and transitive in meaning, but after all these are not brought about
by ”jiu shi” itself, but by the context and the sequential position.
My research focuses on ”jiu shi” in syntactic collaborative construction in naturally occurring Chinese
conversations, which means a syntactically complete sentence can be co-constructed by different speakers in
adjacent turns. According to their positions, tokens of “jiu shi” can be divided into two types: “jiu shi” belongs
to the former part, and to the latter part.

I) Belongs to the former

Ex.1（C-25）
1 C Jiuxiang wo didi j iushi tizuqiu a,
For example, my brother does like playing football,
2 → jiushi,p<
It is,
3 B fengkuangde,
Insane,
4 [Tebie xihuan a.
like it very much
5 C [Te fengkaungde.
Very insane
In example 1, speaker C mentions her brother is enthusiastic about football games. In line 2 she wants to find an
expression to describe her brother. She is the main teller but another participant B collaboratively completes
the utterance. This is signalled by the hearable click from the main teller A which indicates that she is trying to
find a proper word to complete her utterance but encounters obstacles.
II) Belongs to the latter
Ex.2（S-07）
1 R Qishi ta shi ta die
Actually he is his father
2 L Na, dui.
That, right.
3 Jiushi houlai danshi nage ni dei xiang nizhidaome,
But you need to think about it later you know,
4 R → [Jiushi feidian naozi.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

It is mentally tiring
5 L [Jiushi ni dei naozi shaowei xiangyixia.
it is that you have to use your brain to think about it
6 Jiu shui gen shui jiaohuan le.
It is someone change to another
In example 2, the two speaker’s utterances overlap in lines 4-5. The two speakers achieve the alignment in the
following turns.
When “jiu shi” belongs to the former part, it often uses to project later part, or to hold the turn, thus devoid of
losing the speakership although such an attempt may not work; when “jiu shi” appears in the latter part, it acts
as the connector between the prior talk and the subsequent one. This connection can be projected in full accord
with the speaking agenda, or it is only the hearer’s intention to grab the talk at a transition-relevance place of
the speaker’s prior turn.

1394
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intergenerational discourses on climate change

Lecture

Dr. Hermine Penz 1


1. University of Graz

Climate change is a global issue which is already having negative effects on biological diversity, people’s living
conditions and has thus become a growing concern worldwide. It has potential for intergenerational conflict
as the younger generation will have to deal with the consequences of the activities of the previous generations.
However, people of all ages are already experiencing the effects of the changing climate.
This paper analyses intergenerational discourses on how people are experiencing climate change in their im-
mediate environment and investigates conflicts between generations as well as solidarity in their attempts to
deal with this threat and the fears and hopes they express for the future. Age-based perceptions will be the
focus of the analysis.
The data is based on (semi-structured) interviews with two different age groups, i.e. 15-30 years and 60+, some
of which also include an age gap between interviewer and interviewee. The data are analysed by means of
qualitative discourse analysis.

1395
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interkinesthetics in Enskillment: Calibrating Force at the


Potter’s Wheel

Lecture

Dr. Eton Churchill 1


1. Kanagawa University

This study explores the interactive realization and calibration of force in enskillment. In enskillment, the
novice’s attention is not only educated to reproductive points of articulation between their body and the ma-
terial world, but also to how to effectively mobilize and calibrate the body’s forcefulness. Although cognitive
linguists have explored the relationship between language and force schemas (Talmy, 1988; Gibbs, 2005), mul-
timodal analysis may be better suited to illuminating the interactive realization of force during enskillment.
Whereas several studies on social interaction have examined related phenomenon (e.g., touch, movement, ges-
ture), the examination of force has remained peripheral in studies on social interaction. Accordingly, this is one
of the first studies to investigate explicitly how participants interactively realize and calibrate force in enskill-
ment.
The analytical framework for this study is inspired by Goodwin’s (2018) co-operative action. Specifically,
based on videotaped interaction collected over 6 months, this study explores how a master and novice potter
working at an electric wheel in Japan use multimodal resources across trajectories of action to orient to force.
Through their talk and embodied action, participants animate force by indexing its various dimensions—e.g.,
its source, direction, and intensity. Interkinesthetic understandings are attained through the embodied sharing
of force dynamics within turns, and across trajectories of action. Multimodal resources employed to this end
include inter alia mimetic gestures, onomatopoeia, prosody, and the modification of verb forms and turn de-
signs across trajectories of instruction. The participants are shown to carefully synchronize embodied action
to facilitate the analogous perception of force dynamics and their proprioceptive realizations. This paper will
present a categorical analysis of the different multimodal resources used to animate and calibrate force, and
probe the dynamics through which forces animated by the master potter become analogously realized in the
novice’s subsequent actions. It is argued that participants’ orientation to and sharing of force dynamics in en-
skillment contributes to the cultural (re)production of techniques of the body, and thus promises further insight
into the anthropology of the body, social interaction, and human sociality.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interpreting demonstratives using emanation paths: The role


of voice source in early language development

Lecture

Dr. Jack Wilson 1 , Dr. Amy Bidgood 2


1. University of Salford, 2. Liverpool John Moores University

The English demonstratives, this and that, are often analysed as referring to an object that is proximal or distal
to the speaker, respectively. This analysis suggests that a proper understanding of demonstratives involves the
interpretation of a speaker’s language use and their perspective. Therefore, theory of mind / mindreading is
often used to explain the processing of demonstratives. Since infants have been shown to use and comprehend
demonstratives very early on in development, it has been suggested that children’s early mindreading capacities
(implicit theory of mind) involves some form of perspective taking (Rubio Fernandez, 2021). What’s more, some
have argued that demonstratives and mindreading might mutually boost each other in development. In this
talk, we agree with the second of these ideas, but question the first.
There are two possible ways to interpret the English demonstratives. The first, or standard way, is to treat under-
standing the distinction between this and that as involving perspective taking. This means ‘near the speaker’
and that means ‘not near the speaker’. An alternative is that demonstrates are interpreted using emanation
paths. Emanation paths, such as the ripples a pebble leaves on the surface of water, emanate from a central
source. Acoustic linguistic productions form emanation paths from the speaker’s location. As such, infants may
interpret demonstrates as proximal or distal from path source. This interpretation would not involve mindread-
ing but could facilitate an infant’s developing ability to mentalise as they develop an association between the
source of the emanation path and the speaker.
The path interpretation of demonstratives is impossible to distinguish from the perspective taking approach in
English because it has a binary proximal/distal distinction. However, while demonstrative appear to be uni-
versal, a binary proximal distal distinction is not. Japanese, for example, has a three-way distinction, proximal
to speaker, proximal to hearer, and distal from both hearer and speaker. The perspective taking analysis would
expect no difference between proximal to speaker and proximal to hearer demonstratives, whereas the path
analysis would expect that proximal to hearer is learnt later in development since it must rely on perspective
taking. In a recent study, it was found that while proximal to speaker demonstratives are acquired along a
similar time frame in English and Japanese, proximal to hearer demonstrates were not produced in the win-
dow under investigation (Diessel and Monakhov, 2022). We argue that this favours the path interpretation and
presents a challenge to the perspective taking explanation. We believe that this finding presents an avenue for
new research and can shed light on the nativist and developmental (nominalist) approaches to theory of mind.
References
Diessel, H. and Monakhov, S. (2022). Acquisition of demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective. Journal of
Child Language:1–32.
Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2021). Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and theory of mind. Syn-
these, 199(1):1125–1158.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interpreting Pragmatics of the Matrimonial Adverts: A


socio-cultural perspective

Lecture

Dr. Tazanfal Tehseem 1


1. University of Sargodha

This paper aims at interpreting how matrimonial adverts portray pragmatics of culture through language with
a focus on how marriage discourse is conducted in the two cultures, as a way of reinforcing the SFL claim
that language reflects and constructs the context of culture (Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999). Pragmatically,
meaning potential remains dynamic as construed by the language use therefore, its interpretation is deeply
rooted in its social context (Verschueren, 1999). Historically, marriage was considered not only a romantic tale
but a right to exploit women as commodities so was advertised screening the consumership (Anand, 2017). The
traits advertised include age group, skin colour and appearance, social stature, caste and ethnicity, education
and occupation etc. to complement the demands in the two cultures; western and Pakistan. We hypothesize
that there would be socio-cultural differences in the adverts from the two cultures in focus.
Since the marriage discourses offer rewarding data on how the people choose to display their intended at-
tributes regarding socio-cultural frats, therefore, is of great interest to the discourse analysts to unfold linguistic
patterns employed. The paper draws on the systemic functional framework (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014)
for discourse analysis mainly the transitivity choices and the attitude types; affect, judgement and apprecia-
tion (Thompson 2014) and the differences in the linguistic choices will reflect the cultural constructions. The
data is collected from different sources including print as well as digital media from the two cultures embed-
ding match-making practices. In total 54 adverts have been scrutinized which look deemed representative of
the given cultures to make a comparison. The findings are consistent with the predictions hypothesized and
illuminate the ways in which the two cultures portray marriage clients.
Keywords: Matrimony, pragmatic analysis, appraisal and lexicogrammar
References:
Anand, K. (2017). An Analysis of Matrimonial Advertisements. Sociological Bulletin.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (1999). Construing Experience through Meaning : A language-based
approach to cognition. London ; New York : Continuum.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed).
London: Arnold.
Thompson, G. (2014). Introducing Functional Grammar. (3rd ed). London: Arnold.
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold.

1398
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interpretive Constructs: what do flattery, incitement and


hypocrisy have in common?

Lecture

Dr. Roni Danziger 1


1. Lancaster University

The ability to identify what others are doing with language is the basis of human interaction (Tomasello, 1999).
However, the interpretation of semiotic and linguistic resources is not at all clear-cut. Sometimes, impolite
language is used to build rapport, like in jocular mockery (Haugh, 2010), and very polite language is used ma-
liciously (Danziger, 2023). Scholars of Pragmatics have therefore concluded that no utterance is inherently
polite or impolite (Locher & Watts, 2005). Participants in interactions evaluate language in context, according
to personal as well as social and cultural expectations. But social interaction is even more complex, dynamic
and fuzzy. Previous research has further shown that some utterances can never be unequivocally identified
(Danziger, 2020; 2021). For example, positive evaluations can be interpreted at face-value, as compliments or
praise, or they can be identified as strategic, i.e., as flattery.
Flattery is an evaluative label. It reveals that a participant in an interaction has judged a positive social act
(Danziger, 2023) as strategic language that negatively exceeded expectations in context. Flattery is a strate-
gic non-conventionalized social behaviour that abuses verbal actions that are coded as conventionalized and
recognizable positive communication and not a conventionalized speech act in itself. Flattery thus lies in the
interpretation of an action and not the action itself. Labeling a suspicious action as flattery is performative
because it frames an action as instrumental, by so bringing forward the underlying strategic use of language
implied by the meta-pragmatic label. Until the label of flattery is given to that action, its status as flattery re-
mains completely potential. In uttering it, the label transforms a positive act of communication into flattery. An
important characteristic of flattery is that it is always a matter of perspective. The same positive social act can
be perceived as a compliment or as flattery by different observers who judge the recipient of the positive evalua-
tion as praiseworthy or not (Danziger, 2020; Danziger, 2021). Thus, the positive evaluation is and is not flattery,
simultaneously. The different observers have gone through an interpretive process and reached a different
conclusion, neither more correct then the other.
Two other similar socio-pragmatic phenomena, hypocrisy (Sorlin & Virtanen, 2021) and incitement (Kurzon,
1998) have received limited attention in the field of pragmatics. Hypocrisy is too an indeterminate interpretive
construct; it is positive discourse (moral discourse) that receives a negative label due to a perceived mismatch
between previous and current moral behavior of the speaker. Incitement, like flattery, does not have a conven-
tionalized form, and it is defined by the perlocution sequel (Austin, 1976), i.e., the action that follows a successful
incitement. In this presentation, I will compare hypocrisy and incitement with flattery in order to advance our
understanding of interpretive construct. Understanding what interpretive constructs are and what labels fall
under this category will contribute to the field of and pragmatics in that it will demonstrate how not only are
utterances never inherently polite or impolite, but also that some utterances can never be unequivocally clas-
sified.

1399
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Into the “grey zone” of formality

Lecture

Ms. Yuning Cao 1


1. Stanford University

The current presentation examines real-life data from a corpus I build for my dissertation that investigates the
pedagogy for teaching honorifics. I intend to select a few representative excerpts to demonstrate that speakers
constantly vary the usages of honorifics in the same setting to achieve different purposes.
I would first like to question what “formal context” means. Not all contexts can be identified as (in)formal in
a black-and-white way like NHK news and casual chats in a drinking bar. For instance, a YouTuber may shoot
a monologue video with the purpose of interacting with asynchronous viewers, where he/she tries to convey
some serious messages but meanwhile entertain others. In this case, I argue that instead of labelling the video as
formal or informal, it belongs to the grey zone on the formality scale, which in fact, exists far more commonly in
real life. Workshop presentations are usually on the formal end of the scale. However, during the presentation,
the presenter may want to make jokes to attract the attention of the audience.
Many data in my corpus illustrate how speakers make use of honorifics to be interactive, engaging, and funny
in “formal” contexts. I will first demonstrate how the YouTuber uses plain forms to the asynchronous viewers,
which seems to be impolite under a normative view but exactly suggests that he is joking in the context. By
switching between polite forms and plain forms in one discourse the speaker skillfully distinguishes serious
talk and unserious talk. In this way, he is able to build intimacy and simultaneously convey a message with
heart in one discourse.
In the workshop example, I show how the presenter gradually shifts from a hyper-polite style to a slightly more
intimate style as she moved forward in the presentation. Instead of interpreting the phenomenon as the pre-
senter is too tired to sustain a refined speech level, I argue that the presenter makes an effort to engage the
audience by manipulating her usage of honorifics. That is, the presenter actively chose more-than-necessary
honorific forms at the beginning of the workshop to establish her authority in the setting. However, as the pre-
sentation went on, the presenter shifted her focus to building a closer relationship with the audience so that
they can interact with the material better. She purposefully used this strategy to keep the audience engaged
through the 90-minute workshop on Japanese linguistics. Both examples demonstrate how the speaker use
style-shift as a linguistic device to achieve conversational purposes with the traditionally defined “hierarchy
between speakers” and “the formality of the situation” staying the same.
Unlike a more static, ideological view that speech styles should be predetermined by the relationship between
interlocutors, the current presentation demonstrates that it is possible, actually common, to use plain forms in
formal contexts to temporarily adjust the social distance between the speaker and the hearer. Therefore, the
so-called “formal” contexts indeed have many grey zones for linguistics to further explore.

1400
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Intralingual translation in “Suske en Wiske”: the case of the


pragmatic particle “hè”

Lecture

Dr. Bram Vertommen 1 , Mrs. Melina Pasanikolakis 2


1. Utrecht University, 2. University of Antwerp

In Jakobson’s (2013) view, translation may either involve the “interpretation of verbal signs by means of some
other language” (interlingual translation), “by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (intersemiotic transla-
tion) or “by means of other signs of the same language” (intralingual translation). This trichotomy emphasizes a
close affinity between the three subtypes of translation: regardless of whether a source and target text are in a
different language/sign system or not, translators are still considered “cultural mediators” who carefully nego-
tiate linguistic and cultural differences (Schmid 2008). Even if the readers of a source and target text officially
speak the same language, they can still be seen as members of different “cultures” (Holliday 1999) because of
their different sociodemographic status: e.g. working versus middle class, or American versus British English.
Nevertheless, intralingual translation has been understudied (Korning Zethsen & Hill-Madsen 2016). This paper
intends to fill this gap by analyzing intralingual translation strategies in the Flemish (Belgian) comic book series
Suske en Wiske, written by Willy Vandersteen. The oldest comics of this series, written in the late 1940s, first
appeared in the Flemish broadsheet De Standaard and subsequently as albums. Soon Vandersteen also released
his series in the Netherlands, albeit in versions adapted to Dutch readers. Only from 1964 onwards, uniform
album versions for both Flemish and Dutch readers have been issued (Meesters 2000). The resulting different
versions of one and the same comic (e.g. newspaper versus album version, Flemish versus Dutch version)
served to accommodate different classes or nationalities of readers (Van Hooydonck 1995), or (in the case of
the uniform versus the Flemish version) to respond to changing attitudes regarding Standard Dutch in Flanders
during the 1960s (Jaspers & Van Hoof 2013).
In order to examine the intralingual translation strategies between the different versions above, this paper will
focus on the Dutch pragmatic particle hè [’right?’]. The translators’ choices with respect to hè (to reformulate,
to omit or to preserve the particle) strongly suggest different interpretations of it depending on the class, na-
tionality or language attitude of the reader. These observations also further support Wierzbicka’s (1992, p. 160)
claim that the use of interjections is culture-dependent.
References
Holliday, A. (1999). Small cultures. Applied Linguistics, 20(2), 237-264.
Jakobson, R. (2013). On linguistic aspects of translation. In Brower, R.A. (Ed.), On translation (pp. 232-239).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jaspers, J., & Van Hoof, S. (2013). Hyperstandardisation in Flanders: extreme enregisterment and its aftermath.
Pragmatics, 23(2), 331-359.
Korning Zethsen, K., & Hill-Madsen, A. (2016). Intralingual translation and its place within translation studies -
a theoretical discussion. Meta, 61(3), 692-708.
Meesters, G. (2000). Convergentie en divergentie in de Nederlandse standaardtaal: het stripverhaal Suske en
Wiske als casus. Nederlandse taalkunde, 5(2), 164-176.
Schmid, B. (2008). A duck in rabbit’s clothing: integrating intralingual translation. In Kaiser-Cooke, M. (Ed.), Das
Entenprinzip: Translation aus neuen Perspektiven (pp. 19-80). Bern: Peter Lang.

Van Hooydonck, P. (1995). Suske en Wiske 50 jaar. Antwerpen: Standaard Uitgeverij.


Wierzbicka, A. (1992). The semantics of interjection. Journal of pragmatics, 18(2-3), 159-192.

1401
18th International Pragmatics Conference

1402
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ironic speech and its prosodic correlates in the Spanish of


Chilean women

Lecture

Dr. Abril Jimenez 1 , Dr. Mariška Bolyanatz Brown 2 , Ms. Isabella Silva DePue 1
1. Davidson College, 2. Occidental College

Verbal irony can manifest in a variety of forms and it displays prosodic particularities that distinguish them from
non-ironic speech, especially when examining rhythm, duration, pitch (F0), amplitude, and voice quality (Anolli,
Ciceri, & Infantino, 2000; Bryant, 2010; Gibbs, 2000; Niebuhr, 2014). While some of the studies examining this
prosody-irony connection have relied on naturally-occurring speech, only a few have explored irony in Spanish
and none have examined Chilean Spanish despite the unique intonation patterns of this dialect.
This paper examines how prosody in female talk contributes to the creation of pragmatic meaning of verbal
irony. We examined spontaneously-occurring ironic utterances in speech of 15 Chilean women residents of La
Pintana, a low-income Santiago neighborhood. The conversations, extracted from sociolinguistic interviews,
revolved around sensitive topics such as relationships with friends and family members, neighborhood-based
discrimination in Santiago, and drug addiction and violence in the community. We analyzed five subtypes of
verbal irony (jocularity, rhetorical questions, understatements, hyperbole, and sarcasm) to (i) determine what
subtype was more prevalent in the data and (ii) provide a detailed prosodic analysis of each subtype. For the
acoustic analysis, we segmented, in Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2022), 3,987 syllable nuclei and compared
ironic to pre-ironic utterances along seven dependent variables: pitch range, duration, F0, F1, F2, H1*-H2*, and
HNR. Data were submitted to six linear mixed-effects regression analyses for each of the dependent variables.
The participants produced a total of 200 ironic utterances with an average of 13.47 ironic utterances per speaker
(ranging from 4 to 31 per speaker; SD=7.54). Our findings revealed that jocularity, described by Gibbs (2000) as
playful ironic teasing, represented 62.5% of all the ironic utterances and thus, was the most prevalent. Approx-
imately 16% of the data were rhetorical questions (questions for which explicit responses are not expected.),
19% hyperbolic utterances (exaggerating the reality of a situation.), and only 4% were understatements (stating
far less than what the situation obviously merits). There were zero occurrences of sarcasm (talking positively
to convey a negative meaning, often involving criticism). Furthermore, the prosodic analysis showed that the
three most frequent types of irony were prosodically distinct from preceding non-ironic utterances. That is,
each of these subtypes of irony showed an increased pitch range across the utterance, as well as more non-
modal phonation. While we do not claim that these prosodic features are a marker of irony alone, we suggest
that increased pitch range and non-modal voice quality contribute to indicating that the utterances are counter
to expectations (i.e. should not be interpreted as literal), and also allow the speaker to establish rapport with
the hearer while discussing difficult real-life events with a touch of humor.

1403
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Japanese English L2 learners, email writing and pragmatic


competence: A corpus approach to identifying learner
challenges

Lecture

Dr. Allan Nicholas 1 , Dr. John Blake 1 , Dr. Maxim Mozgovoy 1 , Dr. Jeremy Perkins 1
1. University of Aizu

While the use of instant messaging services has increased in recent years, English L2 email remains a widely-
used mode of communication within Japanese higher education institutions when communicating with non-
Japanese faculty. The pragmatic aspect of English L2 email communication can be challenging for many learn-
ers; however, there are relatively few supporting tools available to English L2 learners that focus on the prag-
matic aspect of communication. Addressing this need among Japanese English L2 learners entails taking the
initial step of identifying the specific elements of email writing in English they find challenging.
A corpus approach can be useful in this regard, allowing for the systematic identification of perceived diver-
gence from pragmatic norms in the email dataset. Few corpora, however, have focused on pragmatic or register
variation in L2 learner English, in part due to the need to manually annotate corpora for pragmatic features.
We report on the development, annotation and analysis of a specialised learner corpus of request-focused
Japanese learner English L2 email writing, annotated for specific instances of perceived divergence from prag-
matic or register-specific norms. Approximately 1,300 texts were elicited from 426 participants, and collated
into a corpus. Participants completed four email tasks, each with varying levels of Power (P), Distance (D),
and Rank of imposition (R) (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Task scenarios primarily focused on the academic con-
text, with non-academic scenarios also included in order to prompt variation in language choices. The data set
was then manually annotated by trained expert English users– who were also relevant members of the target
community– for perceived instances of divergence from pragmatic norms. The coding scheme used for anno-
tation was based on the CCSARP (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984), adapted for use with email text data, and for
identification of perceived pragmatic failure. Findings show high frequencies of perceived pragmatic diver-
gence across all areas of English L2 email writing, with participants frequently finding appropriate variation of
language choices in response to differing levels of P, D and R to be challenging. In particular, variation of the
R value in task scenarios led to high frequencies of identified perceived instances of divergence from expected
norms within the head act. The absence of expected modifying strategies external to the head act was highly
frequent across tasks, as were identified issues with email openings and closings. Results are discussed in detail,
along with implications for the English language classroom.
References
Blum-kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. (1984). Requests and Apologies: A Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization
Patterns (CCSARP) 1. Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 196-213.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.

1404
18th International Pragmatics Conference

L2 proficiency and preference organization in online


text-based interaction

Lecture

Mr. Xingcheng Wang 1 , Prof. Carsten Roever 1


1. University of Melbourne

Despite the rapid development of research on second language (L2) interactional competence in the past decade
(see Pekarek Doehler, 2019, for an overview), only a few studies have investigated online text-based exchanges
in real-time second language communication (e.g., Abe & Roever, 2019, 2020; Kampen Robinson & Liebscher,
2019). As part of a larger project investigating L2 learners’ development of interactional competence in a wide
range of social actions, the present study focuses on preference and dispreference organization in learners’
target language (English) during online text chat. More specifically, we were interested in how L2 learners
managed social actions such as refusals, invitations, apologies, and complaints in a socially preferred or dispre-
ferred manner.
A total of 72 Chinese learners of English at three proficiency levels (B1, B2, and C1) and 20 native English speakers
participated to interact in four dyadic role plays involving refusing, invitational, apologetic, and complaining
scenarios on an instant messaging platform WeChat. Through conversation analysis (CA), our data showed
that L2 learners adapted spoken interactional practices in the online written interaction, despite the lack of
prosodic and embodied cues. However, learners at different L2 proficiency levels demonstrably differed in
their organization and formatting of preferred and dispreferred actions.
Regarding dispreference organization for refusals and complaints, lower-intermediate (B1) learners either di-
rectly negated their ability to accept the interlocutor’s invitation when refusing or deployed a single disprefer-
ence marker (e.g., apologies, expressions of positive feeling, prefatory particles) in their production of refusals.
However, upper-intermediate (B2) learners unanimously marked refusals as dispreferred through a broader
range of interactional tools, including pro forma agreements, counteroffers, and mitigation (e.g., downgraders,
hedges). Advanced (C1) learners displayed a stronger orientation to social harmony through ongoing moni-
toring, active recipiency, and a combination of sequential and linguistic tools. Similarly, when complaining,
higher-level learners were more sensitive to the delicacy of complaining and could legitimize their complaints
based on gradually established grounds. Advanced learners also tended to refrain from explicitly labeling their
talk as ‘complaining’ and make efforts to restore social harmony towards the end of the interaction.
Regarding organizing apologies and invitations as preferred actions, lower-intermediate learners delayed their
apologies or apologized through limited tools (e.g., IFID + account + status quo). In contrast, upper-intermediate
and advanced learners often fronted their apologies which usually consisted of a broader spectrum of devices
(e.g., acknowledgment of responsibility, offer of repair, reassurance, etc). For invitations, higher-level learners
more fittingly contextualized their invitations with positive feelings (e.g., gratitude, acknowledgment). In all
scenarios, native speakers deployed a similar repertoire of interactional tools to L2 learners, but they demon-
strated more fine-tuned social actions and a more overt orientation to social norms. Implications for research
on L2 interactional competence and the impact of the affordances of the medium of text chat will be discussed.

1405
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Lexical blending: from typical concepts to atypical ad hoc


concept creation. A corpus-based analysis

Lecture

Dr. Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin 1


1. The Iorgu Iordan Alexandru Rosetti Institute of Linguistics, Romanian Academy

New words are coined every day by derivation, back formation, conversion, compounding, clipping, abbre-
viation, acronyms or borrowing. But there is one word creation/formation process that still puzzles: lexical
blending. Contradiction is the key-word when trying to define blending more exactly: source words need to be
clipped (Ralli, Xydopoulos 2012) or clipping should be done only on the inner edges (Bat-El 2006; Bauer, Lieber,
Plag 2013), etc.
Here, lexical blends are words coined by fusing together parts of (at least) two other source words, where the
output is shorter than the concatenation of the source words, a process ultimately presupposing clipping of at
least one of the source words and the compounding of the resulting forms. The literature has been focused
more on the formal characteristics (where and how clipping is done, the overlapping segment, etc.), and less on
the conceptual dimension.
The presentation here offers a possible explanation of how lexical blending occurs in people’s mind. Since
the new words are atypical forms presupposing the amalgamation of the source words, the proposal is that,
conceptually, lexical blending starts from at least two typical concepts already existing in people’s mind and
yields an atypical concept. Initially, nonce words are born, but due to linguistics and extralinguistic factors that
are going to be exemplified here by recourse to Romanian and English corpora, nonce words may get accepted.
But why and how these atypical concepts occur? Following relevance theory, and their lexical pragmatics ap-
proach, I claim that lexical blending presupposes ad hoc concept formation (Barsalou 1983; Carston 2002; Sper-
ber&Wilson 2006). The aim is both theoretical and applied as it provides a possible step-by-step conceptual
explanation of the process of lexical blending formation and comprehension supported by real examples taken
from corpora (more than 300 examples, eg. En./Ro. brunch or Ro. țuicomicină (alcoholic drink with alleged
medicinal properties). The proposal is also salient because it explains why many lexical blends result in the
narrowing or broadening of one of the source words. Moreover, being a pragmatic approach, the proposal also
accommodates the extralinguistic factors that play an extremely important role in lexical blending – most often,
blends are used as ostensive stimuli – they are there in the discourse to attract people’s attention, to make the
audience process the message. They create some effects (to be analysed for each example) that would not be
otherwise possible if the two words would have been used separately.
Bat-El, Outi, 2006, “Blends”, in K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Elsevier, Oxford.
Bauer, L., et al. 2013, The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Ralli, Angela, George Xydopoulos, 2012, “Blend formation in Modern Greek”, in Renner et al. (eds.), Cross-
Disciplinary Perspectives on Lexical Blending, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 35-50.
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1983. Ad hoc categories. Memory and cognition 11: 211-27.
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances. The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D, D. Wilson, 2006, A deflationary account of metaphor. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 171-203.

1406
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Linear placement of subjects of active and passive clauses in


Mansi: Pragmatic reasons for non-clause-initial placement

Lecture

Dr. Susanna Virtanen 1


1. University of Helsinki

This paper discusses the linear placement of the syntactic function of subject in Northern Mansi, concentrating
on the less frequent non-clause-initial placement, and differences between the nature of subject in active (SA)
and passive (SP) clauses. Mansi is a seriously endangered indigenous language spoken in Western Siberia,
belonging to the Ob-Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugrian language family. There are still approximately 1,000
living speakers of Mansi.
I have previously discussed Northern Mansi constituent order and its pragmatic variation in Virtanen (2021).
My template analysis (see Good 2016) proved that the arrangement of constituent order is twofold. First, the
basic constituent order is connected to the order of syntactic functions. Secondly, particular syntactic functions
alternate between two or more slots, depending on which pragmatic status they represent. The same template
model can be applied to both active and passive clauses. The clause-initial default placement of subject is due
to correlation between syntactic functions and pragmatic status (the pragmatic primary topic occupies the syn-
tactic function of subject), and the tendency for primary topic to occupy clause-initial position. 74% of SAs and
63% of SPs are placed in clause-initial position due to their topicality. Furthermore, those subjects accompanied
by a scene-setting adverbial are placed just after the scene-setting adverbial. (Virtanen 2021.)
In this paper, I will expand on my previous analysis and concentrate on those SAs and SPs that are placed in
non-clause-initial position. My data consist of a corpus of 676 entries from the newspaper Lūimā Sēripos (LS). I
will discuss the pragmatic reasons for the non-clause-initial placement of SAs and SPs. My main arguments are:
1. The most frequent reason for placing an SP in non-clause-initial position is the focality of the syntactic subject,
in connection with impersonality of the passive clause (no agent).
Тӯйт-ныл нё̄тнэ хури-т ва̄р-ве̄-с-ыт
snow-abl beautiful figure-pl make-pass-pst-pl
‘Beautiful figures were made out of the snow.’
2. In active clauses, only in approx. 50% of the non-clause-initial cases, the syntactic subject holds topical
pragmatic status, and the scene-setting adverbial in clause-initial position causes the non-clause-initial position
of the subject.
Тувыл ма̄н ханищтахт-уӈкве мина-с-ӯв.
later 1pl study-inf go-pst-1pl
‘Later on, we left to study.’
3. In approx. 50% of cases, the SA is pragmatically focal and for that reason occupies the non-clause-initial
position.
То̄нт кӯщаи-г Ольга Александрова о̄л-ыс.
then leader-transl Olga Alexandrovna be-pst.3sg
‘Back then, their leader was Olga Alexandrovna.’
Unlike the earlier results, majority of the SPs and half of the SAs placed in non-clause-initial position are prag-
matically focal. Focal subjects are not frequent in Mansi, but they are possible, especially in passive clauses.
The fact that the mentioned SAs and SPs practically appear immediately before the clause-final predicate – the
default “focus slot” in my template analysis – supports this result.
References:

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Good, Jeff. 2016. The Linguistic Typology of Templates. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139057479
LS = Лӯимā сэ̄рипос [Lūimā Sēripos]. Newspaper published in Khanty-Manjsijsk. http://www.khanty-
yasang.ru/luima-seripos
Virtanen, Susanna. 2021. A Template Approach to Pragmatic Constituent Order Variation in Modern Northern
Mansi. Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen 66. 188–234. https://doi.org/10.33339/fuf.95133.

1408
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Management of disagreement in small group discussions for


reading comprehension

Lecture

Dr. Masanobu Masuda 1


1. Kyoto Sangyo University

This study analyzes disagreement sequences during peer discussion in a university English reading comprehen-
sion course in Japan using conversation analysis. The analysis is aimed at examining how the students manage
disagreement on answers to comprehension questions which suppose one correct answer and how classroom
activity design influences their interaction.
The course involves TOEIC test preparation, and the students discuss their justification for answers to multiple
choice comprehension questions to reach a group consensus. Group discussions (lasting about three minutes
for each question) were recorded, resulting in a dataset consisting of 31 discussions by 11 groups of three to
four students. The discussions were held primarily in students’ first language (Japanese) without the teacher
present.
While disagreement is generally considered a dispreferred action (Pomerantz, 1984), some studies argue that
this is not the case in discussion, argumentation, or disputes, where pursuit of different perspectives is expected
(Fujimoto, 2010; Georgakopoulou, 2001; Kotthoff, 1993). Observation reveals that disagreement turns in my
dataset were also not oriented to as dispreferred, with no markers such as delay or mitigation. It is notable that
the disagreement turns in my dataset did not involve “pursuit of different perspectives” so much as “pursuit of a
correct answer.” In the discussions examined, the students’ goal was to work together to determine which of the
four choices was correct, implicitly rejecting the other choices as incorrect. The inevitability of disagreement
in this classroom activity resulted in preference or unmarkedness of disagreement.
Another feature of disagreement sequences in the discussions examined is that students referred to text in
the materials after each disagreement. It is a relevant action in this reading comprehension activity, when
students inspect the validity of the answers they disagree about and determine which choice is correct to resolve
their disagreement, because the answers should be grounded in the content of the materials. The students’
orientation to text as the grounds for the answer proved so strong that they failed to reach the correct answer
to questions which required inference or comprehension of pragmatic meaning. Because the correct answer
to such questions does not relate directly to words explicitly written in the text of the reading passage, strong
orientation to text led students to choose distractors.
Some cases in which a delayed response to a proposed answer was oriented to as a marker of dispreference were
found. In these cases, students withdrew an answer they had proposed immediately after they were met with a
delayed response, without discussing the validity of the answer with other students. The students were working
on questions which required inference or comprehension of pragmatic meaning in these cases. A feature of
these questions, difficulty to find a direct support for the answer from the text, contributed to early withdrawal
of the answer to avoid upcoming disagreement, even in the activity where disagreement was preferred. These
cases illustrate that the students’ orientation to text in reading comprehension influences not only their choice
of answers but also preference structure.

1409
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Managing Delicacy in Persian Conversations: the Case of


Placeholders

Lecture

Dr. Elham Monfaredi 1


1. University of Washington

Using vulgar language is viewed as violating typical behavior in interaction. In order to restore a routine con-
duct, interlocutors may deploy a variety of interactional resources to manage delicacy in talk. This study iden-
tifies the Persian nominal placeholders (chiz, felān) as interactional means through which taboo words can be
avoided in Persian conversations. While the interactional function of placeholder fillers has been identified
as holding a place for a delayed referent and searching for words (C. Goodwin 1987; Goodwin, 1983; Hayashi
& Yoon, 2010; Hayashi, Raymond & Sidnell 2013; Keevallik 2010), their use in atypical contexts is yet under
researched. This study uses multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2014) to explore how Persian inter-
locutors replace a delicate word (e.g., words that are considered obscene, vulgar, blasphemous etc.) with a
placeholder to manage delicacy in conversation. The data for this study was collected from eleven hours of TV
shows and videos of YouTube influencers. The findings of the study shows that Persian speakers use placehold-
ers for a vulgar referent to withhold its actual production while displaying its inappropriateness. The particular
interactional affordances of placeholders enable a vague language (Channell 1994) that makes the referent con-
textually retrievable for the recipients. This study contributes to a growing body of research exploring the
cross-linguistic applicability of conversation-analytic findings to languages other than English.

1410
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mandarin Chinese peer advice online: A study of gender


disparity

Lecture

Prof. Chihsia Tang 1


1. National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology

Peer evaluation is a common learning activity and is beneficial to students’ development. Nevertheless, peer
evaluations often include unsolicited advice, which potentially damages the face of advice-receivers and their
interpersonal relationship with advice-givers. In the literature, little is known about how peer advice messages
in the academic discourse are pragmatically constructed by Chinese speakers who generally define advice-
giving as a rapport-building behavior. The present study, therefore, investigated how Chinese-speaking stu-
dents rhetorically manage unsolicited advice in an online learning activity. Whether and how gender exerts
impacts on the students’ advising styles in the formal institutional setting was inspected.
The corpus involved 1,118 units of advice messages elicited from peer evaluations given by 43 Taiwanese stu-
dents in an online English class in 2020. Each advice communication was coded as a speech event, which in-
cludes a head act and optionally one or more internal and external modifiers. The qualitative analyses drew on
the scheme of Li (2010) and Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). Regarding the quantitative examination, one-way anal-
yses of variance were run to compare the distributions of the advising strategies and modifiers in the advice
comments addressed in different gender dyads.
Regarding advice strategies, results showed that Option Offering is most frequently used to encode advice il-
locutions addressed in mixed-gender and same-gender situations. Despite its rapport-building function, the
students’ strong preference for the indirect advice strategy might be due to the unsolicitation of their given
remarks and the structural power equality between the advice-givers and receivers in the academic discourse.
Even so, the gender of both the advice-givers and receivers have significant impacts on the distribution of re-
dressive devices. Due to its effectiveness in persuasion, women are more likely than men to use conditional
constructions with a reasoning discursive move to encode their advice. This structural configuration increases
the likelihood for the advised proposition to be taken into action and eventually lends support to the peers’
performances. On the other hand, men prefer using subjectivizers, such as I think, to redress their advice com-
ments, especially those addressed to men. Moderated with Subjectivizer, the advice comments are pragmati-
cally restricted to the advisors’ subjective opinions, thus diminishing the destructive effects on the masculine
attributes, including assertion of autonomy, and minimizing the deprivation of the advice-recipients’ sense of
accomplishment.
Briefly, in the formal institutional setting, the discourse is more critical than gender to the students’ linguistic
explicitness while addressing peer advice. However, the students’ preferred redressive strategies still reflect the
stereotypical politeness behaviors characterized as masculinity and femininity. While women show a propen-
sity for utilizing positive politeness languages, men rely more on negative politeness devices in their advice
responses, which may be pertinent to gender disparity in value priority and social-emotional orientations that
they inherently have towards their addressees.
References:
Blum-Kulka, S., J. House and G. Kasper. 1989. Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood:
Ablex.
Li, E. S.-H. (2010). Making suggestions: A contrastive study of young Hong Kong and Australian students. Journal
of Pragmatics, 42(3), 598-616.
Keywords: online evaluation, peer advice, academic discourse, gender, Mandarin Chinese

1411
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Maximizing the unique combination of critical and


ethnomethodological approaches in critical discursive
psychology

Lecture

Ms. Mai Shirahata 1


1. University of Jyväskylä

Critical discursive psychology (CDP) allows addressing large-scale societal discourses in locally situated dis-
courses. In my doctoral research project, I have been utilizing CDP to examine language ideologies in macro-,
meso-, and micro-level discourses about students and language in internationalizing higher education. In so do-
ing, I realized the importance of revisiting the debate between Schegloff (1997) and Wetherell (1998) on how to
study sociopolitical issues. While Schegloff suggests doing technical analysis first, and then critical or sociopo-
litical analysis, Wetherell suggests a synthetic approach. Nevertheless, both agree on the usefulness of technical
analysis for avoiding presuppositions, which likely mislead analysis. In this respect, CDP proposes a point of
compromise by combining critical and ethnomethodological approaches (Wiggins, 2017). In practice, however,
I find this combination challenging, especially when using CDP to analyze visual images. Unlike in talk and text,
which are common data types for CDP studies, the process of discourse construction in visual images tends to
be less explicit when topics are abstract and complex. This would let researchers’ own as well as common-sense
worldviews act as presuppositions in the analysis of possible meaning of visual images, violating the very prin-
ciple of discursive psychology: discourse as social action, not representation of mind (Potter & Wetherell, 1987).
In this paper, I aim to explore ways in which the unique combination of critical and ethnomethodological ap-
proaches in CDP can be best utilized while reducing the risk of being constrained by presuppositions. I reflect
on three CDP studies in my doctoral research project, all of which deal with different types of data (university
documents, student organization social media, and student focus group discussions). My question is: How do
I (and my co-authors) anchor the analysis within the data rather than theories or common-sense beliefs? The
preliminary findings indicate that I (and my co-authors) pay attention to the process of language being locally
defined and students being locally constructed or categorized as specific language speakers in text or talk. The
findings will contribute to the development of CDP as a theoretical and methodological framework to address
important societal issues with a nuanced bottom-up approach.
References

• Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. Lon-
don: Sage Publications.
• Schegloff, A. E. (1997). Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society, 8(2), 165–187.
• Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-
structuralism in dialogue. Discourse and Society, 9(3), 387–412.
• Wiggins, S. (2017). Discursive psychology: Theory, method and applications. London: Sage Publications.

1412
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Meaning control and algorithmic power in political


discussions on social media

Lecture

Dr. Inês Signorini 1 , Dr. Maria Lucena 2


1. Unicamp, 2. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Meaning control in the context of social media is a complex and multifaceted issue, as it encompasses both con-
scious human activity and the “technological unconscious” of the performative socio-technical infrastructures
that make up contemporary eco-social systems (Latour, 1996; Lemke, 2015; Beer, 2009; Maly, 2018; Cesarino,
2022). Indeed, social media users are receivers and consumers, producers and participants of communicative
flows, increasingly perceived as a co-production of humans and machines, although user-generated content and
sociability dynamics are centered on commercial motives and data driven profit strategies, most often without
the knowledge of those they are affecting to. As computer codes and business models into an approach built
around statistical and correlational analysis reconfigure the norms and values inherited from the scientific ap-
proach to social phenomena and from the linguistic and discursive approach to social communication, coherent
models or unified theories built around causation or modelling and explanation are put aside. And since in the
algorithmic model individuals have become variables rather than actors, algorithmic power is a key element
to better understand the issues at stake in online verbal communication practices aimed at reflective and civic
engagement against misinformation, verbal violence and political polarization in specific contexts (Signorini,
2022). The data supporting the discussion are drawn from the results of empirical research on how Brazilian
experts trained in the humanities examine these issues in conversational podcasts produced by a prestigious
newspaper in São Paulo, Brazil. These experts seek to explain how opponents in debates on social networks
define the limits of freedom of expression, (a)typical arguments and electoral decisions, particularly on the eve
of the 2022 presidential election. The qualitative content analysis (Tunison, 2023; Selvi, 2019) identifies the
projection, in the studied corpus, of a representative taxonomy of the (a)typical reasoning and behaviour the
reader/listener/voter engaged in social media. However, as we intend to show, it is a taxonomy inspired by the
humanist tradition on the study of identities and roles in social interaction which is completely alien to the role
of performative sociotechnical infrastructures in the reasoning and behavior of this reader/listener/voter.
BEER, David. Power through the algorithm? New Media & Society, v. 11, n. 6, p. 985–1002, 2009.
CESARINO, Letícia. O mundo do avesso: Verdade e política na era digital. São Paulo: Ubu Editora.
LATOUR, Bruno. On Interobjectivity. Mind, Culture, Activity, v. 3, n. 4, p. 228–245, 1996.
LEMKE, Jay. Feeling and Meaning: A Unitary Bio-semiotic Account. In: TRIFONAS, P. P. (Org.) International
Handbook of semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. p. 589–616
MALY, Ico. “The New Right, global nationalistic activism and the Flemish identitarian movement Schild & Vrien-
den. A case study.” Social media and society (2018).
SELVI, Ali F. “Qualitative content analysis.” The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics.
Routledge, 2019. 440-452.
SIGNORINI, Inês (ed.) Language Practices of Cyberhate in Unfolding Global and Local Realities. Cambridge Schol-
ars Pub, 2022.
Tunison, S. Content Analysis. In: Okoko, J.M., Tunison, S., Walker, K.D. (eds) Varieties of Qualitative Research
Methods. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Cham, 2023.

1413
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediated justice or immoral act? Discourse of ambivalence


about doxxing

Lecture

Dr. Carmen Lee 1


1. Chinese University of Hong Kong

Doxxing is commonly understood as actively seeking and publishing targets’ personal information because of
their perceived wrongdoing. As an act of digital vigilantism, doxxing exposes the target’s ‘true’ identity and
invites public shaming, seeking retributive justice and deterring others from engaging in similar actions (Lee,
2020; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2021; Trottier, 2020). Scholarly attention to doxxing is evident in various disci-
plines, but rarely has it been the focus of applied linguistics research. Aligning itself with the conference theme,
this paper understands doxxing as a form of (a)typical social practice. It aims to uncover how doxxing practices
are discursively constructed as abusive and/or normal by various social actors. In Hong Kong, doxxing has be-
come a criminal offense since 2021, a decision met with much criticism from lawmakers, tech firms, and the
general public. Part of a government-funded project that offers a discourse-analytic perspective to doxxing in
Hong Kong, this paper asks the overarching question: How is doxxing discursively constructed by active forum
users, bystanders, and the government respectively, probing specifically into ambivalent discourses surrounding
‘doing justice’. Based on a critical discourse analysis of a database of online interaction (43 forum posts and
28943 comments), 3 focus group interviews with 13 participants and 5 individual interviews, the study found
that doxxing was positively and negatively evaluated simultaneously by participants: justification and framing
strategies enabled a positive evaluation of doxxing as a justice-seeking tool. Atypical and potentially harmful
discourses of doxxing were regularly normalized; at the same time, participants repositioned doxxed targets as
victims experiencing harm, thus considering doxxing as a transgressive practice. Such ambivalence results in
uncertainty and confusion about the moral and legal implications of doxxing. This paper critically engages the
notions of ambivalence and reflexivity in understanding the complexity of public perceptions of controversial
online behaviour (Fisher, 2019). It also underscores the methodological significance of analyzing ambivalent
discourse in policy decisions targetting online utterances. With the rise of digital vigilantism and cancel cul-
ture, reflexive awareness of the intent, moral values, and sociocultural contexts surrounding online behaviour
should be taken into account in internet governance.
References:
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2021). Getting into the Mob: A Netnographic, Case Study Approach to Online Public
Shaming. In Analyzing Digital Discourses (pp. 247-274). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Fisher, E. (2019). Governing with ambivalence: The tentative origins of socio-technical integration. Research
Policy, 48(5), 1138-1149.
Lee, C. (2020). Doxxing as discursive action in a social movement. Critical Discourse Studies, 1-19.
Trottier, D. (2020). Confronting the digital mob: Press coverage of online justice seeking. European Journal of
Communication, 35(6), 597-612.

1414
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediating Group Agency in the Digital Classroom

Lecture

Dr. Melanie Moll 1


1. Europäische Fernhochschule Hamburg

Mediating Group Agency in the Digital Classroom


The notion of social presence in the e-learning context (Kehrwald 2008; Lowenthal 2010; Nowak & Biocca 2001)
has been developed as a means of better understanding human interaction. Following the continuum of so-
cial presence (Cui et al. 2013; de Susa 2002; Kehrwald 2008, 2010) this study answers the call to explore the
connections between social presence and the interactional co-construction of group agency. Specifically, I in-
vestigate how groups in a university business program are creating agency related to their group memberships
when assigned certain tasks, and how they portray their group vis-à-vis other groups in the class. I also explore
the detailed work done through discourse as they arrange and manage a group task in the online, asynchronic
environment.
With data collected over 2 years in multiple online classrooms of a European business university, I use a dis-
course analysis method to show how the function of intersubjective social presence is visible through language
usage, and how participants shape their bids for leadership in task management. My aim is two-fold: first, to
explore how participants negotiate their social identities in a virtual community, and second, to further our
understanding of effective learning contexts in business education. Specifically, my goal is to understand what
instructors and facilitators can do to encourage dialogical acts of learning and further humanize digital context.
References
Cui, G., Lockee, B., & Meng, C. (2013). Building modern online social presence: A review of social presence theory
and its instructional design implications for future trends. Education and information technologies, 18(4), 661-
685.
de Susa, R. (2002). Twelve varieties of subjectivity: Dividing in hopes of conquest. Paper presented at the
International Cognitive Science Society meeting, San Sebastian, Spain.
Kehrwald, B. (2008). Understanding social presence in text-based online learning environments. Distance Edu-
cation 29, No. 1:89 – 106.
Kehrwald, B. (2010). Being online: social presence as subjectivity in online learning. London Review of Educa-
tion. Vol. 8, No. 1: 39 – 50.
Lowenthal, P. R. (2010). The evolution and influence of social presence theory on online learning. In Social
computing: Concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications (pp. 113-128). IGI Global.
Nowak, K. and F. Biocca. (2001). Understanding the influence of agency and anthropomorphism on copresence,
social presence and physical presence with virtual humans. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
12, No. 5:481 – 494.

1415
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mediating Interpersonal Interaction in the Interpreted


Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences

Lecture

Dr. Rui Zhang 1


1. Dalian University of Technology

The study aims to explore how institutional interpreters mediate the salience of the participants’ personal and
institutional identity in the interpersonal interaction among the Chinese premier, international journalists, and
their audience at the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences (the CPPCs). It investigates the underlying forces
that drive the participants’ identity shift between as an individual and as a collective member of groups or an
institutional mouthpiece in the interpreted discourse.
Speakers manage the interpersonal relationship in political interaction mainly for the purpose of construct-
ing alignment with their audience or other participants so as to get their attitudes and stances more readily
accepted and build up a favorable image. The interpreted CPPCs are an important site of public diplomacy,
the limited existing studies on interpreted Chinese political interaction dominantly focus on interpreters’ me-
diation in alignment or conflict management (Gu, 2019; Fu and Chen, 2019; Li and Zhang, 2021) for conveying
China’s official voices and stances whereas participants’ individual elements such as personal responsibility,
commitment as well as involvement are overlooked.
As the spokesperson of the country facing the international audience with great temporal constraints, the use
of first and second-person pronouns reflects how the premier interacts with journalists and the audience, how
questions and answers are more personally or institutionally tuned. How is it mediated by the interpreter
will affect China’s interaction and communication with the international community. This study, therefore,
addresses the following questions: (1) What changes at interpersonal levels can be identified in utterances
where first-person-singular pronouns and second-person pronouns are mediated by the interpreter? (2) How
do those changes affect the salience of the premier’s and journalists’ institutional and personal identity? (3)
What can be accountable for the circumstances when personal identity is either weakened or strengthened?
Our study uses a self-built transcribed Chinese-English parallel corpus of the nine-year CPPCs from 2014 to 2022.
Our study uses a self-built transcribed Chinese-English parallel corpus of CPPCs from 2014 to 2022 with 120,107
tokens. Utterances are extracted in which interpreters’ mediation of first-person-singular pronouns (I, me, my,
mine, myself and their corresponding Chinese version wo, wode) and second-person pronouns (you, your, yours,
yourself and their corresponding Chinese version ni, nin, ni-de, ni-men) occur. Then deviation of interpersonal
markers and speech acts in the extracted utterances from the speakers’ discourse and the interpreter’s discourse
is further analyzed by resorting to Hyland’s Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse (2005) and Searle’s classifi-
cation (1979) of speech acts. The shift of the participants’ identities between as an individual (more salience on
their individual emotions and attitudes) and as institutional spokesperson (more salience on the institution’s
position) are analyzed. How the premier, the journalists and the interpreter position themselves and their in-
terlocutors in the complex system of interactional roles and social roles (Davies and Harré, 1990; Weizman,
2008) would be used to account for the interpreter’s possible motivations. This study contributes to the confer-
ence interpreter’s complex role performance in institutional interpreting and echoes the increasing interest in
relational work in pragmatics.

1416
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metaphor of CAT and DOG in Taiwan Hakka proverbial


expressions

Lecture

Prof. Huei-ling Lai 1 , Dr. Hsiao-Ling Hsu 1


1. National Chengchi University

This study investigates the interactive relationship between metaphor and culture, examining how specific
salient cultural elements can constrain the formation of metaphor. Analyzing proverbial expressions contain-
ing CAT (13 tokens) and DOG (74 tokens) in Taiwan Hakka, this study addresses two questions: how CAT and
DOG are conceptualized in metaphor, and what interactive patterns between metaphor and culture these ex-
pressions manifest. Four steps are followed: searching for source domain vocabulary strategy to obtain expres-
sions containing cat and dog (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2007), identifying specific target domains and analyzing
the intended meanings, teasing out salient cultural elements, and then making a comparison of the difference
between metaphors of CAT and DOG. The results demonstrate that CAT and DOG, the two domesticated animals,
are conceptualized differently in proverbial expressions, manifesting cultural influence on forming metaphor
from CAT and DOG. Target domains of CAT metaphor such as KINDNESS, INTEGRITY, RESPONSIBILITY, HUM-
BLENESS, COMPETENCE, CONTENTMENT, MISBEHAVIOR, SLOPPINESS, and GREEDINESS are identified, am-
bivalently revealing either positive (56%) or negative (44%) values associated with cats. On the other hand,
target domains of DOG metaphor such as MISBEHAVIOR, GREEDINESS, INGRATITUDE, INCOMPETENCE, IM-
PETUOUSNESS, IRRESPONSIBILITY, and STINGINESS are mostly identified, overwhelmingly showing negative
values (91%) associated with dogs.
As proverbs give speakers a way of understanding complicated propensities of human beings through other
forms of being, the result unravels how domesticated animals strongly reflect the Hakka people’s local folk
cultural knowledge schemas. Some inherent characters and behaviors associated with cats and dogs are par-
ticularly profiled as a result of their experience of life and their impressions on them. Cats are considered
beneficial to them because of their talent for rat hunting and killing—rats stealing their crops and rats often
carrying lethal bacteria and viruses. And this function of cats is illustrated by the abstract characteristics, such
as COMPETENCE (歪貓好嚇⿏vai24 meu55 ho42 hag2 su42 ‘Even an ugly cat is able to scare off rats.’), employed
to educate people not judge others simply by their appearance. On the contrary, dogs often leave unfavorable
impressions due to their craving for food, engaging in a gang fight and annoying loud bark, as illustrated by the
example exhibiting the feature of GREEDINESS (狗爭屎⾷gieu42 zang24 sii42 siid4 ‘Dogs fight even for feces.’),
employed to criticize how close friends can contend with each other even over trivial matters.
The findings not only exemplify how proverbial expressions of the most common domestic animals can bring
out value judgments embedded in cultural conceptions through the manifestation of metaphor but also reveal
how cultural constraints can influence the development of metaphor (Kövecses 2005, 2015). The analysis carries
a further implication. Using lower forms of being such as cats and dogs to convey certain attitudes, comment
on or evaluate situations can be pragmatically and socially inappropriate if not humiliating. Nevertheless, their
connotative opaqueness through cultural metaphors can lighten up such didactic force of proverbs if any, easing
out possible interactional unpleasantness and hence maintaining relational and social harmony.

1417
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Metaphor Processing: Referring and Predicating

Lecture

Prof. Robyn Carston 1 , Ms. Xinxin Yan 1


1. University College London

The general consensus emerging from decades of empirical investigation of metaphor processing is that, when
appropriately contextualised, metaphorically used language is no more effort demanding than literally used
language (Shinjo & Myers 1987; Gerrig 1989; Gibbs 1994). However, a small number of studies contradict this
view, notably Noveck et al. (2001), who maintain that relevance-based pragmatic theory predicts increased
cognitive costs incurred in deriving the extra effects that metaphors typically yield, and they provide experi-
mental results that support this prediction. In our study, we first surveyed tasks and stimulus materials of a
large number of experiments on metaphor processing from the 1970’s to the present day. Our most significant
findings were (a) that the few studies finding extra effort for metaphor relative to literal equivalents had tended
to test participants on metaphors used as referring expressions rather than as predicates (e.g. ‘The wilting vio-
let mumbled nervously’ vs. ‘That woman is a wilting violet’), and (b) that there was considerable variation and
inconsistency in the nature of the (so-called) literal equivalents used.
Based on this meta-analysis, we ran two self-paced reading experiments to test our hypothesis that when used
as a predicate metaphorical language is no more costly than literal language, but when used referentially it
does incur extra processing costs relative to a literal referring expression. We were careful to employ literal
counterparts that were consistent cross the two conditions (referring and predicating). Here is a sample of the
materials used in the first experiment (each preceded by the same context describing a neighbour’s noisiness
when vacuum cleaning his apartment):
Metaphorical referring: “That clanking tank is back in action.”
Literal referring: “That noisy machine is back in action.”
Metaphorical predicating: “That vacuum cleaner is a clanking tank.”
Literal predicating: “That vacuum cleaner is a noisy machine.”
Statistical analysis (using a linear mixed effects model) showed no effect of either figurativeness or communica-
tive function, but a significant crossover interaction between the two (p = .0073). In short, referential metaphors
were significantly more costly to process than literal equivalents, while predication metaphors took no longer
to process than literal equivalents.
The second experiment was motivated by the need to control for sentence position, as an early study by Ger-
rig & Healey (1983) indicates that this may make a difference to speed of metaphor comprehension. So we
included referentially used metaphors placed in object position, thus making their location in the sentence sim-
ilar to that of the predicate metaphors. Again, however, the results showed a significant difference in time
taken to process metaphorical referring expressions relative to both literal referring expressions (of compara-
ble descriptive length) and metaphorical predicates. Thus sentence position has no effect on the metaphorical
referring/predicating difference when the target sentences are presented with appropriate preceding context.
We end with an analysis of what it is about the referential use of metaphors that is special and effort-demanding,
calling here on insights from philosophical and linguistic analyses of metaphor and reference.

1418
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mitigated opinions in oral spontaneous conversations from


Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Lecture

Mr. Danny Murillo Lanza 1


1. Universitat de València

Assertive acts, where speakers convey their belief or opinion about a fact or reality (Searle, 1976), have been
considered one of the acts most likely to be mitigated (Bravo, 2002). According to Albelda et al. (2014), assertive
acts can be of two types: those of information and those of opinion. In the first ones, a mitigating strategy is
used to reduce “the speaker’s epistemic commitment to the truth that he or she is expressing”, while in the latter
the aim is to “soften or relativize the expression of judgments or speaker’s own opinions”. Giving an opinion
can “provoke different reactions such as reaching an agreement, or expressing an open disagreement, because
[…] an opinion […] can go against or in favor of what the interlocutor believes” (Flores and Ramírez, 2015).
Ultimately, when a speaker expresses an opinion, his social face “is more compromised, therefore the greater
mitigating activity can be expected” Albelda et al. (2014).
Taking all these conceptual considerations in mind, the aim of this research is to show how the mitigating work
on opinions is linguistically conveyed by Spanish speakers from Tegucigalpa, specifically in spontaneous oral
conversations. This research is considered relevant because studies on this local Spanish variety are scarce,
whereas it is also assumed that speakers from Honduras mitigate opinions in a very high rate (Murillo, in pro-
cess).
Methodologically, this research is corpus-based, coming from the analysis of the Ameresco-Tegucigalpa corpus,
included in the broader American corpus of Spanish conversations (Ameresco, Albelda and Estellés, online,
available at www.corpusameresco.com). For data analysis, methodological guidelines proposed by Albelda et
al. (2014) have been followed and the recognition tests proposed by Villalba (2020) have been applied.
The preliminary qualitative results show that the speakers mitigate their opinions, not only because the content
is negative, but also because it is too categorical. They mitigate them in three ways: a) they give the possibility
to the interlocutor to show his agreement –or disagreement– through the contact control particle: ¿va?, b) they
limit or restrict them to a certain space through various opinion-delimiting constructions. And c) they show
partial agreement through concessive structures. Ultimately, when they give a mitigated opinion, they want to
protect their social face and to prevent possible disagreements with the interlocutor.
Albelda, M., Briz, A, Cestero, A. M., Kotwica, D. y Villalba, C. (2014). «Ficha metodológica para el análisis prag-
mático de la atenuación en corpus discursivos del español. (ES.POR.ATENUACIÓN)». Oralia. 17: 7-62.
Albelda, Marta y Maria Estellés. En línea. Corpus Ameresco. Valencia: Universitat de València.
www.corpusameresco.com
Bravo, D. (2002). «Actos asertivos y cortesía. Imagen de rol en el discurso de académicos argentinos». In: M. E.
Placencia; D. Bravo (eds.). Actos de habla y cortesía en español. London: Lincom.
Flores, E. y G. Ramírez. (2015). «La atenuación de los actos asertivos: Diferencias entre hombres y mujeres».
SOPRAG. 3(1): 90-119.
Searle, J. (1976). Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge, Cambridge.
Villalba, Cristina. 2020. «Recognising mitigation: Three tests for its identification». Journal of Pragmatics. 167:
68-79.

1419
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mitigation in social media posts of autistic users

Lecture

Prof. Nelya Koteyko 1 , Dr. Martine Van Driel 2


1. Queen Mary University of London, 2. University of Birmingham

As a minority group affected by a stigmatised social status autistic people modify their behaviour to try to fit in
with social situations. This presentation considers how digital pragmatics can contribute to the understanding
of autistic adults’ ‘adaptive morphing’ (Lawson, 2020) or camouflaging online. We used the corpus linguistics
tools of keywords and concordances to establish the topics and relative frequencies of discourse and mitigation
markers in the posts of Twitter and Facebook users who regularly disclose autism versus those who do not (35
users in total). The analysis shows that mitigation at the level of proposition, illocution, and utterance source is
more frequently used by those who avoid disclosing autism (15 users). Semi-structured interviews with these
users reveal that negative stereotyping and anxiety about misinterpretation of one’s posts occupy a key place
in justifications for using or avoiding linguistic and visual forms. We discuss the implications of our findings
for addressing the relationship between body, mind and technology related to digitally mediated interaction.
First, social stress and past negative experiences of social interactions continue to shape autistic users’ linguistic
choices on social media, in contrast to optimistic statements in earlier research that ‘the different symbolic
capacity [of autistic people] was less relevant in the interactional world of the Internet’ (Ryan and Räisänen,
2008: 140). Second, while most studies of both face-to-face and digitally mediated interactions address the
cause of mitigation as the need to follow politeness norms our findings point to alternative causes focused on
the reduction of vulnerability (Bates, 2021).
Bates, C. (2021). Mitigation in discourse: Social, cognitive and affective motivations when exchanging advice.
Journal of Pragmatics, 173, 119-133.
Lawson, W. (2020). Adaptive morphing and coping with social threat in autism: An autistic perspective. Journal
of Intellectual Disability-diagnosis and Treatment, 8(3), 519–526.
Ryan, S. and Ra¨isa¨nen, U. (2008). “It’s like you are just a spectator in this thing”: Experiencing social life the
‘aspie’ way. Emotion, Space and Society 1, 135–143.

1420
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Mock Affect, and the socio-pragmatics of unlicensed


epenthesis

Lecture

Prof. Rakesh Bhatt 1 , Ms. Taraneh Sanei 1


1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In this paper we present evidence of Mock Affect—a ludic interpellation that is indexically tied to the phonolog-
ical process of unlicensed epenthesis in non-native language use—and show the various community responses,
the meta-pragmatic commentaries, that sustain its ideological dimension: the denigrated Other. The unli-
censed epenthesis, phonological relic of native tongues, mobilizes a variety of closely-related socio-pragmatic
meanings—rustic, amateur, rural—that easily coalesces into a ‘vernacular voice’ that is picked up in mimetic
performances, produced steadily on a jocular key, as shown in (1) below where second generation Kashmiri mi-
grants (R1-R3) in New Delhi, India, mimic how their uncle from Kashmir speaks Hindi with a “Kashmiri Accent”
.
Excerpt 1. Discussion on Kashmiri Accent
1. I: koi example hai aapke paas (Do you have any example)
2. R1: haaN, aur kyaa (yes, of course)
3. jaise, voh kaheNge, fizikəs exam kaisa hua (like, they will say, “how was your physics exam”)
4. R2: zaraa aaj dəresəd chiken khaane ka man hai (“please today I feel like having dressed chicken”)
5. R1, R2, R3: (Loud laughter follows)
6. (3.0)
7. R3: His wife is worse
8. I: How
9. R2: She does that a [lot
10. R3: [I think she is originally (2.0) {switch to Kashmiri} gaam-ic (of/from village)
11. R1: I don’t know that, but not well educated
Even in this short (T: 32 secs) excerpt, taken out of 13 hours of recorded conversations among second-generation
Kashmiri migrants in New Delhi, India, ages 20-54, we observe the negative evaluation of the use of epenthetic
vowel: unlicensed in form and mocking in function. The switch to Kashmiri, gaam-ic (belonging to village),
by R3 in line 10 above foregrounds this Affect—jocular mockery—by relating frequent epenthesis (line 9) to
images of personhood: rural/rustic (line 10), and uneducated (line 11). What undergirds Mock Affect is, on
the one hand, the low symbolic, cultural and economic capital of Kashmiri, vis-à-vis Hindi and English, and on
the other hand, a set of (historical-political and colonial) ideologies that denigrates Kashmiri to the status of a
‘vernacular,’ cumulatively enabling vernacular exhibitions such as (1) above.
The cross-cultural reflex of Mock Affect appears among young Farsi-English bilingual speakers in Iran. The Farsi
data also show how the unlicensed epenthesis in English words gets picked up and deployed, through jocular
mockery, as a resource to ‘Other’ certain speakers, as lower-class and uncouth. The data further show that the
‘degree’ of epenthesization, the number of epenthetic insertions, in single words impacts how the resolution of
the ‘vernacular voice’ is interactionally constructed; that is, the more instances of epenthesis within a word, the
higher the resolution of the constructed images of personhood.
In conclusion, we argue that linguistic diacritics of Othering, effecting Mock Affect, serves as a proxy to denigrate
groups, stereotyping them as caricatures of their selves.

1421
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Modal values and NEG-raising in ‘I think’, ‘I’m sure’ and ‘there


is a/some chance’

Lecture

Mr. Jiqiang Lu 1 , Prof. Kristin Davidse 1


1. KU Leuven

Clausal epistemic modal markers (henceforth CLEMs) like I think have been studied intensively from the per-
spective of grammaticalization (e.g. Shank et al. 2016). However, conceptual questions about the full grammat-
ical system formed by CLEMs have remained largely unaddressed, such as:
i. Do CLEMs express the whole epistemic scale of degrees of likelihood?
ii. How does NEG-raising, i.e. transfer of the negation of the proposition into the CLEM, as in (1b), play out
within the full grammatical system?
(1a) If it was going to be conclusive evidence I think I’d have sympathy with what you’re saying but I think it’s
not going to be that conclusive. (WB)
(1b) things could get hard, but I do not think it is going to be a war on the field. (WB)
In this presentation, we propose an analytical model in which CLEMs, just like modal auxiliaries and adverbials,
express values ranging from high over median to low, as visualized in Figure 1.
Modal value Modal markers
high must / surely / I am sure
intermediate will / probably / I think
low may / perhaps / there is a/some chance
Figure 1: Epistemic modal scale
We stress that, semantically, epistemic modality is inherently positive (Halliday 1970, Nuyts 2001). This entails
that the negative polarity is always a constituent of the proposition. We further predict rough semantic equiv-
alence for alternate CLEMs with median value, e.g. (1a-b). By contrast, high and low value CLEMs containing a
negation are predicted to be equivalent with CLEMs of the opposite value, as in (2a-b).
(2a) Origin’s Mortlake plant won’t be operating until 2008. But at least there’s a chance the lights won’t go out
in the following year. (WB)
(2b) The crops are so late that I’m not sure the tonnage or volume will be there. (WB)
With qualitative and quantitative corpus study, we will verify these predictions and examine the distribution
of the CLEMs I think, I’m sure and there is a/some chance with negative propositions and the same CLEMs with
NEG-raising. We will do this by calculating the normalized frequencies of all their attestations in the subcorpus
UKspoken WordbanksOnline (WB). There are 86,938 potentially relevant hits, but lexical and non-modal uses
as well as examples with positive propositions will have to be filtered out. We will also develop a typology
of the different pragmatic effects of these two variants, in terms of such rhetorical goals as countering the
interlocutor’s expectation (1a), putting a positive spin on the low likelihood of a negative state-of-affairs (2a), or
soft-pedalling the likelihood of a negative state-of-affairs, as in (1b) and (2b).
References
Halliday, M. A. K. (1970). Functional diversity in language as seen from a consideration of modality and mood
in English. Foundations of Language, 322-361.
Nuyts, J. (2001). Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. Journal of pragmatics,
33(3), 383-400.

Thompson, S. A., & Mulac, A. (1991). The discourse conditions for the use of the complementizer that in conver-
sational English. Journal of pragmatics, 15(3), 237-251.

1422
18th International Pragmatics Conference

1423
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Modification of Linguistic Landscape as a Social Practice:


Revealing the Gaze

Lecture

Prof. Michal Tannenbaum 1 , Prof. Elana Shohamy 1


1. Tel Aviv University

Research in Linguistic Landscape (LL) in recent years has broadened in various directions, including the in-
vestigation of its potential to raise school students’ awareness regarding their surroundings, as part of broader
education and language pragmatics. It asks questions such as how people read and interpret public spaces and
how LL affects them in terms of their identity, emotions, and sense of belonging to their own communities and
to wider society. In collecting and analyzing LL data (such as signs, graffiti, ads, and street names), students
become aware of issues like language hierarchies, unequal power relations between groups, representation,
discrimination and exclusion.
A number of studies that have examined the pragmatics of LL in education have pointed to the centrality of gaze,
i.e., how students perceive and interpret their LL environment differentially, reflecting their group affiliations
and experiences. Thus, a study by Goldstein-Havetzky (2011) pointed to the difference between Jewish and Arab
students in a mixed (Arab/Jewish) city in Israel: The Arab students reacted with anger to their realization of the
lack of written Arabic in their surroundings. The Jewish students in contrast were rather indifferent; the issue
of language did not strike them as relevant to social justice. Hayik (2017), using the tool of PhotoVoice, exposed
the intense negative emotional reactions of Arab students in Israel after interpreting the LL in their environ-
ment, realizing the relative absence of Arabic and a range of misuses of the language. Another study related
to gaze employed an innovative methodology in which high school students, following an introductory course
about LL, were asked to document signs in their environment that they perceived as discriminatory in terms of
linguistic representation. They then (virtually) modified them towards greater inclusivity and fairness in terms
of language, identity, and other symbolic features, providing explanations for their modifications (Shohamy &
Pennycook, 2022; Tannenbaum & Shohamy, 2019).
To learn more about the interrelationships between group affiliation and LL interpretation, the present study
expands the above-mentioned research, employing similar methodology with more ethnolinguistic groups in
Israeli schools: a. Arabic-speakers (including Muslims, Christians, and Druze), b. Immigrants from various
countries (first and 1.5 generations), and. c. Refugees and asylum seekers. This study also included a new
component: After the modification phase, participants were given photos that had been modified by members of
other groups, and were asked to analyze them from their own gaze, thus generating a discussion about impact of
representation and subjectivity. In our presentation, we will describe the different pragmatic styles of different
groups, the contribution of trying to view things from other perspectives and points of view, and the implications
of the study for activist pedagogy in terms of its potential to promote equality, empathy, mutual understanding
and tolerance.

1424
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Moments of WeChat, moments of identity struggle

Lecture

Prof. Chaoqun Xie 1


1. Zhejiang International Studies University

Technological innovations and advances have transformed and facilitated social members’ ways of interaction
with their life-worlds. WeChat has, thanks to its one-stop affordances of a wide range of features of convenience,
become the most widely used social networking application in (mainland) China, and doing social life on WeChat
has become an everyday normal, which is evidenced, among others, by more and more netizens posting updates
in Moments of WeChat. Posting updates is not necessarily a mere act of sharing in pursuit of lots of ‘likes’; it
can be one of social presence struggling for group/community membership and recognition. Updates posted in
Moments of WeChat are not something fixed, passive or static but dynamic, active and complex in the sense that
posting updates may represent an action of identity struggle, the interpretation of which needs to go beyond
updates proper and take into account various social, cognitive and/or historical factors. This paper, focusing
on the chronological investigation of Moments of a single WeChat account coupled with relevant interviews,
argues that identity constructed in and through updates in WeChat Moments may turn out to be a struggle for
identity.

1425
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal Argumentation in digital media: brazilian


political tweets as case studies

Lecture

Prof. Rosalice Pinto 1 , Prof. Fabrizio Macagno 1


1. Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Digital media is now being used as an important means of political propaganda. Tweets, especially, have taken a
leading role in political campaigns due to the technological advantages they provide. Considering their growing
relevance in political communication, this paper aims to present an analytical and multidisciplinary methodol-
ogy for the study of multimodal argumentation in political tweets.Analytical categories from Pragmatics, Argu-
mentation Theory, Text Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and Digital Discourse Analysis will be used to study verbal
and visual argumentation in these digital genres. In a previous study (Macagno and Pinto 2021), the analysis
of visual-verbal argumentation in advertisements was analyzed through five steps dynamically related: (1) the
analysis of its context, the text genre and the images; (2) the polyphonic articulations and presuppositions; (3)
the explicatures; (4) the dialogical functions and illocutionary forces; (5) the construction of argumentation
schemes. In the present analysis of tweets, this method will be enriched by further categories drawn from
Digital Discourse Analysis. In empirical terms, we will present tweets that circulated in Brazil’s 2022 election
campaign, namely from the two most-voted presidential candidates: Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Ignácio Lula da
Silva. Preliminary results show that the multimodal strategies used by the first candidate appear to be more
diversified, which may have contributed to the negligible voting difference between the two candidates.

1426
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Multimodal narratives in children: the interplay between


gesture and referring expressions

Lecture

Mr. Corrado Bellifemine 1 , Ms. Camille Dupret 1


1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Our study aims to explore the concomitant use of gestures and referring expressions in narratives by children
between 7 and 9. Since children tend to produce more ambiguous referring expressions in narratives than
adults, we formulate the hypothesis that gestures could have the function of clarifying the verbal modality when
the chosen referring expression is potentially ambiguous for the interlocutor or when the referent is weakly
accessible.
We videorecorded 20 French speaking children’s oral narratives in two different situations. In the first situation,
10 children told a story to an experimenter from a set of static textless pictures visually shared by both parties.
In the other situation, 10 children recounted a story to their mother after watching a cartoon without her. We
analyzed the referring expressions according to their form (i.e. pronominal or lexical), the animacy of the
referent mentioned and the position on the referential chain. We analyzed gestures in terms of their density
to the absolute number of referring expressions and for each one of the abovementioned features. We also
determined the types of gestures used (deictic, iconic, beat gestures) and their density in the two situations
according to the different features of the referring expressions.
Results show that children’s gesture ratio is similar in the two situations, suggesting that the degree of shared
knowledge with the interlocutor has no effect on the density of gestures produced during the two types of nar-
ratives. However, despite a large interindividual variability, several differences are found as for the types of
gestures used in the two contexts, that qualitative data analysis is able to put forth.
Overall, children are sensitive to the interactional settings and they adapt their use of gestures based on their
interlocutor’s knowledge of the referents mentioned. Moreover, our study consolidates the multimodal charac-
ter of language and shows that gestures are strongly intertwined with the verbal content of speech. Thus, both
verbal and nonverbal modalities work together, contributing to the construction of meaning during discourse
elaboration and highlighting a specific multimodal dimension of reference.

1427
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Narrating Success Stories - How Migrants from the Balkans


Forge Their Identity as Entrepreneurs

Lecture

Prof. Nadine Thielemann 1 , Ms. Lejla Atagan 1


1. WU Wien

People from the former Yugoslavia represent Vienna’s largest group of migrants (Statistik Austria 2021). Due to
difficulties in accessing the labour market, many start a business of their own – mostly a deli, restaurant, or café
where they commodify the Balkan culinary culture and hospitality – and thus turn into migrant entrepreneurs
(Dheer 2018). In our research, we analyse how they construct their identity as migrant entrepreneurs.
For this purpose, we have conducted in-depth interviews to learn more about their ideas and experiences as
migrants to and entrepreneurs in Austria. These data further enabled us to investigate the discursive practices
which they use for identity construction. A practice widely adopted in our data is the narrative (de Fina &
Georgakopoulou 2008). The personal story of becoming an entrepreneur here plays a key role.
The recurrent plot pattern we observe highlights the transformation of the protagonist (cf. Tobias 1993: 153-
159). Consequently, the three essential elements of the reconstructed plot characterise stages of life and mark
milestones in the process of change. These include
- an initial self-presentation as an ‘underdog’ comprising experiences of social marginalisation and economic
precarisation both in their community and in the host society, which is characterised by a lack of agency on
behalf of the protagonist.
- a moment of transformation as a key element, marking a juncture in the protagonist’s life; this is presented
as the moment in which they decided to start a business of their own and in which they thus took the fate into
their own hands and gained agency.
- the coda / evaluation frames this transformation from an underdog to an entrepreneur as a success (e.g., ex-
ternal validation and recognition within the community and the host society), which they attribute to a set of
character traits (‘yugoslavian discipline’, etc.), hard work, having gone through the school of life, etc.
Our analysis thus reveals how migrant entrepreneurs forge their identity as successful business founders, which
enables them to gain status and recognition in the host society by couching their personal stories in the narrative
pattern of a transformation that stresses the idea of self-empowerment. In doing so, our analysis complements
research from a business perspective (e.g., O’Connor 2002, Hjorth & Steyaert (eds.) 2004) and adds to the under-
standing of the role and power of the narrative in this process.
References
Dheer, Ratan J. S. (2018): Entrepreneurship by immigrants: a review of existing literature and directions for
future research. In: Int Entrep Manag J 14 (3), S. 555–614.
Fina, Anna de; Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2008): Analysing narratives as practices. In: Qualitative Research
8 (3), S. 379–387.
Hjorth, Daniel; Steyaert, Chris (eds.) (2004): Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship. A second
movements in entrepreneurship book. Edward Elgar Publishing. Cheltenham.
O’Connor, E. (2002): Storied Business: Typology, Intertextuality, and Traffic in Entrepreneurial Narrative. In:
Journal of Business Communication 39 (1), S. 36–54.
Tobias, Ronald B. (1993): 20 Master Plots. Cincinnati, Ohio.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

National identity as a socially differentiated way of


performing professional identity in the Qatari context of the
reformed national university

Lecture

Mrs. Afra Al-Khulaifi 1 , Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop 2


1. Qatar University, 2. KU Leuven

In Qatar, top-down structural changes have intrinsically linked the role of the national university with a trans-
formative agenda that targets both society and economy. From a discursive perspective such macro-level pro-
cesses especially affect the identity work of employees (Van De Mieroop and Schnurr 2017) as change in the
system and role of the university essentially ‘brings about redefinitions of the professional identity of educa-
tors in relation to the job market and the consumers of education’ (Sarangi and Roberts 1999: 18). Although
the topic of reforms is extensively discussed, the impact of these changes on the various groups of employees
involved is largely lacking.
In this study, we tap into the complexities of these reforms and capture their implications on the group of Qatari
junior academics who are the target of these reforms. We demonstrate how the university’s ‘Qatarization’ em-
ployment scheme – which is, roughly speaking, an apprenticeship scheme for Qatari nationals – intricately
links the process of becoming a ‘Qatari academic’ with a process of socialising into an increasingly complex
workplace structure through a career path that combines competing values of internationalisation and nation-
alisation. While this scheme emphasises ‘nationality’ and thus entails an advantageous position for the Qatari
native minority group, it also emphasises ‘foreign’, rather than ‘local’, knowledge and qualifications and thereby
entails an especially ambivalent position for native employees who need to confront these conflicting values.
In particular, we adopt the social constructionist perspective to explore how this macro-social context is re-
flected in the micro-discursive identity work of junior academics, particularly in terms of how they construct
their professional identities when telling stories about their careers. We draw on a corpus of 12 semi-structured
interviews in Arabic language with female Qatarijunior academics. As an analytical procedure, we adopt the
narrative as social practice approach (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2008), which combines a focus on the fine-
grained and local occasioning of stories with a consideration of the more general backdrop of the macro-levels
of social organisation. The analysis presents a selection of stories from two interviews and an emergent pat-
tern of similar identity work that explicitly invokes ‘national identity’ as a crucial aspect in the development of
the interviewees’ career. This thus points at the construction of a very specific version of ‘professional’ iden-
tity that can be considered as emblematic of the characteristics of the academic profession as it takes shape in
current-day Qatar.
References
De Fina, Anna & Alexandra Georgakopoulou. (2008). Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to
practices. Text & Talk 28(3). 275-281.
Sarangi, Srikant & Celia Roberts. 1999. The dynamics of interactional and institutional orders in work-related
settings. In Sarangi, Srikant & Roberts, Celia (eds.), Talk, work and institutional order: Discourse in medical,
mediation and management settings, 1-57. Mouton de Gruyter.
Van De Mieroop, Dorien & Stephanie Schnurr. 2017. Epilogue: Identity struggles as a reflection of knowledge,
competing norms, and attempts for social change. In Van De Mieroop, Dorien & Schnurr, Stephanie (eds.), Iden-
tity struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world, 445-454. John Benjamins.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Negotiating the boundaries of resistance in parent-child


interaction

Lecture

Prof. Richard Fitzgerald 1 , Dr. Younhee Kim 1


1. University of Macau

While certain behaviour is a preferred response to parental directives, directive-response sequences in parent-
child interaction are routinely infused with resistance. Children might resist by challenging the grounds on
which parents request the modification of their behaviour or they might simply ignore the request. However
rather than these actions being organised around a binary of compliance or noncompliance, examination of
expanded conflict sequences between children and parents reveals that there is constant negotiation around
the relevant boundaries in the here and now around some action and possible resistance through ‘fudging’
between the request and judging the action required has or has not been completed satisfactorily, which may
include the child not doing what was asked. Drawing on 36 hours of video-recording of parent-child interaction,
the analysis uses conversation analysis and embodied analysis to examine extended sequences where a parent
and a child are engaged in pursuing conflictual action trajectory concerning a required behaviour of the child.
The analysis begins from preliminary findings concerning a ‘standard’ rule of behaviour within the family (e.g.,
you have to sit at the table until other people finish), and examines how far and how strictly the rule is pursued or
flouted/resisted in particular instances. Through this, the analysis highlights how, even in conflictual sequences,
there is an orientation to the boundaries (i.e., how far they can resist) both by the parent and the child but also
how a particular sequence of actions of resistance is subject to negotiation by both parent and child in situ.
In examining the in situ interpretation and articulation of a behaviour ‘rule’, the analysis demonstrates how
boundaries evolve, are worked out, oriented to and fudged through forms of interaction and embodied action.

1430
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Notions of disinformation as a resource in interaction:


Empirical and theoretical observations on commenters’
metapragmatic awareness

Lecture

Dr. Cedric Deschrijver 1


1. Ming Chuan University

Contemporary geopolitics is increasingly marked by transnational flows of disinformation that occur in complex
and multi-layered contexts of online communication. Despite a growing focus on this type of disinformation,
existing research has mainly investigated its spread and reach of disinformation, or its specific discursive or lin-
guistic features. Far less attention has been devoted to analyzing audience orientations towards, receptiveness
to, or suspicion of, disinformation.
The current paper seeks to contribute to this gap from both an empirical and a theoretical angle. The paper
analyses The Financial Times anonymous online user comments on the 2019 Hong Kong protests. The city’s
internationalized fabric ensured global coverage of the events, yet also incited an internationalized clash of
discourses, with disinformation campaigns spreading far beyond the city. This was seemingly also the case
in The Financial Times comments sections, where comments regularly referred to the prima facie presence of
organised disinformation campaigns.
The paper’s empirical focus lies on the results of a linguistic-pragmatic discourse analysis focusing on partici-
pants’ metapragmatic awareness in the context under investigation. Firstly, the paper provides a brief overview
of the variety linguistic/discursive features that participants explicitly designated as ‘atypical’: taken as poten-
tially indicative of commenters linked to disinformation campaigns. Secondly, the analysis tracks one of these
specific features throughout the dataset, i.e., the discursive representation of the protests themselves. By fo-
cusing on discussions on this discursive representation, the paper argues that the notion of ‘state-led disin-
formation’ became part of a dynamically engendered context of the interaction, in turn amenable to further
recontextualization and enregisterment. Simultaneously, this dynamically engendered context narrowed the
range of possible interpretations: commenters explicitly rejected any comment that was seen to echo comments
previously identified by participants as part of a disinformation campaign.
The paper concludes with preliminary reflections on the results’ theoretical relevance. Specifically, it argues
that in data where key contextual features are unknown both to participants and analysts, a focus metapragmat-
ics provides a necessary way to assess interactional processes. This, however, prompts a revisiting of certain
traditional discourse-analytical claims, which do not consistently take into account audience reception. Indeed,
the empirical results suggest that, rather than discourse being instrumental in shaping worldviews, it may be
metapragmatic descriptions of discourse (academic or otherwise) that may be more consequential in influenc-
ing worldviews.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Nullius In Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal


Society Corpus

Lecture

Ms. Nina Haket 1


1. University of Cambridge

Conceptual Engineering (CE) is the practice of improving certain concepts we use in discourse, for example,
those to do with scientific theories, social reality, or politics. Despite involving words and their meanings, this
practice has not been looked at from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics, instead remaining within the
bounds of philosophical methodologies. I aim to show that linguistic pragmatics has a significant role to play in
the study of CE.
To bring CE into linguistics, linguists can use empirical linguistic tools to help evaluate the extent to which engi-
neered terms are successfully implemented and diffused in scientific and everyday discourse. To exemplify this,
I use the case study of mass and weight in the Early Modern scientific register, which I argue is an instance of CE,
and track their implementation through scientific journal articles associated with The Royal Society between
1700 and 1920. The aim was to investigate whether these lexical items were differentiated based on their sense
or by other extra-linguistic factors such as the author, object, and subfield. Success, for this project, is differenti-
ation based on sense and not on any other extra-linguistic factors since the project aimed to get scientific writing
to use these terms consistently and accurately. 1500 tokens of mass and weight from the Royal Society Corpus
were manually annotated for their sense and extra-linguistic factors and analysed by looking at the frequencies
of the respective senses over time, along with Ctrees and Random Forests to identify annotations that were the
most important in predicting the lemma, and Principal Component Analysis to visually inspect clustering and
patterns over time. These analyses concluded that this instance of CE was not successfully implemented, despite
targeting a small, ideologically niche community with shared goals, because sense had little predictive power
over the chosen lemma, whereas extra-linguistic factors had much greater predictive power.
These results speak to the ongoing debate on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. Introducing an innovative
word meaning does not guarantee usage with that meaning in contextually-situated forms of language, even
in a niche community with shared goals that might be thought of as cooperating with the language authority
within their society. I will explore the notion that despite standing meaning not changing according to the
criteria set out in this work, the discourse in scientific articles is constructed so that understanding is main-
tained despite an unclear concept-meaning-word mapping across the mass-weight domain. What is understood
is different from what is written, and speculate the role of interlocutor common ground, communicative as-
sumptions, and inference in pinning down speaker-meaning. From the perspective of CE more generally, this
work shows that philosophers and linguists need to work together on such projects to avoid the simplification of
semantic prescriptivism without consideration of pragmatic or ideological factors. Rather than targeting literal
word meaning, it must be explored whether other levels of linguistic meaning may be more appropriate targets
for CE.

1432
18th International Pragmatics Conference

On Discourse Markers of Interruption: Iltan and Wusen in


Korean

Lecture

Prof. Sunhee Yae 1


1. Chung-Ang University

Interrupting the speaker is generally regarded as impolite. For various reasons, however, discourse markers of
interruption (DMIs) are often employed by the discourse participant to cut in the discourse and discourage the
speaker. The DMI is displayed tactfully and effectively in discourse to accomplish the purpose of the interlocuter
by minimizing the face-threatening speech act for the speaker. Therefore, the DMI tends to be a fragment in
form to get the instant attention, for example, guard ‘look’ in Italian (Balteiro, 2018), wait (Tagaliamonte, 2021;
Waltereit, 2002), camkkan, kaman, and kuman ‘just a moment’ in Korean (Rhee, forthc.) and to be characterized
by momentariness, sensory perception, and priority in its lexical origin.
This paper aims to investigate the two similar yet different DMIs iltan and wusen in Korean from the perspectives
of grammaticalization and pragmatics. The DMIs iltan (⼀旦) and wusen (于先) are Chinese-origin words. Iltan
consists of il (⼀) ‘one’ and tan (旦) ‘morning,’ designating ‘one morning’ or ‘overnight.’ The word iltan was first
attested in 1496. Phyocwunkwuketaysacen presents three meanings of iltan: (i) ‘first of all,’ (ii) ‘wait,’ ‘hold on,’
(iii) ‘once, in case of emergency.’ The example in (1) shows that iltan has developed into a DMI, with which S
interrupts C’s talk.
(1) (in the telephone conversation between C (Cwunho) and S (Swumi))
C: I am going to work in some other city from the next week.
S: Really?
C: I will drop by at home at the weekend to meet our children.
S: al-ass-e iltan kkunhe cikum com pappe (hang up the phone)
see-Pst-SE DMI hang.up.the.phone now a.little busy
‘I see. First of all, hang up the phone. I am a little busy now’.
(2007 Drama Kangnamemma Ttalacapki #16)
Wusen is composed of a particle wu (于) and sen (先) ‘first of all,’ ‘ahead.’ Based on Phyocwunkwuketaysacen,
wusen has two sense designations: (i) ‘first of all,’ ‘ahead,’ (ii) ‘just as it is, somehow or other.’ Wusen was first
attested in the 18th century. The example in (2) represents the DMI function of wusen in contemporary Korean,
with which C interrupts K’s serious line of talk.
(2) (in the dialogue between K (Kayin) and C (Cinho) in which C tries to talk seriously)
K: …Look
C: Look what?
K: wusen pap-pwuthe mek-ko cincihan tayhwa-nun nacwungey ….
DMI rice-from eat-and serious conversation-Top afterward
‘First of all, let’s have dinner and then have a serious conversation…’
(2010 Drama Kayinuy Chwihyang #06)
This study will illuminate the differences and commonalities of the DMIs iltan and wusen (i) by tracing back the
diachronic paths from the Chinse origins to the discourse markers and (ii) by categorizing their discourse func-
tions drawing upon textual organization, subjectification and intersubjectification (Heine 2013: 1215) in Present
Day Korean. Theoretical implications such as pragmatic inferences in the DMI fragments, feigned interactivity
(Rhee, forthc.), etc. will also be looked at closely.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the acquisition of formal pronouns in Bangla

Lecture

Ms. Yangchen Roy 1


1. Jawaharlal Nehru University

Languages may encode the social relationship between the speaker, the addressee
or the third person via honorifics, pronouns, allocutive marking on the verb, and/or other speech act markers
in the clause. Bangla does this is via three levels of second person pronouns (L1, L2 & L3) and two levels of third
person pronouns (L2 & L3). Using novel language data from picture description tasks done with Bangla speaking
adults (n=10) and children (n=19), I show that children not only do not produce formal pronouns, they replace
them using non-formal counterparts, something that adults do not do. Based on a Generative understanding of
the grammar, I propose and discuss two hypotheses on why children do this.
The choice of the feature bundles that result in the manifestation of the morphemes that represent formal
pronouns, is dependent on discourse/speech-context. Therefore, the speaker and addressee, and the relation(s)
they share need to be represented in the narrow syntax (Ross, 1970; Sadock, 1974; Miyagawa, 1987). Speech act
layers have been proposed above CPs (Speas & Tenny, 2003; Haegeman & Hill, 2013), and as projections above
pronouns (Portner, Pak, & Zanuttini, 2019), or as elaborate nominal speech act structure (Ritter and Wiltschko,
2019; Wiltschko, 2021). Using a battery of tests from Ritter & Wiltschko (2018), I first establish that Bangla has
a nominal periphery, and then argue that the results of the experiments can be explained by the following two
competing hypotheses: children lack a fully developed nominal periphery (PAH1), or they lack the features in
their feature inventory that constitute politeness (PAH2).
PAH1 has the following consequences. If the Speech Act Structure is responsible for licensing the 1st , 2nd persons
(Speaker and Addressee), and the 3rd person personal pronouns as per the Duality of Person Hypothesis of Ritter
& Wiltchsko (2018), then a missing Speech Act layer should mean a deficiency in the acquisition of 1st and/or 2nd
person, along with problems with politeness acquisition. Children are infamous for referring to themselves in
the third person. Those with autism too are known to refer to themselves in the wrong person i.e., the second
and/or third. If the third person is argued to be first built in the DP layer, and then raised to the Speech act layer
to acquire the personal pronoun form, these are not unusual.
The idea behind PAH2 is that unless the child encounters speech that includes linguistic items that represent
a bundle of politeness features with the appropriate feature values, they will not begin learning the feature
values. In this case it involves the child stepping out of the informal setting of the home, and into the formal
setting of the school. Further, children not only did not produce third person L3 pronouns, they referred to the
researcher using L1 pronouns. This suggests that children may only have a single level of politeness in their
system i.e., they lack a demarcation between the three levels. This means they have not acquired all the feature
values that constitute the politeness levels.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the persuasive power of personification in online car


reviews: an empirical pilot study

Lecture

Dr. Gábor Simon 1


1. Eötvös Loránd University

According to the rhetorical approach, personification as a “literary device” contributes to the emergence of an
image of the speaker as an eloquent and competent member of the community (Halmari 2005: 123). The per-
suasive effect of personifying language use is not limited to modern political discourse but has a significant
record in the history of arts (see Melion‒Ramakers 2016), raising, however, the question of whether the per-
suasive power of personification is confined to initiating an attitude shift towards the speaker. An alternative
approach can consider personification as a strategy of symbolization that initiates also the reconceptualization
of the subject of the discourse (see Dorst 2011), not only our impression of the speaker.
The main question of the paper is the following: how can we model the persuasive effect of personifications
in online media discourses? As reported by a previous corpus-driven study (Simon 2022), personifications are
not infrequent in current Hungarian online car reviews. In the present research, I do not focus on the overall
distribution of personifications in the corpus but on their pragmatic effect evoked in the readers. I assume
that this effect is complex, with one attitudinal dimension towards the journalist (as a car-lover) and another
one towards the car (as a living, human-like entity). While the former may have an interpersonal orientation
(from a neutral domain to a positive evaluation, e.g., to respect), the latter may have a role in the conceptual
elaboration of the subject of the discourse in a more sophisticated manner.
To test this assumption, I measure the persuasive power of personifying language use with a questionnaire
using personifying excerpts from the reviews and their modified versions with no personification and a more
objective usage of language. The informants answer questions about how they evaluate the writer of the review,
the car under review, what are their basic impressions about them, and whether they would buy the car and
because of what reasons. The paper not only provides new data about the different dimensions of persuasion
using personification (based on corpus examples) but also investigates their potential relationship, moving well
beyond the mere labelling of personification as a persuasive device of language.
References
Dorst, Aletta G. 2011. Personification in discourse: Linguistic forms, conceptual structures and communicative
functions. Language and Literature 20 (2): 113‒135.
Halmari, Helena 2005. In search of “successful” political personification: A comparison of the styles of Bill
Clinton and Ronald Reagan. In: Halmari, Helena‒Virtanen, Tuija (eds.): Persuasion Across Genres. A linguistic
approach. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 105‒134.
Melion, Walter S. ‒ Ramakers, Bart 2016. Personification: An Introduction. In: Melion, Walter S.‒Ramakers,
Bart (eds.): Personification. Embodying Meaning and Emotion. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 1‒40.
Simon, Gábor 2022. Identification and Analysis of Personification in Hungarian: The PerSECorp project. In:
Calzolari, Nicoletta‒Béchet, Frédéric‒Blache, Philippe‒ Choukri, Khalid‒ Cieri, Chritopher‒ Declerk, Thierry‒
Goggi, Sara‒ Isahara, Hitoshi‒ Maegaard, Bente‒ Mariani, Joseph‒ Mazo, Hélene‒ Odijk, Jan‒ Piperidis, Stelios
(eds.): Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Paris: European Language
Resources Association (ELRA), 2730‒2738.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the pragmatics of English necessity verbs: the role of


‘source’

Lecture

Dr. Benoît Leclercq 1 , Dr. Bert Cappelle 2 , Prof. Ilse Depraetere 2 , Mr. Cyril Grandin 2
1. Université Paris 8, 2. University of Lille

On the pragmatics of English necessity verbs: the role of ‘source’

One of the striking features in taxonomic discussions of modal meanings is that, compared to possibility
modals, far less clearly delineated meaning distinctions stand out in the realm of root necessity (Depraetere
2015). Since no clear semantic distinctions can be established, this raises the question of what factor(s)
predict the choice of a necessity verb. We assume it must be a pragmatic factor. It is typically advanced that
necessity modals exhibit differences in strength; however this concept is difficult to operationalize (Schützler
and Herzky 2021). Another crucial factor that is often put forward is the ‘source’ of the modality, i.e. the
(extra-linguistic) driving force that makes a state of affairs necessary, and this concept has been captured in
specific classifications that can be tested empirically (Depraetere and Verhulst 2008). This factor is, in part,
pragmatic in nature, as it escapes simple truth-conditional verification. It is the predictive power of this factor
that we aim to assess.
We extracted from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English, Davies 2008-) 500 tokens of each of the
modals must, have to, need to, ought to and should. These sentences were annotated in terms of five types of
sources: ‘discourse-internal’ (i.e. the speaker acting as the source in statements, or the hearer in interrogatives),
‘circumstantial’, ‘rules and regulations’, ‘conditional’ (e.g. if you want to suceed, you…) and ‘subject-internal’
(e.g. Tom has to have everything his own way). Using the vcd package in R (R Core Team 2018), we found that the
distribution between the choice of modal and source type is not random. We calculated Pearson Residuals to
pin down patterns of attraction/repulsion (confirmed by configural frequency analysis). The results show that
clear distinctions can be established between the five modal verbs, each of which is strongly associated with
one source (must with ‘rules and regulations’, have to with ‘circumstantial’, need to with ‘conditional’, ought to
with ‘discourse internal’), with the exception of should. A qualitative analysis enables us to relate these results
to previous claims about necessity verbs, for instance the well-known claim that have to is more ‘objective’
than must. In addition, it will be shown that comparing the five verbs together provides a crucial advantage
over standard accounts (which usually focus on pairs such as must vs have to or should vs. ought to). More
importantly, our study confirms that the choice of necessity verb is closely linked to a pragmatic factor.

REFERENCES

Davies, Mark. (2008-).The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available online at
https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.
Depraetere, Ilse. (2015). Categorization principles of modal meaning categories: a critical assessment.
Anglophonia 19.
Depraetere, Ilse & Ann Verhulst. (2008). Source of modality: a reassessment. English Language and Linguistics
12(1). 1-25.
R Core Team. (2018). R version 3.5.0. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

for Statistical Computing Platform, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.


Schützler, Ole & Jenny Herzky. (2021). Modal verbs of strong obligation in Scottish Standard English. English
Language and Linguistics. 1-27.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

On the stative progressive in English: A temporal structure


analysis based on a cognitive perspective

Lecture

Mr. Naoaki Wada 1 , Ms. Haruka Shimura 1


1. University of Tsukuba

The progressive is often said to indicate a dynamic/non-stative situation in progress (Langacker 2008), but there
actually exist “stative progressives” (Higuchi 2019; Kranich 2010; Leech et al. 2009; Levin 2013; Smith 1997).
However, not all stative verbs appear in the progressive, e.g., *I am owning this carpet (Leech 2004), and some
stative verbs describe dynamic/developing situations when in the progressive, e.g., He is resembling his father
more and more as the years go by/He’s being fool (Leech 2004). The distribution of “real” stative progressives
is more restricted (cf. Leech et al. 2009) and some studies (e.g., Dowty 1975, Kranich 2010) have presented
constraints and licensing conditions.
Stative progressives can be divided mainly into three types: (i) the “temporary” type, e.g., I am living in Wim-
bledon (Leech 2004); (ii) the “resultative imperfective” type (Smith 1997), e.g., The socks are lying under the sofa
(Dowty 1975); and (iii) the “intensifying” type (Levin 2013), e.g., I’m loving it (Higuchi 2019). (We are excluding
the “politeness” type, e.g., I’m thinking/wondering…). What motivates us to use these stative progressives and
explains why very many stative situations resist progressivization is Williams’s (2002) notion of “susceptibility-
to-change”. Meanwhile, the three stative progressives differ from each other in certain respects. The above
observations enable us to take a prototype analysis of the English progressive and in fact some cognitive ap-
proaches do so. However, to our knowledge, no study has clarified, within a comprehensive model of tense
interpretation, how the three stative progressives are related to each other or derived from more prototypical
ones.
We therefore present a temporal structure analysis within the tense-interpretation model proposed by Wada
(2001, 2019), which has systematically explained various temporal/aspectual/modal phenomena in English. A
temporal structure is a structuralized cognitive time information of a tense form consisting of information about
the relation between speech time, orientation time, and event time(s), and cognitive schema information reflect-
ing the relevant time-related notions. The susceptibility-to-change comes from the time of the internal part of
the situation described by -ing being situated at the time of be as orientation time, which implies tentativeness,
incompletion, and changeability. The stative progressives are derived from more prototypical ones with some
changes in their temporal structures, based on pragmatic factors such as frame-semantics information of the
elements involved, profile shift or segmental profiling.
References
Dowty, D. (1975) “The stative in the progressive and other essence/accident contrast,” LI 6; Higuchi, M. (2019)
“Habitual progressives and stativity,” Journal of Cognitive Linguistics 4; Kranich, S. (2010) The Progressive in
Modern English, Rodopi; Langacker, R. (2008) Cognitive Grammar, OUP; Leech, G. (2004) Meaning and the En-
glish Verb, 3rd ed., Longman; Leech, G., et al. (2009) Change in Contemporary English, CUP; Levin, M. (2013) “The
progressive verb in modern American English,” In The Verb Phrase in English, CUP; Smith, C. (1997) The Parame-
ter of Aspect, 2nd ed., Kluwer Academic; Wada, N. (2001) Interpreting English Tenses, Kaitakusha; Wada, N. (2019)
The Grammar of Future Expressions in English, Kaitakusha; Williams, C. (2002) Non-Progressive and Progressive
Aspect in English, Schena Editore.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Person deixis in Persian interactions: A dialogic account

Lecture

Prof. Mohammad Amouzadeh 1 , Ms. Masoumeh Diyanati 2


1. Sun Yat-sen University and University of Isfahan, 2. University of Isfahan

The use of person deixis, more specifically the use of paradigmatic personal pronouns has long been of primary
interest (e.g. Bühler 1990 [1934]; Silverstein 1976; Lyons 1977). A number of studies focused on the relationship
between personal deictics and social factors to find how the participants’ identities (age, sex, social status, and
so on) and the speaker-addressee relationship determine the choice of personal deictic terms (e.g., Brown and
Gilman 1960; Ervin-Tripp 1972). Other studies (e.g., Silverstein 1976, 2003; Agha 1993) adopted an anthropolog-
ical orientation by using the notion of social indexicality to explain the multiple functions of situational context
by a single deictic form. In this paper, however, we take a cognitive-interactional approach to examine the
dynamic and emerging uses of personal pronouns to shed some light on how to interpret the construction of in-
terpersonal relations by Persian speakers. More importantly, we aim to account for the alternation mechanisms
between paradigmatic pronouns of lowering and elevating one’s status within a single interaction. The analysis
of a few conversations reveals that interlocutors’ use of personal deictic terms is, to a great extent, a fluid, emer-
gent, and contingent practice, governed by a number of interactional factors, such as the speaker’s emotions,
the speaker’s situational intentions, the prior speaker’s turn, the shift of discourse topic, bystander(s), and the
message. Interlocutors’ shift from lowering into elevating terms and vice versa brings about a fluctuation of
the interlocutors’ interpersonal relationships. The following interaction is a case in point:
1 A: Bijan âqâ Bijan
Bijan Mr. Bijan (‘Bijan … Mr. Bijan!’)
2 B: bale âqâ ǰun?
yes sir dear (‘Yes, my dear father! (what is it?)’
3 A: ye lahze lotfan tašrif bi-yâr-id birun pesar-am?
a moment please presence ipm-bring-2pl out son-1POSS
’My dear! Please come out for a moment!
4 B: bale âqâ ǰun?
yes sir dear (‘Yes, my dear father! (what is it?)’
5 A: to xeǰâlat ne-mi-keš-i be-gir in pul-o
you.2sg shame neg-ipfv-bear.prs-2sg imp-take.2sg this money-om
bo-ro ye meqdâr mive be-gir bardâr bi-yâr
imp-go.2sg a amount fruit imp-take.2sg imp.take.2sg imp-bring.2sg

’Don’t you feel ashamed? Take this money, and fetch some fruit!’
This interaction is between A (father) and his son (B). When A initiates the conversation and asks B to come out
for a moment (lines 1 and 3), both participants are in the living room, where the A’s new employer is also present.
Then, the interaction proceeds in the kitchen, where the A’s employer is out of earshot as a bystander (lines 4-6).
Although, in contemporary Iranian society, a new trend toward reciprocal use of the informal address pronoun
between parents and children is socially accepted (Nanbakhsh 2011), A addresses B (line 3) by using the other-
elevating forms (i.e., the formal verbal inflection –id and the honorific verbal form tasrif âvardan ‘to bring one’s
presence’) because his employer is within the earshot as a bystander. Interestingly, in his next turn (lines 5-6),
A switches into the informal address pronoun and verbal agreement because of his employer absence.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Persuasion and power: An analysis of metadiscourse in EFL


students’ oral practices

Lecture

Dr. Yi Zhao 1 , Dr. Mian Jia 2 , Dr. Yi An 3


1. Tsinghua University, 2. The University of Texas at Austin, 3. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Abstract: English metadiscourse has been a research focus in both written and oral communication, displaying
variation across registers (Hyland & Jiang, 2022; Zhang, 2022). In the light of previous studies, metadiscourse
as a pragmatic construct of social engagement can be used to influence understanding (illocutionary uptake)
and attitude (perlocutionary effect) of the audience. Despite a host of studies on persuasion and power, es-
pecially among interlocutors of asymmetric resources such as business communication and teacher-student
communication, there is insufficient knowledge about how peer students use metadiscourse to persuade. This
study, based on Hyland’s metadiscourse framework (2005), aims to explore how persuasion is (not) achieved
and how power is imposed in terms of metadiscourse markers such as engagement markers and attitude mark-
ers. The data analyzed for this study were collected from a 16-week course - English Listening and Speaking for
Academic Purposes, aiming at first-year college students. 1 Mongolia student, 2 South Korean students, and 66
Chinese students were randomly grouped for an English discussion for about 10-20 minutes twice, one around
the mid-term and the other at the end of the semester. Each group was assigned a debatable topic and stu-
dents should discuss to make a conclusion or consensus. The unscripted speeches, approximately 600 minutes,
were recorded and transcribed. According to our pilot study, power of a peer talk could be perceived in two
ways: demanding the right to speak and imposing reception on others (Bourdieu, 1977:648). The use of metadis-
course to persuade is therefore revealed mainly by a sequence of stance indexing. Following Zhang (2022), the
metadiscourse markers analyzed in this study are categorized as referring to speech event components, describ-
ing discourse actions, and describing discourse circumstances. Nuances across groups about the sequence and
salience of metadiscourse types in persuasion will be further explored in terms of closeness among speakers
and readiness levels of speakers including English proficiency and topic familiarity. Our study presents the use
of metadiscourse in peer talks among EFL learners, which in turn provides pedagogical implications especially
raising metapragmatic awareness for language teachers.
References:
Boourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16: 645-668.
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse. London: Continuum.
Hyland, K. & Jiang, F. (2022). Metadiscourse: The evolution of an approach to texts. Text & Talk (aop), available
at: https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0156
Zhang, M. (2022). Variation in metadiscourse across speech and writing: A multidimensional study. Applied
Linguistics, 1-24.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Phonetic Encoding of Sincerity in Expressive Speech Acts: An


Analysis of Japanese Apologies in Experimental Settings

Lecture

Prof. Sachiko Shudo 1 , Dr. Takayuki Konishi 1


1. Waseda University

Searle’s (1969) notion of sincerity condition presents an interesting paradox in the case of expressive speech acts
(ESAs hereafter), such as apologizing and thanking, which express the speaker’s psychological state. While it is
deemed the essence of ESAs since the sincerity condition itself is what is expressed in ESAs, it is a contradiction
in terms since the condition does not have to be satisfied for ESAs to be accomplished. Some ESAs may be
insincere. However, if insincerity is overtly expressed, the act may not qualify as an ESA.
We often hear complaints that an apology does not sound sincere. This seems to indicate that the sincerity of
an apology is influenced by its phonetic manifestation. While we intuitively know such influences of phonetic
features, knowledge about those features is tacit and has not been systematically investigated.
In our study, we conducted extensive phonetic research on apologies as an example of ESAs. The subjects were
provided with 80 scenarios, for which they gave scores on how remorseful they would feel on a 100-point slider
scale. The subjects then produced utterances of apology according to how they felt in each scenario. The re-
sults showed a correlation between the scores of remorsefulness and estimated phonetic features to manifest
sincerity such as vowel duration and average pitch of words.
We then conducted a perceptual experiment using the collected data as stimuli. The subjects listened to the
recorded apologies and rated how apologetic each stimulus sounded on a 100-point scale. The results showed a
correlation between the scores of the encoded remorsefulness and those of how apologetic the recordings were
perceived. There also existed individual differences among speakers in how well they phonetically encoded
sincerity.
Based on the results, it seems the phonetic encoding of sincerity in ESAs is relatively stable, at least in the current
experimental setting, in which speakers assumed the situations of varying remorsefulness. Our results indicate
that some utterances of apology with low encoded sincerity were not actually perceived as apology. While the
speaker does not have to be actually sincere to satisfy the sincerity condition, the utterance has to sound sincere
to some extent for the hearer to perceive it as apology.
The ‘relatively,’ but not absolutely, stable phonetic encoding of sincerity is what we expected. The relative sta-
bility may be explained by the uncertain relationship between the speaker’s intention and their performance.
Some apologies are performed with speaker’s fully intentional effort to sound sincere while others are natu-
rally performed without such an intentional effort. Many apologies fall probably somewhere in between. The
intentional encoding of sincerity may be an effort to resemble naturally produced sincere sounds. While Grice’s
(1957) notions of natural meaning and non-natural meaning clearly account for the crucial role of speakers’ in-
tention in linguistic meaning, the phonetic encoding of sincerity is unique in that it is a mixture of both types
of meaning.
References
Grice, P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66.
Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Plain Language Initiatives for Cross-Cultural Communication:


Comparison between European Institutions and Japanese
Public Offices

Lecture

Dr. Naoko Hosokawa 1


1. The University of Tokyo

This paper examines the implications of the ‘easy Japanese’ initiative in Japan from a comparative point of
view. As the number of immigrants and foreign residents in Japan increases, there is a growing need for the
national and local governments to provide information in multiple languages. The importance of equal access
to information is crucial for health and safety especially during natural disasters or pandemics, as seen from
the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake, and the 2020 Covid-19 crisis. In
response to this need, the government has launched an initiative to make essential information available in
simple Japanese, in addition to translations in major foreign languages. According to a survey carried out by
the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics (2009), Japanese is the most common second lan-
guage among permanent residents in Japan, spoken by 62.6%, followed by English (44%) and Chinese (38.3%).
Furthermore, according to a survey carried out by the Tokyo International Communication Committee (2018),
the largest number of foreign residents in Japan want to receive information in easy Japanese (76%), followed
by English (68%). Based on these survey results, the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Immigration Service
Agency published the ‘yasashii’ (with multiple meanings including easy, kind, gentle, and soft) Japanese guide-
line in August 2020. The use of plain language supports clear and democratic communication in multicultural
societies while preserving multilingualism. However, the concept of plain language is still relatively new in
Japan, and the initiative has not yet gained full public recognition. To enable future development of the ini-
tiative, it is worthwhile to examine comparable case studies, as the use of plain language initiatives has been
promoted in many multilingual communities. The European Union, for example, promotes multilingualism and
cultural diversity with its twenty-four official languages. In such an environment, English and French are often
used as base languages from which documents are translated into various other languages. In order to ensure
the clarity of these working languages, the European Parliament encourages the use of ‘clear language’ to man-
age communication in highly multilingual settings. This paper compares the plain language initiatives, the ‘easy
Japanese’ initiative in Japanese public offices and the ‘clear language’ initiative in European institutions in terms
of their disciplines, approaches, guidelines, and implementation. By highlighting some key differences between
the two cases, this paper sheds light on the potential contributions of plain language initiatives to cross-cultural
communication in contemporary societies.
References:

• European Commission. 2011. How to Write Clearly. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-


/publication/c2dab20c-0414-408d-87b5-dd3c6e5dd9a5.
• Immigration Service Agency and Agency for Cultural Affairs. 2020. Easy Japanese Guideline for the Sup-
port of Foreign People Living in Japan. https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/930006072.pdf.
• National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics. 2009. Japanese for liv-
ing: Countrywide Survey’ Result Report. https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-projects/nihongo-
syllabus/research/pdf/sokuhou_english1.pdf.
• Tokyo International Communication Committee. 2018. Survey Result on
Communication for Foreign People Living in Tokyo. https://tabunka.tokyo-
tsunagari.or.jp/info/files/a70d5ac7db12bd5c538a3b38f2a01613c262657e.pdf.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Plain Speech: Ideology, Identity, and Religious Practice in


19th-Century Quakers’ Use of “Thee” and “Thou”

Lecture

Ms. Jessica Marsh 1


1. University of Surrey

The Religious Society of Friends, a Protestant Christian denomination commonly known as Quakers, was formed
in England in the mid-17th century under the leadership of George Fox. Among their beliefs was the position
that many common acknowledgements of rank or social position were inappropriate because such deference
should be reserved for God alone. Quakers thus used the T-forms “thee” and “thou” for all individuals. At the
time of their founding, when the V-form “you” was expected when addressing a social superior, this practice
was quite a radical statement of Quakers’ belief in equality. By the 19th century, however, when “thee” and
“thou” were no longer used by the majority of English speakers, much of the egalitarian meaning indexed by
this choice had been obscured. The continued use of this “quaint” form thus became a distinctive marker of
Quaker identity as well as an aspect of religious practice.
There is a considerable body of metalinguistic discourse both justifying this “plain language” as a religious
requirement and discussing what it meant to speakers (or what they believed and/or sought to convince others
that it should mean). This feature is thus a particularly rich topic for inquiry into language ideology and identity
work as well as changes in pragmatic meaning over time. This paper uses a sociolinguistic approach to analyze
data compiled from records of meeting disciplines (i.e., rules for members published at a local level), theological
writing, advice literature, (auto)biographies, and personal letters and diaries. In particular, it explores a) the
often complex combination of linguistic prescriptivism and religious theology used to justify the position that
the singular “you” was both grammatically incorrect and inconsistent with Quaker beliefs; b) the belief that
this unique linguistic feature should serve as a reminder to speakers of their Quaker identities and a defense
against temptation; and c) the self-consciousness or embarrassment frequently expressed, especially by younger
members, about using this form with non-Quakers.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Please laugh: illocutionary acts as a theory of meaning for


jokes

Lecture

Mr. Alexander Sparrow 1


1. Victoria University of Wellington

Having been a touring comedian for a decade – and read very different interpretations of Chris Rock’s Oscars
joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chapelle’s stand-up routines about transgender people,
and Jimmy Carr’s jokes about Romani victims of the Holocaust – it’s become clear that jokes need a framework
for correct interpretation. Jokes require their own theory of meaning, because general theories of meaning
struggle with non-literal language use. Firstly, I define jokes as illocutionary acts spoken with the intent of pro-
voking laughter. Secondly, I differentiate between jokes and utterances that may also provoke laughter, but are
not jokes: these are anecdotes and opinions. Thirdly, I develop a more nuanced definition of jokes by clarifying
their status as humorous lies. Finally, I build on my theory of the meaning of lies, to produce my theory of the
meaning of jokes – arguing that jokes carry no meaning beyond Please laugh.
This builds on Austin’s work by taking his theory of illocutionary acts, applying it to jokes, and taking it to
its logical conclusion. This theory of meaning for jokes i) breaks down the different types of utterance used by
comedians, and ii) clarifies what audiences are meant to take away from these types of utterances. It also helps
explain why the positive illocutionary aim of the comedian (provoking laughter) is sometimes met with a neg-
ative perlocutionary response of the audience (taking offense).

References:
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do Things With Words: the William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University
in 1955. Clarendon Press: Oxford.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Police officer serving as a moral judge in Chinese mediation


discourse

Lecture

Dr. Wenjing Feng 1


1. Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Although there is a lot of discussion on the topic of identity in social sciences and on the interactional mecha-
nism of police interview/interrogation discourse, identity in police mediation discourse has been quite underex-
plored. In one ethnographic study on Chinese police mediation discourse, the author found that Chinese police
officers are often designated by disputants to be a moral judge. With the discourse of 19 police officer-mediated
interactions transcribed as data, employing a qualitative research method, this article examines how and why
police officers serve as a moral judge in Chinese mediation discourse, as well as the moral order underlying
their moral judging practice. It is found that Chinese police officers are often expected by the disputants to be
a moral judge in civil conflict mediation discourse based on typical Chinese moral order or traditional values
advocated by the life philosophy of Mencius and Confucius. Those moral order and cultural values emerged in
our data mainly include “孝悌”(filial piety and respect for brothers), “尊⽼爱幼”, (respecting the old and cherish-
ing the young), “和为贵”( harmony is the most important), five cardinal virtues (“五常”), (namely, “仁义礼智信”,
benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom and honesty). This study can help improve our understanding
of Chinese police mediation discourse, Chinese people’s social life and the Chinese society in general.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Politeness and Ritual in Ancient Chinese: A Case Study of


Shijing

Lecture

Mr. Yafeng Liu 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 2 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 3 , Prof. Juliane House 4
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages & Research Institute for Linguistics, 2. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 3.
Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 4. University of Hamburg

In this talk, we aim to contribute to research on politeness in ancient texts, by exploring language use in the
Shijing (The Book of Odes), an ancient Chinese classic dating roughly at the 11th century BC. Considering that
many ancient texts reflect highly ritualised language use, we approach and categorise pragmatic conventions
of politeness in Shijing by using interaction ritual theory. Our study shows that politeness in ancient texts can
be less captured by using frameworks of interpersonal politeness: for example, manifestations of language use
that one would associate with interpersonal features in the Shijing are embedded in ritual interaction between
the speaker and his ancestors and gods. Because of this, it is important to merge understandings of politeness
with a ritual view on language use, allowing us to observe language use beyond the realm of interpersonal
pragmatics.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Politeness in Sundanese: Verbs affixation system and its


meaning alternation

Lecture

Ms. Intan Wulandari 1


1. Gadjah Mada University

Sundanese is a language spoken in the speech community centered in West Java, Indonesia. It is also well known
as the second most spoken local language in Indonesia after Javanese. As one of the Austronesian families,
Sundanese has many uniqueness in the affixation system. Austronesian language is known as a family language
that has a voice system and is marked by affixation. The affix in Sundanese are; (i) prefix: di-, ti-, pang-, ng-, la-;
(ii) infix: -ar-; and (iii) suffix: -keun, -an. The affixation system in Sundanese could transform the meaning and
politeness system in utterance based on the context. The affixes in Sundanese could change the meaning by the
alternation rule and construct the verbs. This research aims to observe the verbs in Sundanese that possibly
could transform the meaning incorporated with Sundanese affixes, which is part of the Sundanese voice system
in morphological aspect related to the politeness system. A qualitative method is used in this research with a
descriptive approach. The source of the data is taken from the daily utterances of Sundanese people in Manglé
Magazine which indicates the emergence of affixation. The verb phrase nakol maneh ‘hit you’ has different
meaning when it is followed by affixes. Nakol-keun maneh ‘hit my self’, the suffix -keun changes the function
of the verb phrase. The suffix -keun transforms the function of maneh ‘you’ into ‘my self’. The data illustrate
only the change of verb meaning which is caused by affixation. The verbal phrase nakolkeun manéh is only
uttered to show the intimacy between the speaker and interlocutor. This utterance is culturally forbidden to be
spoken to the older interlocutor. This shows the dimension of politeness regarding speech level in Sundanese.
Sundanese is a wilderness in language which is a treasure. It also can be a research repository that should be
explored more in any aspect.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Post-positioned tag questions in pursuit of response: A


multimodal approach

Lecture

Ms. Juman Al-qaoud 1


1. University of Cologne

“Given the first, the second is expectable”: this is how Schegloff (1968, p. 1083) expresses the principle of condi-
tional relevance in conversational base sequences. Thus, in some types of actions, a related response is usually
sought and regularly provided; however, when improper or absent, the speaker may view it as a failure on the
part of the recipient. To explore this phenomenon, a total of 20 hours of audio- and video-recordings of casual
face-to-face Jordanian Arabic conversation of 69 university students and graduates in Irbid City were collected.
This study explores how a combination of linguistic structures, prosodic and visual features contribute to the
way post-positioned tag questions function to elicit a response from the recipient after lack of uptake and in-
vestigates the diverse nature of these responses, by adopting the methodologies of Conversation Analysis and
interactional linguistics. The focus is on how different modes enhance the response-pursuit potential of the
post-positioned tags to different degrees, and whether the recipients are held more accountable for responding
when using specific modes. By shedding light on an area that has largely remained unexplored in the exist-
ing literature on Jordanian Arabic interaction, this study shows that a) post-positioned tags are a multimodal
construction used in the organization of turns and actions, and b) that they can be utilized as powerful tools
to trigger a missing response. Drawing on previous work on response pursuits by Jefferson (1981), Pomerantz
(1984) and Stivers & Rossano (2010), in addition to the current data, post-positioned tags such as sˤaħ “right”
and wella laʔ “or not” are analysed as multimodally produced with a final rising intonation and accompanied
by a fixed gaze toward the recipient, in addition to a possible head nod and raised eyebrows.
References
Jefferson, G., 1981. The abominable Ne?: an exploration of post-response pursuit of response. In: P. Schröder
and H. Steger, ed., Dialogforschung: Jahrbuch 1980 des Instituts für deutsche Sprache, Sprache der Gegenwart.
Düsseldorf: Schwann, pp.53-88.
Pomerantz, A., 1984. Pursuing a response. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage, ed., Structures of social action. Cam-
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, pp.152-164.
Schegloff, E. A., 1968. Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist, 70, pp.1075–1095.
Stivers, T. and Rossano, F., 2010. Mobilizing Response. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 43(1), pp.3-31.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Practices of resisting categorization: Membership


categorization analysis of tele-cinematic discourse in Japanese

Lecture

Dr. Miyuki Takenoya 1


1. Toyo University

Tele-cinematic discourse refers to the discourse in media such as film, animation, and TV dramas. It is con-
sidered to be a valid source for membership categorization analysis (MCA) since it enables several types of
linguistic acts to be observable for researchers. Some communicative acts such as resisting categorization can
be face-threatening in some cultures, and they are difficult for researchers to encounter in face-to-face ordinary
conversations.
The data for the study were collected from TV drama series (twelve 30-minute long drama episodes) called
“kinoo nani tabeta (What did you eat yesterday?)” in Japanese. This drama series shows the humoristic daily
life of a gay couple in their forties living in downtown Tokyo. The research questions which guided the study
are twofold: (1) what expressions do the speakers use when they have been wrongly assigned a categorization?
; and (2) how do the speakers handle repetitive wrong categorizations?
Tele-cinematic discourse is considered to be valid for analysis because of its two-layered nature of communi-
cation levels: (1) the communication level among fictional characters in the drama; and (2) that between the
collective senders (script writers, directors, and producers) of the message and the audience members in front
of the TV. The communication level (2) is the arena which uncovers the ethical incongruity hidden among the
members of different cultures and societies.
In the following excerpt, Kenji categorizes Shiro as bisexual by giving the category-bound predicate of Shiro
having dated a woman in the past (01). Shiro resists this categorization by giving the category-bound predicate
of it “having occurred only one time” and “being a long time ago” (02). Without being convinced, Kenji again
categorizes Shiro as bisexual by giving the category-bound predicate of “bisexual people who get married to a
woman due to social pressure”(03). Shiro again resists Kenji’s categorization of bisexual by giving the category-
bound predicate of “just being gay.” Here, “having dated a woman when he was young, but not anymore” is
considered to be a category-bound predicate of “just being gay.”
01 Kenji: dattte shiro-san mukashi onnanohito to tsukiatteta Desho?
[you were dating a woman before]
02 Shiro: Hitori dakedayo shikamo 20nenmo maeno hanashi janaika
[only one person, it was even 20 years ago. . .]
03 Kenji: . . . iruyone: sooyatte sekentei toritsukurotte
[I know some cases after acting as if they were not gay]
04 sonomama onnanohitoto kekkonshichau Hitotte
[but getting married to a woman eventually]
05 Shiro: …oremo wakakattashi shinpai suruna.
[I was young back then. Do not worry.]
06 Orewa moo bai ja nai yo.
[I am not bisexual anymore.]
As Okazawa (2021) pointed out, the collective sender of the drama arranges the fictional categories as well as
resisting categorization in interaction. In these sequential arrangements, category bound predicates are used
in interaction to create incongruity for the audience (p.33).
Reference:

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Okazawa, R. 2021. Resisting categorization in interaction: Membership categorization analysis of sitcom humor.
Journal of Pragmatics, 186, 33-44.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic intervention in academic writing

Lecture

Dr. Aurélia Lyrio 1 , Dr. Antonio Abreu 2


1. Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES), 2. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho - UNESP;
Faculdade São Leopoldo Mandic, Campinas

In the increasingly global knowledge-sharing, academic writing poses a challenge for Brazilian university stu-
dents, since they lack customized materials, familiarization with rhetorical practices and lexico-grammatical
realizations which define academic writing (SWALES, 1990), and exposure to coherent syllabi. Additionally,
academic writing courses seem to neglect the teaching of the pragmatic resources underlying the social prac-
tices which characterize academic literacy (LEA and STREET, 1998). Among the several rhetorical-interactional
devices which typify the academic text, we find hedges. Such issues led us to look for the presence of these
expressions in the writings of 14 undergraduate students in the academic writing discipline of the English Lan-
guage and Literature course at UFES. The objective was to verify the use and distribution of such rhetorical
mechanisms in their academic production. We analyzed 42 students´ essays. The first 28 refer to their first and
second assignments required before the intervention. The last one, to the third assignment required after the
intervention. Our results demonstrated that most students did not make use of such discursive devices, in their
initial writings, which made their claims seem too authoritative. This pointed to the need for a systematic ap-
proach to teaching the proper use of such mitigating devices, along with the preparation of suitable materials,
and the promotion of an awareness of their role in the socio-academic and disciplinary practices at the univer-
sity. Therefore, we began a period of intervention, in which we taught students how to mitigate their claims with
the use of hedges. Two weeks after the intervention, we assigned a final essay with the same topics as the previous
ones. The new results suggest that the intervention was effective, since they made a good use of hedges.
Keywords: Academic writing. Intervention. Hedges.
BRIZ, A.; ESTELLÉS, M. (2010) On the relationship between Attenuation, Discourse Particles and Position. In:
KALTENBÖCK, G. ; MIHATSCH, W.; SCHNEIDER, S. (eds.). Studies in Pragmatics 9. New Approaches to Hedging.
United Kingdon: Emerald Group Publishing, p. 289-304,
HINKEL, E, (2013) Cultures of learning and writing in the US academy. In: JIN, L; CORTAZZI, M.(eds) Researching
intercultural learning. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
HINKEL, E, (2005). Hedging, Inflating and Persuading in L2 academic writing. Applied Language Learning, v. 15,
n.1 e 2, p.. 29-53.
HINKEL, E, (2002) Second language writers’ text. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
HYLAND, K, (1998). Hedging in scientific research articles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing
Company, 1998.
HYLAND, K, (1997). Indirectness in L1 and L2 academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics, v. 3, n. 27, p. 360-386.
KIM, L. C. LIM, J. M. H. (2015). Hedging in academic writing- A pedagogically-motivated qualitative study.
Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, v.197, p. 600-607.
LEA, M. R. ; STREET, B., (1998) Student Writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. Studies in
Higher Education. London, v. 23, n. 2, p. 157-172.
SWALES, J.; FEAK, C., (1994) Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatic values of Spanish ‘future’ forms in colloquial


speech: Grammar in interaction

Lecture

Ms. Claudia Gómez-Valadés 1 , Prof. María Sol Sansiñena 1


1. KU Leuven

Spanish has both an inflexional future form -i.e. the synthetic future (SF)-, as in Hablarán con él mañana ‘They
will speak to him tomorrow’, and a periphrastic future construction (PF) <ir a ‘go to’ + infinitive>, as in Van a
hablar con él mañana ‘They are going to speak to him tomorrow’, which have a wide range of possible interpre-
tations and have developed different functional and frequency profiles. The Spanish future forms have evolved
new uses expressing different types of (inter)subjective qualifications (see a.o. Rodríguez Rosique, 2019). Some
of these developments have been addressed in the literature, while others have not been discussed at all, par-
ticularly some new uses whose semantics-pragmatics are at first sight incongruent with the meanings typically
associated with the ‘future’ constructions.
This paper analyzes the pragmatic values of the SF and the PF in Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish in
computer-mediated communication and social networking services, such as Twitter, as well as in colloquial
speech. For the latter, we use four different corpora, namely, COLA, C-ORAL-ROM, Val.Es.Co. and Ameresco. All
documented tokens of the SF and the PF are annotated and analyzed in terms of morphosyntactic, lexicogram-
matical, semantic-pragmatic and discourse-interactional parameters, as well as contextual elements expressing
speaker-related meanings (modal adverbs, discourse particles, hedges, etc.).
We expect sentence type to play an important role in the expression of modal meanings, since e.g., polar and par-
tial futurizing interrogatives are more likely to display rhetorical effects, as in (1), than futurizing declaratives
(Rosemeyer & Sansiñena, 2022).
(1) A: O le mentís claro
‘Or you lie to her, of course’
B: ¿cómo le voy a mentir a mi psicóloga?

‘How could I (lit. go to) lie to my psychologist?’ (Ameresco, 2021)


The refutational use of the PF in (1), constructed as a rhetorical question with cómo (‘how’) counts as a repetition
of the interlocutor’s previous proposition presented as non-factual. It would be ungrammatical to use the SF in
such a context. However, we documented challenging uses of both the SF and the PF in dispreferred response-
initiations that are wh-interrogatives with qué (‘what’), as in (2), where the speaker conveys that the interlocutor
surely does not know (or is expected not to know) anything about the topic under discussion.
(2) A: Anda a estudiar eso que es re fácil
‘Go and study that, it is very easy’
B: Qué sabrás vos de estudiar
‘What would (lit. will) you know about studying?’ (Twitter, 2022)
We explain the pragmatic differences between the use of the PF and the SF in such dispreferred response-
initiations and we also discuss the documented substantial dialectal variation in the use of futurizing morphol-
ogy.
References
Borzi, C. (2021). Corpus de conversaciones Ameresco-Buenos Aires, in Albelda & Estellés (coord.), Corpus
Ameresco, www.corpusameresco.com, Universitat de València, ISSN: 2659-8337
Rodríguez Rosique, S. (2019). El futuro en español: Tiempo, conocimiento, interacción. Peter Lang.

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Rosemeyer, M. & Sansiñena, M. S. (2022). How sentence type influences the interpretation of Spanish future
constructions. Functions of Language, 29(1), pp. 116-141. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.00040.ros

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmaticists’ views on what laypeople should know about


language

Lecture

Dr. Tomas Lehecka 1 , Prof. Jan-Ola Östman 2


1. Åbo Akademi University, 2. University of Helsinki

Many fields of science have recently seen an increased interest in laypeople’s perceptions and understanding of
scientific facts. In particular, studies have focused on common misconceptions about social inequality, public
health, and climate change etc. (e.g. Rosling et al. 2018, de Figueiredo et al. 2020). Anecdotal evidence also
suggest that lay people hold many false beliefs about language (e.g. Bauer & Trudgill 1998, Davies 2012), but
these suggestions have not been subjected to detailed empirical investigation. Our research project seeks to
address this challenging point through a large-scale survey into the nature and prevalence of language-related
misperceptions among the general public.
In order to survey what laypeople know about language, one needs first to decide what questions their knowl-
edge should be tested with: What should the general public know about language for their own benefit or for the
benefit of society? What do linguists of all credos agree on? Previous studies in this field have had a national
focus; e.g. Hudson (1981) on what British linguists all agree on. To investigate this question empirically, we
carried out a global survey among linguists (n=552) where we asked linguistic experts to write down questions
about language that they think everyone should know the answer to. We received 3,349 open text responses
which we have annotated and categorized thematically.
The results of the survey show that views about what is important for the general public to be aware of vary
between linguists from different parts of the world, and between linguists who are active in different subfields
of linguistics. In this contribution, we focus on comparing the views of “pragmaticists” (i.e., linguists who in-
dicated in our survey that they work in the subfield of pragmatics) against linguists from other subfields. Not
surprisingly, we find that pragmaticists consider, on average, the relationship between language, social status
and power a more important issue than what linguists from other subfields do. We also find that the top three
“macro-questions” that linguists of any field of interest most frequently offer as questions that the general pub-
lic should know the answer to are “How and why do languages change?”, “How do children acquire language?”,
and “How many languages are there in the world?” – in other words, questions that are central to pragmatics.
Theoretically, the presentation utilizes insights from the field of science communication and raises discussion
about the “universals” of important language-related issues, and what role knowledge of various functions of
language play among them.
References
Bauer, L., & Trudgill, P. (Eds.). (1998). Language myths. Penguin.
Davies, W. V. (2012). Myths we live and speak by. Standard languages and multilingualism in European history,
1, 45-69.
De Figueiredo, A., et al. (2020). Mapping global trends in vaccine confidence and investigating barriers to vac-
cine uptake. The Lancet, 396(10255), 898-908.
Hudson, Richard. 1981. Some issues on which linguists can agree. Journal of Linguistics 17(2). 333‒343.
Rosling, H., et al. (2018). Factfulness: Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than
you think. Flatiron Books.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatics and loyalty issues in the translation of university


diplomas and CVs

Lecture

Prof. Verena Jung 1


1. AKAD University

While translation studies researchers from the 1980s onwards (Hönig&Kussmaul 1982, Kussmaul 1980) have
espoused pragmatics as a valuable analysis tool for shifts in stance, politeness, relevance, etc. between origi-
nals and translations (House 1997, Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, House&Kadar 2021), different schools of translation
studies have focussed on very different aspects of pragmatics.
The skopos translation principle (Reiss &Vermeer 1984/2010), which would normally see a pragmatic shift in
the translation as desirable if it makes the utterance more acceptable in the other culture, has been problema-
tized by the translation scholar Nord (2001) who created the concept of loyalty in translation to overcome the
pragmatic shifts expressly allowed and commended by skopos theorists.
Where Jung & Schrott in 2003 have looked at pragmatic shifts in translations of historical texts, this paper looks at
the difficult meaning calibrations that translators have to negotiate when they translate different propositional
content, especially when this content is linked to claims of professional skills that must be translated accurately,
without either understatement or overstatement, especially for employability claims.
By means of the translation studies concept of loyalty as well as pragmatic concepts of identity, relevance and
scope (Bucholtz&Hall 2010, Li 2021), translations of international CVs from English into German and university
graduate qualification level claims from university diplomas from German into English are analysed according
to the widening or narrowing of scopes and of propositional content they allow for.
The stakeholder loyalty concept framework developed by Kilic (2022) will be used to visualize and assess prag-
matic shifts as well as widening or narrowing of scope or relevance shifts in the translations.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2010. Locating Identity in Language. In Language and Identities, ed. by Carmen
Llamas, andWatt Dominic, 8–28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hönig, H. G., & Kussmaul, P. (1982). Strategie der Übersetzung: Ein Lehr-und Arbeitsbuch (Vol. 205). Gunter Narr
Verlag.
House, J. (1997). Translation quality assessment - a model revisited. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
House, J., & Kádár, D. Z. (2021). Cross-cultural pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Jung, V & Schrott, A (2003) In Meaning Through Language Contrast. Kasia M. Jaszczolt, Ken Turner (eds.): Vol.
2, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 345-371.
Kilic, Karolina (2022) Loyalitätskonflikte bei der Kulturvermittlung zwischen Autor und Empfänger in der Über-
setzung von Lebensläufen von Kandidaten für eine Arbeitsvermittlung im medizinischen Bereich, BA thesis,
AKAD university
Kussmaul, P. (Ed.). (1980). Sprechakttheorie: ein Reader (Vol. 17). Athenaion.
Li, Y. (2021). A Discourse Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Pragmatic Identities’ Construction Based on Adaptation The-
ory. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 8(7). 369-380.

Nord, Christiane. (2001). Loyalität statt Treue. Vorschläge zu einer funktionalen Übersetzungstypologie. In
TEXTconTEXT 15 ( 227–244).

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Reiss, Katharina; Vermeer, Hans J. (2010)[1984 original publication date]. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen
Translationstheorie. Berlin/ New York: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatics of atypical capitalization: ‘alternating caps’ in


digital discourse

Lecture

Prof. Jannis Androutsopoulos 1


1. University of Hamburg

The shift of computer-mediated communication (CMC) research during the 2010s towards digitally-mediated
interaction (DMI, Meredith et al. 2021) has shed new light on the role of graphic devices – punctuation, diacrit-
ics, other non-referential writing features – in the coordination and contextualization of mediated interaction.
Punctuation signs, in particular, have been shown to afford DMI participants various interactional practices
(Androutsopoulos/Busch 2021, Busch 2021). Following this line of research, this paper focuses on a particular
graphic feature, i.e. ‘alternating caps’, and its use in public digital discourse. The term ‘alternating caps’ refers
to a seemingly random pattern of (multiple) alternation of upper and lowercase characters within a word or
utterance, e.g. ‘cLIMAtE chANge Is a hOAX’. The term itself is familiar to online culture, as evidenced by respec-
tive entries in Wikipedia and urbandictionary.com, but the practice and process of doing alternating caps in
DMI is still undocumented.
Drawing on a large set of computationally collected German and Greek data from Reddit (a social media plat-
form organized into anonymous discussion forums), this paper examines alternating caps in a ‘total linguistic
fact’ approach, i.e. an integrated analysis of the structure, use, and awareness of this feature (Silverstein 1985,
Androutsopoulos/Busch 2021). Alternating caps came into usage in American English in 2016 and quickly spread
to other languages and scripts, including German and Greek. Formal analysis shows that alternating caps dif-
fer from conventional word-internal capitalization in acronyms (e.g. ’PhD’) and compounds (e.g. ‘LaserJet’),
in that they neither support the perception of morphemic boundaries nor lead to the formation of lexicalized
types. Pragmatically, alternating caps work as a double-voicing cue (Agha 2005). They index a dissociation of the
writer from the word or utterance that is set in alternating caps, and position this utterance, and by extension
its principal, in an indexical field (Eckert 2008) which includes evaluative qualities such as ‘irrational’, ‘unreli-
able’, or ‘ridiculous’. This way, alternating caps provide a non-referential resource for indexing evaluation, a
key practice in social media discourse (Zappavigna 2017).
Overall, this study provides new evidence for the role of graphic resources for pragmatic work in digital dis-
course and the interplay of global semiotic circulation and local adaptation in the development of graphic cues
in DMI.

• Agha, A. 2005. Voice, Footing, Enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38-59.
• Androutsopoulos, J. and F. Busch 2021. Digital punctuation as an interactional resource: the message-
final period among German adolescents. Linguistics & Education 62, April 2021, 100871.
• Busch, F. 2021. The Interactional Principle in Digital Punctuation. Discourse, Context & Media 40, April
2021, 100481.
• Eckert, P. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4): 453-476.
• Meredith, J., D. Giles, and W.Stommel eds. 2021. Analysing Digital Interaction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Silverstein, M. 1985. Language and the culture of gender: at the intersection of structure, usage, and
ideology. In: E. Mertz and R. Parmentier eds. Semiotic Mediation, 219-259. Orlando: Academic Press.
• Zappavignia, M. 2017. Evaluation. In: Hoffmann/Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media, 435-458.
Berlin: de Gruyter.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Pragmatics of queer ‘palabreo’ in Chile

Lecture

Dr. Jaime Crisosto-Alarcón 1


1. Universidad del Bío-Bío

Various groups of people develop linguistic mechanisms to generate identity ties within a community of prac-
tice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013). Queer argots involve different degrees of lexical replacement in which
queer neologisms replace some words (Barrett, 2018) or manipulates gender morphology and syntactic forms
(Gaudio, 2014). The queer community in Chile use a speech style broadly called ‘palabreo’, which works un-
der certain rules and dynamics that are shared within the collective. The pragmatic-interactive features of this
conversational style are addressed in this study with an emic-speaker focus.
The research is embedded into an interpretive - qualitative framework with a transverse temporality and uses
the content analysis as methodology. A semi-structured interview is conducted with 30 auto-reported LGBTIQ+
chilean people.
The results indicate that the ‘palabreo’ is a conversational format that the Chilean LGBTIQ+ community con-
siders as part of their own identity. In it, prosocial and antisocial discursive tendencies are noted, which are
manifested simultaneously in the discourse with a vindicatory, political, and fraternal-friendly role. Also, the
participants recognize the importance of contextual clues for an adequate interpretation of the messages be-
tween the interlocutors. The topics addressed in the palabreo are the sex-affective relationships of the partic-
ipants, the appearance of the interlocutor, the socio-economic status of the interactants, and daily life issues.
Finally, the palabreo blurs the line between private and public topics, using resources of mock impoliteness and
a permanent humorous setting in the conversation.
References:
Eckert, P. & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2013). Language and Gender. Cambridge University Press.
Barrett, R. (2018). Speech play, gender play, and the verbal artistry of queer argots. Suvremena Lingvistika,
44(86), 215-242. http://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2018.086.03
Gaudio, R. (2014). Acting like women, acted upon: Gender and agency in Hausa sexual narratives. LalZim-
man, Jenny L. Davis, and Joshua Raclaw, (Eds.) Queer excursions: Retheorizing binaries in language, gender, and
sexuality. Oxford University Press, pp. 170–194.

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Pragmemic Dialogicality of Hate-Speech Comments on


Facebook in Arabic, English, and Romanian

Lecture

Dr. Hussain Al Sharoufi 1


1. Gulf University for Science&Technology

The current study investigates hate speech in comments written by English, Arab, and Romanian participants on
Facebook. Hate speech represents a common characteristic of numerous comments written by some Facebook
participants. To understand this critical aspect of Facebook comments, this paper poses three main questions:
1. Do hate-speech writers use specific pragmemes in their comments?
2. Do Arab, English, and Romanian speakers use similar cultural schemata when exchanging hate speech with
other Facebook participants?
3. Do hate speech disseminators impose certain culturemes, depending on hate-speech schemata, in their dis-
course?
To answer the above questions, 90 hate-speech comments made on specific political and social articles published
on Facebook were investigated. Drawing on Mey’s pragmemes (2010), Al Sharoufi’s culturemes (2020), and
Sharifian’s schemas, pragmemes, and practs(2016), the data was analysed. The results showed that specific
pragmemes were used to impose hate speech on Facebook participants. Other important results showed that
specific Facebook users, using hate speech in particular, share similar cultural schemata in Arabic, English,
and Romanian respectively. The paper concludes with the idea that hate-speech disseminators use specific
culturemes that are based on specific hate-speech schema that exist in all the three languages and cultures.
Such findings will help Facebook users become more aware of their communicative behaviour and pay more
attention to the kind of language they use on Facebook to avoid any possible conflicts.

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Primary School Children’s Narratives

Lecture

Dr. Kyoko Sugisaki 1


1. Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg

This presentation is based on an on-going research project on primary school children’s storytelling in
Germany. In this presentation, I examine children’s narratives in terms of their (a)typicality.

Investigating the primary school children’s narratives provides insights into which (a)typical narrative forms
and structures they are acquiring in spoken communication in the period of literacy socialisation. In this
presentation, I am going to analyse children’s narrative practices in multimodal conversation analysis (CA)
(Goodwin 2000; Mondada 2016). I investigate how children co-construct their narratives in interaction and
how they deploy language and other resources such as body and materials in their “interactional space”
(Mondada 2013; Hausendorf 2013) to construct the “narrative/imaginary space” (Heller 2019, 2022). In other
words, I investigate how children bring their narratives from the “here and now” into the “then and there”
(Filipi 2014) and construct the “narrative/imaginary space” by establishing the places, times, and persons of the
story in spoken discourse with the deployment of verbal and non-verbal resources (cf. Heller 2019; Quasthoff
et. al (2019)).

Methodologically, I open up data-derived corpus-linguistic methodologies to CA in terms of the (a)typicality in


the narratives. In this work, (a)typicality is understood as recurrent patterns of children’s solutions (verbal and
non-verbal “forms” in sequential “devices”) to “jobs” in storytelling (Hausendorf & Quasthoff 1996; Quasthoff
et. al (2019)). The corpus-linguistic methodology provides an overall pattern of children’s narrative forms
to accomplish the storytelling jobs in interaction. In addition, I will discuss the methodological issues and
challenges in my approach.

References
Filipi, A. (2014). The shift from talking about the ‘here and now’ to talk about the ‘then and there’ in interactions
with young children. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference of Conversation Analysis, UCLA.
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489-1522
Heller, V. (2022). Imaginary spaces in storytelling. In A. H. Jucker and H. Hausendorf (eds), Pragmatics of Space,
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 209-250.
Heller, V. (2019). Embodied displacements in young German children’s storytelling Layering of spaces, voices,
and bodies. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3, 168-195.
Hausendorf, H. (2013). On the interactive achievement of space - and its possible meanings. In P. Auer, M.
Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock and B. Szmrecsanyi (eds), Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interac-
tional, and Cognitive Perspectives, Berlin: de Gruyter, 276-303.
Hausendorf, H. and Quasthoff, U. (1996). Sprachentwicklung und Interaktion: eine linguistische Studie zum
Erwerb von Diskursfähigkeiten [Language development and interaction: a linguistic study of the acquisition of
discourse abilities]. Opladen:Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Mondada, L.(2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Soci-
olinguistics, 20(3), 336–366.
Mondada, L. (2013). Interactional space and the study of embodied talk-in-interaction. In P. Auer, M. Hilpert,
A. Stukenbrock and B. Szmrecsanyi (eds), Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interactional, and
Cognitive Perspectives, Berlin: de Gruyter, 247–275.

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Quasthoff, U., Kern, F., Ohlhus, S., and Stude, J. (2019). Diskurse und Texte von Kindern: Praktiken – Fähigkeiten
– Ressourcen: Erwerb. Stauffenburg Verlag: Tübingen.

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Public Discourse Changes with the Times and Media: Writer


and Reader Responsibility in Corporate Mission Statements

Lecture

Ms. Mana Kitazawa 1


1. Keio University

This study analyzed corporate discourse to explore how changing times and the associated change in the form
of media from print to digital influence people’s use of language in public. Corporate discourse, such as corpo-
rate websites and annual reports, is a type of public discourse accessible to virtually everyone. By focusing on
corporate discourse, the study investigated how companies take account of their potential audience when using
language and how that use of language changes over time.
This research focused on mission statements, which appear in the annual reports that most companies distribute
or publish on their websites. The texts of these statements are relatively stable, as a company’s products, ser-
vices, and direction do not fluctuate significantly, but writers must sometimes revise the statements to make
them acceptable to as many of a society’s readers as possible at a given time.
The data were collected from the annual reports of ten companies and cover the years 1986–2021. This research
looked at what the companies included in their statements and how those elements evolved over time. First,
it classified the statements’ content by adopting—or, occasionally, revising—classifications from earlier studies
(Bart, 1997; Bartkus et al., 2004; Williams, 2008). Second, each element in the statements was qualitatively
examined from the viewpoint of writer and reader responsibility (Hinds, 1987), including the degree of detail
and whether a company explained itself directly or indirectly. The remarks can be considered to reflect greater
writerly responsibility if they are explicit and clear enough for readers to understand without ambiguity.
The findings reveal that, while the elements in these statements are similar, companies describe them in differ-
ent ways over time. Three stages may be identified. When the reports are initially published in print, companies
promote themselves in a self-contained manner by presenting their products as precisely as possible. For ex-
ample, the1986 report of Best Buy says, “Best Buy Co., Inc., sells nationally recognized, brand name consumer
electronics and major appliances through 12 retail stores located in Minnesota.” In the subsequent stage, the
references to the companies’ products become more generalized as demonstrated in Best Buy’s 1998 report:
“Our Company is devoted to providing our customers the best value on the products they want.” During this
stage, companies express themselves more indirectly by integrating their products into their actions toward
specific stakeholders. In the final stage, companies make broadly general references to stakeholders as well as
to products and services as in Best Buy’s 2021 statement: “At Best Buy, our goal is to enrich lives via technology.”
The terms lives and technology make it difficult to define exactly whose lives are meant and what the company’s
products are.
This study suggests that mission statements may become more ambiguous over time due to changes in the form
of media, increased opportunities to be seen by a wider variety of audiences, or the public’s greater knowledge
of the companies. As a result, reader responsibility is now greater than before, as readers must decide how to
interpret ambiguous meanings.

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Rationales for Covert Hate Speech: A game-theoretic approach

Lecture

Ms. Xinya Liu 1


1. University of International Business and Economics

This paper is a proposal of using game-theoretic model in analyzing the mechanism of covert hate speech. The
gist of the model is that the production and perception of covert hate speech can be viewed as social recur-
sive reasoning between rational interlocutors. Experiment will be used to collect participants’ production and
interpretation strategies under different communicative goals for model testing.
Hate speech has generated much interest in sociopragmatic research for its pervasive use on social media and
intertwined with impoliteness and identity (Terkourafi et al., 2018), usually disguised in a covert way. Previ-
ous research on covert hate speech has primarily relied on discourse analysis and corpus method, examining
various discursive strategies (Bhat & Klein 2020). While the descriptive approach provides us with insights on
various forms the covert hate speech can take, it hasn’t explained the motivation for using such techniques and
how they can be reliably understood. More importantly, the interplay between speaker’s discursive strategy
and listener’s evaluation is underexplored. Therefore, this study takes covert hate speech as co-constructed
and negotiated between group members. Though such coded messages seem ambiguous, it is a critical strat-
egy adopted by speaker who strikes a balance between being informative and lessening resentment, and it can
be reliably communicated if listeners can recover speaker’s communicative goals. This process is formalized
through Bayesian game-theoretic approach with the support of experimental data, which has been proposed in
understanding politeness (Yoon et al., 2020). In a game-theoretic model, the strategic speaker is uncertain about
the types of potential audience; therefore, he/she has to alter the implicitness according to the prior belief of
probability distribution of audience types to maximize the expected utility. The utterance functions as a signal
to reveal the speaker’s group affiliation, promoting hatred against outgroup members while still maintaining
plausible deniability. In supporting experiment, this study adopts an interactive experimental paradigm in-
volving action-based tasks both on production and comprehension sides, with material and scenarios collected
from Chinese online social media “Weibo”. Native speakers and listeners are paired in the same game where
the speakers’ messages generated in a given scenario are immediately transmitted to listeners’ computer screen
for interpretation. The results are to find whether the covert strategy can be reliably understood meanwhile
generate less resentment to the speaker.
References
Bhat, P., Klein, O. (2020). Covert Hate Speech: White Nationalists and Dog Whistle Communication on Twitter.
In: Bouvier, G., Rosenbaum, J. (eds) Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation. Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham.
Terkourafi, M., Catedral, L., Haider, I., Karimzad, F., Melgares, J., Mostacero-Pinilla, C., Nelson, J., & Weissman,
B. (2018). Uncivil Twitter: A sociopragmatic analysis. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6(1), 26–57.
Yoon, E. J., Tessler, M. H., Goodman, N. D., & Frank, M. C. (2020). Polite Speech Emerges from Competing Social
Goals. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 4, 71–87.

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Reaching the “Black Box” of Politicians: Mediating Political


Intentions Through the Eyes of Journalists

Lecture

Ms. Mia Schreiber 1


1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This study aims to illuminate meaning-making processes by analyzing journalists’ perception of their role as
mediators of intentions in reports of political utterances. Political utterances serve as the foundations of news-
stories regarding the political sphere (Gans,1979; Van Dijk, 1988), and their mediation is a significant part of
journalists everyday practice of news reporting (Sigal, 1986; Wierzbicka, 1987). Research on reported speech
in news-stories has demonstrated that the act of mediating utterances involves different levels of interpreta-
tion (Clayman, 1995; Fairclough, 1988; Kampf, 2009; Schreiber and Kampf, 2022; Stubbs, 1983). Studies that
dealt with speech presentation in news reports engaged mainly in the analysis of news stories, focusing on
journalists’ practices of citation (Fairclough, 1988; Roeh and Nir, 1990; Zelizer, 1993), the different ways of as-
similating source’s texts in news stories (Baden and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2018; Livio and Cohen-Yechezkely,
2018; Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Baden, 2016), and the reporting of speech acts (Kampf, 2009, 2013; Schreiber
and Kampf, 2022; Stubbs, 1983). Yet, the subtle, nearly unnoticed practice of interpreting political intentions
within news stories did not receive research attention so far.
The current study aims to shed light on the act of mediating intentions and its importance to the meaning-
making process in news reports, by analyzing journalists’ perspective regarding their role as mediators of po-
litical intentions. The research questions guiding this study are: How do journalists describe the process of
inferring intentions when reporting on politicians’ words? and what are their main motivations for mediating
political intentions? In order to examine journalists’ perspective on the mediation process of political inten-
tions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with eighteen Israeli journalists (reporters and editors) from a
variety of news platforms that represents a mix of ownerships and political ideologies.
While most interviewees began the interview by arguing that the reporting of intentions is meaningless, the
use of the reconstruction technique in the interviews (Reich, 2006) enabled a shift in journalists’ perspective
regarding the act of mediating intentions and their importance in shaping news stories. What was perceived
as a trivial, meaningless matter that does not require any journalistic thought or skills, turned during the in-
terviews to an act that involves different considerations and requires personal knowledge and professional
abilities. Alongside the acknowledgment in the importance of mediated intentions to news reports, the analysis
points to the evaluative categories journalists apply in the attempt to interpret political intentions. Further-
more, the findings suggests that the reporting of intentions meets two main journalistic needs: storytelling, or
the need to give meaning and to make sense of events in the political sphere; and verification, or the need to
uncover politicians’ “true faces”. I conclude by discussing the importance of meta-discourse for deciphering the
mechanisms of journalistic work and the process of inferring intentions, and suggest that this type of analysis
can shed light on other social interactions in which the mediators are of crucial importance in the process of
meaning-making.

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Reconsiderating the interactional functions of Bushi /Meiyou


(‘No-’) prefaced responsive turns in Mandarin conversation.

Lecture

Dr. Jia Li 1
1. Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University / Graduate School, The University of Tokyo

Bu- and mei- are two high frequency negation markers in Mandarin Chinese. Li and Thompson (1981) have
reported the difference between bu and mei(you) is whether completion is involved; bu provides a neutral
negation, whereas mei(you) negates the completion of an event. According to previous research on discourse
markers and conversational actions, bushi and meiyou, two negators developed from bu- and mei-, function dif-
ferently. Bushi serves to directly refute assertions, and meiyou hedges the negative response it initiates and thus
functions to seek alignment with the interlocutor (Wang 2008). Meiyou mitigates the disagreement by avoiding
a pointed syntactic negation in polar-question-response sequences (Wang 2020).
Although these findings are informative, the following problems still persist; (i) In what sequential contexts do
Mandarin Chinese native speakers utilize bushi and meiyou prefaced responsive turns in everyday conversation
other than the question-response sequences? (ii) How does the prosodic feature effect the functions of bushi and
meiyou?
To address these questions, this study examines bushi /meiyou prefaced responsive turns in 9 hours of everyday
Mandarin face-to-face conversation audio recordings, adopting an interactional linguistic approach and using
the methods of conversation analysis. Detailed analysis revealed that:
1. Although certain syntactic constraints are imposed by preceding turns: bushi prefaced responses frequently
follow the utterances contain shi (be-verb), and meiyou prefaced responses commonly seen behind you (have)
or you…guo (have experienced) related claims or confirmations, the counterexample is demonstrated in the
following excerpt:
1 L: Ài wo juéde ni bèi dōngxi shízài shì tài lìhài le. [assessment]
‘I think you are so good at remember things.’
2 W: Wo méi:you:=wo xiànzài lao la. Wo zhēnde.hhh. [denial+account]
‘I méiyou, I am old now, really. (laughter)’

After a shi contained assessment (line1), meiyou prefaced response is produced, which is involved in the action
combination of denial plus account operating in the sequential context of expressing humility (line2).
2. In Beijing Mandarin conversation, these two negators have diversified prosodic representations (five kinds of
each according to our observation). Bú:shì: and méi:you: with vowels lengthening may represent strong denial
whereas their truncated form búr and méi as simple turn-taking markers.
While conversational actions conducted by bushi / meiyou prefaced turns has been examined (Chiu 2012), this
research offers new insight into the sequential context where bushi /meiyou prefaced responsive turns con-
strained by interactional rules as well as the pragmatic function-prosody interface in everyday conversation.
The results can help learners better understand the usages of Mandarin negators.
References
Chiu H. (2012) Méiyou-/Búshì-(‘No-’) prefaced turns in talk show interaction: Constitutive elements of entertain-
ment broadcasts in Taiwan. Language and Linguistics 13(3): 391–435.
Li, C. N. & Thompson, S. A. (1981) Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley, California:
University of California Press.
Wang W. (2020) Grammatical conformity in question-answer sequences: The case of meiyou in Mandarin con-
versation. Discourse Studies 22(5): 610-631.

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Wang Y. F. (2008) Beyond negation – The roles of meiyou and bushi in Mandarin conversation. Language Sciences
30(6): 679–713.

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Reference Ascriptions, Ambiguity, and Coordination

Lecture

Prof. Mihai Hîncu 1


1. Valahia University of Târgoviște

In this paper, I focus on the linguistic constructions in which occurs the most emblematic verb of our pragmatic
lexicon, the verb „refer (to)” by means of which the speaker’s meaning is reported, and I look at its complex
semantic profile through the prism of the logical aspects considered definitory for the extensional verbs. In this
regard, I scrutinize the semantic differences between the verb used to ascribe reference and the extensional
transitive verbs with respect to the existential entailment, to the substitution ‘salva veritate’ of the coextensional
terms and to the semantic specificity, and I show that there are strong theoretical reasons for considering that
it belongs to the class of the intensional transitive verbs (ITVs).
Insofar as the sentences containing ITVs are structurally ambiguous between an intensional, de dicto interpre-
tation, and an extensional, de re interpretation, they threaten the coordination between agents. For this reason,
if the speaker uses a reference ascription in one way and the hearer’s reading of it diverges from the speaker’s
intended meaning, both agents have a coordination problem. In this regard, using the mathematical frame-
work of games of partial information, I will show what conditions have to be satisfied in order for a rational
speaker and a rational hearer to efficiently communicate with a reference ascription, and to converge on its
right interpretation when the sentence’s surface syntax is probabilistically silent about which of the de re or de
dicto meaning the hearer has to choose in order to coordinate with the speaker.
In order to accomplish this task, I present a scenario of strategic communication involving reference ascriptions
and I model it as a two-agent coordination game. The cognitive dynamics peculiar to the agents’ interaction
will be presented on the background of some reasonable assumptions introduced to guarantee the finding of
a solution concept corresponding to the game. In this regard, after I let the utility functions be sensitive to the
agents’ preferences for more economical expressions, I compute the expected utilities of the strategic profiles,
I determine a set of Nash equilibria and I show that the game’s unique solution can be equated with that set’s
member which passes the test of Paretian efficiency. The present model highlights the mutually recursive way
in which each agent reasons about the other agent’s probabilistic reasoning, and it manages to integrate the
uncertainty involved in the successful communication with the reasoning about reasoning process involved in
the language production and interpretation.
In the end, I present the picture of the interplay between the speaker’s reference and the semantic reference
which emerges from the game-theoretical framework adopted here and I will show some of its methodological
consequences related to the way in which the key concept of reference has to be theoretically framed.

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Refusals in English as a lingua franca: An investigation of


Chinese and Indonesian speakers

Lecture

Mr. Xianming Fang 1


1. Monash University

This study examines refusals in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) context where the interactants are usually
English L2 speakers. It particularly focuses on two major ELF user groups in the Asia-Pacific region, namely
Chinese and Indonesian ELF speakers. Thirty Chinese and 30 Indonesian L1 speakers took part in this study.
They were made in pairs to play role-plays. The role-play data is divided into two data set. The first data set
includes 15 Chinese participants who acted as refusers and 15 Indonesians who played the role of requesters.
The second data set includes 15 Chinese (as requesters) and 15 Indonesians (as refusers). In addition to role-
plays, each participant had an immediate interview with the researcher after the completion of role-plays. The
role-play data were examined in terms of the refusal strategies and refusal sequences.
Results show that Chinese English speakers share many similarities with Indonesian English speakers when
making refusals in intercultural communication. Strategically, both Chinese and Indonesian participants usu-
ally prefer indirect strategies, especially explanations. Sequentially, both Chinese and Indonesian participants
usually tend to delay their refusals with a variety of interactional tools, such as pauses, turn-initial delay, and
anticipatory accounts, etc., and prefer to end their interactions with an acceptance. The interview data suggest
that many participants linked their indirect refusal performance with their L1-derived sociopragmatic norms
and believed that the preference for “indirectness” is a commonality shared by Asian English users who are
different from Westerners. Despite the similarities, Chinese and Indonesian ELF speakers still have some dif-
ferences, particularly in some pragmalinguistics (e.g., the discourse markers, the downgraders).
The findings of this study show that ELF refusals used by speakers from different Asian linguacultures appear to
be similar in strategies and sequential organization. The similarities are likely due to the participants’ transfer
of their L1 pragmatic norms which are similar regardless of the different national boundaries. Participants
seem to favour their L1 pragmatic transfer when interacting with Asian speakers because they thought that it
is shared by the Asian interlocutor with whom they are interacting. Hence, when using English as a regional
lingua franca in Asia, the local pragmatic norms seem to be a more ideal choice rather than English L1 speakers’
pragmatic norms. Moreover, we should realize that the so-called Asian ELF speakers are not a homogeneous
group but have some differences when using ELF. An implication of these findings in pedagogy is that pragmatic
instruction should pay more attention to local pragmatic norms rather than sole English L1 speakers’ norms.

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Repair lexemes as tweet-initial responses in Finnish Twitter


interaction

Lecture

Ms. Helena Nurmikari 1


1. University of Helsinki

On Twitter, where interaction is asynchronic, the need for repairs is different than in spoken interaction
and repair practices can develop new pragmatic and metapragmatic purposes (Nurmikari, 2021). Using the
conversation analytic approach and by applying Digital CA (Giles, Stommel, Paulus & Reed, 2015), this paper
answers the following research question: What interactional tasks do Finnish open class repair lexemes mitä,
tä(h), hä(h) and anteeks(i) mitä have when used at the beginning of a tweet, followed by more text in the same
tweet?

As a response after the turn-transitional space in spoken interaction, an open class repair initiator points out
a problem in receiving, understanding or accepting the previous turn or a longer stretch of talk, and calls
for a repair, which often is a full or partial repetition of the trouble source by the producer of the trouble
source (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977). In Finnish spoken interactions, open class repair initiators are used
similarly to how Drew (1997) has described their use in English, often pointing out to problems in hearing
or understanding (Haakana, 2011; see also Schegloff, 2004). The most common open class repair initiators in
Finnish are mitä (’what’) and its abbreviation tä(h).

The data consist of 368 manually collected tweets that include Finnish repair lexemes that in spoken in-
teraction are used as open class repair initiators. I will show that the tweet-initial use of these lexemes
does not call for a repeat or other repair as a response from the co-participant. In a tweet-initial position,
these lexemes make both use of the function of repair, in pointing out something problematic or difficult in
accepting the previous turn, and the pragmatics of surprised response tokens (see Wilkinson & Kitzinger,
2006 on response tokens) in displaying an affective and distancing stance. The tweet as a whole can be either
affiliative and aligning or disaffiliative and challenging to the previous tweet, in which the previous writer has
presented their stance to some topic for example by commenting a news topic or a another Twitter user’s tweet.

REFERENCES

DREW, PAUL 1997: ‘Open’ class repair initiators in response to sequential sorts of troubles in conversa-
tion. – Journal of Pragmatics 28 p. 69–101.
GILES, DAVID – STOMMEL, WYKE – PAULUS, TRENA – LESTER, JESSICA – REED, DARREN 2015: Microanalysis
of online data: the methodological development of “digital CA”. Discourse, Context and Media 7 p. 45–51.

HAAKANA, MARKKU 2011: Mitä ja muut avoimet korjausaloitteet [Mitä (’what’) and other open class repair
initiators in Finnish interactions]. – Virittäjä 115 p. 36–67.

NURMIKARI, HELENA 2021: #eiku – itsekorjauksesta moniäänisyyteen [#eiku – from self-repair to polyphony].

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– Virittäjä 125 p. 347–376.

SCHEGLOFF, 2004: On dispensability. – Research on Language and Social Interaction 37, p. 95–149.

SCHEGLOFF, EMANUEL A. – JEFFERSON, GAIL – SACKS, HARVEY 1977: The preference for self-correction in
the organization of repair in conversation. – Language 53 p. 361–382.

WILKINSON, SUE – KITZINGER, CELIA 2006: Surprise as in interactional achievement: reaction tokens in con-
versation. – Social Psychology Quarterly 69 p. 150–182.

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Repair of misunderstandings on Twitter: report on a pilot


study

Lecture

Ms. Chloé Duquesnoy 1 , Prof. Ilse Depraetere 2


1. Université de Lille, 2. University of Lille, UMR 8163 STL

Misunderstandings constitute an important member of the mis-family, next to mis-hearing or misleading (Das-
cal, 1999). They are “a form of understanding which is partially or totally deviant from what the speaker in-
tended to communicate” and in which “the interlocutor who misunderstands is not aware of it” (Weigand, 1999:
769). Research on the topic has mainly focused on misunderstandings in face-to-face (FTF) communication with
particular attention for the sources of misunderstandings (Weigand, 1999), their structure (i.e., the origin, the
manifestation, the devices and the state of realisation; Humphreys-Jones, 1986), the conflict resolution strategies
(i.e., integrative, distributive and avoidance strategies; Sillars, 1980) and the types of repair (self or other repair;
McRoy and Hirst, 1995).
In this presentation, the focus is on misunderstandings in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Edwards
(2017) argues that misunderstandings in text messaging tend to get resolved as often as in FTF communication.
Here, we aim to find out how the participants reach the state of realisation (i.e., the moment when the partici-
pants realise that a misunderstanding occurred) in another CMC context, that is, Twitter. We also examine how
misunderstandings are resolved, if, at all, and by whom.
Starting from Humphreys-Jones’ analysis of the state of realisation (1986), we searched for misunderstandings
making use of 22 sequences that signal misunderstanding. In this way, we collected a sample of 100 tweet
threads from Twitter and analysed the tweet which caused the misunderstanding and the tweets that follow
until all the participants reach a state of understanding. We applied Humphreys-Jones’s (1986) framework and
coded the turns in terms of three features: (a) the devices (i.e., optional textual components elaborating the
misunderstanding), (b) the conflict resolution strategies and (c) the participant resolving the misunderstanding
(i.e., self-repair or other repair).
Our analysis shows that misunderstandings on Twitter are generally resolved in the same way as in FTF con-
texts. It is usually the participant who produces the misunderstood utterance who also resolves the misunder-
standing. They typically use integrative strategies (i.e., by maintaining a positive evaluation of the partners;
Sillars, 1980) and devices that help the other participant understand the communicative problem.
Dascal Marcelo, “Introduction: Some questions about misunderstanding”, Journal of Pragmatics, 31, (1999):
753-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00059-9
Edwards Renee et al., “That’s Not What I Meant: How Misunderstanding Is Related to Chan-
nel and Perspective-Taking”, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 36(2), (2017): 188�210.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X16662968
Humphreys-Jones Claire, An investigation of the types and structure of misunderstandings, Ph.D., Newcastle Uni-
versity, (1986).
Mcroy Susan and Hirst Graeme, “The Repair of Speech Act Misunderstandings by Abductive Inference”, Com-
putational Linguistics, 21, (1995): 435�78.
Olaniran Bolanle, “Computer-Mediated Communication: A Test of the Impact of Social Cues on the Choice of
Medium for Resolving Misunderstandings”, Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 31(2), (2002): 205-222.
Sillars Alan, “Attributions and Communication in Roommate Conflicts”, Communication Monographs, 47, (1980):
180�200. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758009376031
Weigand Edda, “Misunderstanding: The standard case.”, Journal of Pragmatics, 31(6), (1999): 763–85.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00068-X

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Reporting Non-literal: An Empirical Study of Belief Reports on


Metaphors

Lecture

Ms. Xiaoxuan Chen 1


1. University of Cambridge

In this study, I examine the intersection of belief reports and metaphor—two widely studied topics in separation
but significantly underresearched in tandem. It aims to investigate people’s preferences for how they report
metaphor in belief reports compared with non-metaphorical language, and to what degree conventionality
affects the preferences.
Under a post-Gricean contextualist framework which includes metaphorical meaning in the truth-conditional
content of an utterance (see e.g., Carston, 2002, 2010; Recanati, 2004, 2010; Sperber & Wilson, 2008), the pre-
diction is that there will not be a significant difference between people’s preferences on how they report literal
and metaphorical utterances. I analyze whether, and how, speakers paraphrase metaphors in their reports, in
order to shed more light on the literal/non-literal distinction and metaphor interpretation using evidence from
propositional attitude reports.
In this talk, I present and briefly discuss the results of a questionnaire-based survey that addresses this question
with respect to three categories of sentences: (i) sentences with conventional metaphor, (ii) sentences with novel
metaphor and (iii) literal sentences, checking whether participants adopt different strategies when constructing
the reports on them. Participants are asked to respond to an open-ended task, i.e., completing a report in the
frame “B believes that______” after reading each target sentence placed at the end of a short story context. The
main strategies they are expected to adopt are reusing the target expression, paraphrasing the target expression
and substituting the sentence with implicature. This approach allows us to compare their responses through
both quantitative and qualitative analysis.
References
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, Robyn. 2010. Metaphor: Ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental images. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 110. 295–321.
Recanati, François. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-Conditional Pragmatics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 2008. A deflationary account of metaphors. In Raymond W. Gibbs (ed.), Cam-
bridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 84–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Resistance by defendants in Chinese criminal trials

Lecture

Ms. Yan Chen 1 , Dr. Alison May 1


1. University of Leeds

China is conducting a ‘trial-centred’ judicial reform, which highlights the critical role of questioning in trials
to find out the facts, verify evidence and deliver justice. However, in comparison with legal professionals’ lan-
guage, defendants’ language draws much less attention because the questioners’ language (mostly questions)
has formal markers while the responses do not (Liao, 2004, p.29), and responses are mainly ‘shaped by the
constraints of prior questions and turn-allocation systems’(Carter, 2019, p.225). This research fills the gap in
the academic field and contributes a linguistic perspective to the legal discussion. This research examines re-
sistance practices by defendants in 49 transcribed trials. This research adopts a combined approach of corpus
linguistics and conversation analysis for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The corpus results show
that defendants are frequently interrupted by legal professionals, which usually signals a response to defen-
dant resistance. The resistance by defendants who plead not guilty is more obviously seen when their responses
are compared with those by defendants pleading guilty. Specifically, this research finds that defendants’ most
frequent resistance practices are ‘我 就 (I jiu)’ sentences and the nonanswer responses structured with ‘不 知道
(not know)’. The analysis of ‘我 就 (I jiu)’ sentences demonstrates how the defendants try to create an opportu-
nity for narratives, where they use ‘我 就 (I jiu)’ sentences to justify and normalise their behaviours. The close
examination of the sequences triggered by nonanswer shows that defendants tend to resort to nonanswer as a
convenient resistance strategy though they usually provide an account for not knowing. Nevertheless, it is found
that legal professionals have different strategies to deal with a nonanswer response to either get a real answer
or to undermine the credibility of the defendant. Though resistance in courtroom settings has been researched
before (e.g., Drew, 1992; Matoesian, 2008), this study which examines an underexplored non-Anglo-American
jurisdiction, enriches our understanding of questioning and response in institutional talk.
References
1. Carter, L. 2019. Preference organization in PRC criminal trial interaction: Defendant resistance and enforced
compliance. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal. 10(2), pp.224–240.
2. Drew, P. 1992. Contested evidence in courtroom cross-examination: The case of a trial for rape In: P. Drew and
J. Heritage, eds. Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge
University Press, pp.470–520.
3. Liao, M. 2004. 答话研究——法庭答话的启⽰ (A Study on Responses: Thoughts on Responses in Courtroom ).
修辞学习(Rhetoric Learning). 5, pp.29–34.
4. Matoesian, G.M. 2008. You Might Win the Battle but Lose the War: Multimodal, Interactive, and Extralinguistic
Aspects of Witness Resistance. Journal of English Linguistics. 36(3), pp.195–219.

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Resisting gaslighting: Conversational strategies, linguistic


resources, and oral deaf people

Lecture

Dr. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan 1


1. National Cheng Kung University

This paper explores how orally educated deaf people in Taiwan adopt conversational strategies and linguis-
tic resources to claim legitimacy as the subject of lived experiences of disability, negotiating with others who
attempt to question their disability experiences (i.e., “gaslighting”).
From a disability studies perspective (Kerschbaum, 2021), it is argued that much work needs to be done in
exploring how disabled persons navigate experiences of disability among themselves or with their important
others, rather than with abled researchers or clinicians. This study is in alignment with this intellectual agenda.
This study looks at two pairs of participants: one consists of two deaf persons (one is a hearing aid user, and the
other is a cochlear implant user), and the other consists of one deaf person and her hearing mother.
In the first pair, a cochlear implant user, Xiao-Kun, talks about how cochlear implants are a powerful technology
for heavily deafened people like her. Her interlocutor, a hearing aid user with mild deafness, does not buy Xiao-
Kun’s argument and tries to question the materiality of cochlear implants and her experiences. It is observed
that Xiao-Kun adopts conversational strategies such as interruption, trouble-identification, and membership
categorization as well as linguistic resources like code-switching to legitimize her experiences with cochlear
implants and deafness.
In the second pair, a deaf person, Grace, shares with me (a hearing researcher) her frustration with learning En-
glish as a foreign language. However, her (hearing) mother questions her experiences and argues that hearing
people in Taiwan are also frustrated with English learning. To claim her legitimacy in experiencing disabil-
ity, Grace adopts phonetic resources in turn allocation, such as raising her pitch in interrupting her mother
and claiming the floor, as well as hypo-articulating vowels in expressing negative affect towards her mother’s
stance.
Different from work that focuses on “medical gaslighting” from clinicians (Sebring, 2021), this study aims to
look at how disabled people respond to gaslighting from people who do not perform medical authority. By the
examples mentioned in this talk, I argue that we should recognize the potential agency of disabled people in
negotiating disability experiences. This study also shows how pragmatics as a field concerning language-in-
action can inspire further intellectual projects in exploring microsocial practices among disabled people.
References:

Kerschbaum, Stephanie L. 2021. Engaging disability studies and discursive psychology: Materialisms and
ideologies of ableism. In Jessica Nina Lester (ed.), Discursive Psychology and Disability (Palgrave Studies in
Discursive Psychology), 211–216. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-
71760-5_10.

Sebring, Jennifer C. H. 2021. Towards a sociological understanding of medical gaslighting in western health
care. Sociology of Health & Illness 43(9). 1951–1964. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13367.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Ritual Small Talk in Chinese: A Speech Act Analysis

Lecture

Ms. Zongfeng Xia 1 , Prof. Fengguang Liu 1 , Prof. Dániel Z. Kádár 2 , Prof. Juliane House 3
1. Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 2. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, 3. University of Hamburg

In this study, we examine ritual small talk in Chinese, which is a regretfully understudied phenomenon. We
analyse small talk by capturing its recurrent pragmatic features in the units of interactional structures and
speech acts, and also by interpreting such pragmatic features through the lens of an interaction ritual (House
et al. 2020; House & Kádár, 2021). As a case study, we examine instances of small talk taking place in front
of Chinese primary schools where parents engage in casual phatic conversations to kill the time while waiting
for their children. The study of our corpus of small talk conversations allows us to unearth linguaculturally
embedded patterns of language use in the complex participatory setting of various parents interacting on busy
Chinese streets in front of schools.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Russian čto li as modal particle: Testing pragmatic hypotheses


with robots

Lecture

Ms. Beatrice Bernasconi 1 , Prof. Kerstin Fischer 2


1. Roma Tre University - Sapienza University of Rome, 2. University of Southern Denmark

In this study, we aim to verify the hypothesis that the Russian complex particle čto li behaves as a modal particle.
The particle čto li is attested in a corpus of spoken Russian in various contexts, such as requests for confirmation
(1), rhetorical questions (2), declaratives (3), and imperatives (4):
1. Mamen’ka. Tak čto pravda my čto li v Peterburg ne edem?
‘Mom. So it’s true, we are not going to St. Petersburg čto li?
2. Èto čё takoe? Èto čto, čaj čto li? Uberi!
‘What is this? Is this tea čto li? Take it away!’
3. Znaeš’, ja znala, čto ty soglasiš’sja. Potomy čto utebja glaza takie… Dobrye čto li. Nežnye.
‘You know, I knew you would agree. Because your eyes are so…kind čto li. Gentle.’
4. Nu, obnimites’ čto li.
‘Well, hug yourselves čto li.’
Depending on the context, the particle performs different pragmatic functions, i.e., interlocutor’s involvement
in the meaning construction process, commitment reduction, and meaning approximation (Bernasconi under
review; Bezjaeva 2002; Bogdanova-Beglarian 2016). Our claim is that the polyfunctionality of čto li is due to
its function to anchor the utterance in common ground, therefore behaving as a modal particle (Diewald 2006;
Fischer 2007; Fischer & Heide 2018). To verify this hypothesis, we carried out an empirical study on L1 Russian
speakers.
In an online questionnaire, we showed participants videos with robots interacting either with a human or an-
other robot and asked them a few questions. In the videos, the robots utter sentences that are adapted from
authentic examples from the multimodal subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. Each participant rated one
of the two versions of each example, either with or without the particle. Audio files both with and without the
particle were synthesised and then manipulated in Praat to recreate a natural intonation pattern. Videos with
robots were then recorded and matched with the audio files. Using a robot allows us to create identical situa-
tions of use and is furthermore neutral concerning human characteristics. The online questionnaire included
26 questions to be answered on 7-point Likert scales. The following research questions guided the design of the
questionnaire:

• Does čto li entail a close relationship between interlocutors that motivates the sharing of common
ground?
• Anchoring the proposition to common ground, does čto li influence the answer to a polar question?
• Does čto li mitigate orders and evaluative comments (as in rhetorical questions) by referring to notions
that are shared by the speakers?
• Does čto li approximate the meaning by implicitly referring to notions stored in common ground?

Participants were recruited through the online platform Prolific. 61 of the 73 collected responses were valid.
The statistical analysis confirms our hypotheses a, c, and d, suggesting that čto li influences how close the rela-
tionship between speaker and hearer is perceived, how polite the interaction is understood to be, and the extent
to which common ground is evoked. The results were however mitigated by the different grammatical contexts
in which čto li was used.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Selectional Restrictions as Natural Language


Ontology_Presupposition Projection and Copredication

Lecture

Mr. Zhengjie Situ 1


1. University of Edinburgh

Selectional restrictions are limitations on the applicability of predicates to arguments. Those sensitive to ‘the
type of entity selected for’ I dub Typed Selectional Restrictions. To illustrate, consider:
(1) The blood of that person is blue.
(2) ? The ambition of that person is blue.
One interprets (1) as implausible and false but (2) ‘not even false’ since ambition cannot be coloured.
A presuppositional treatment is widely preferred (Horn 1990, Beaver 2001) over a syntactic account (Chomsky
1965). More controversial is their nature (semantic vs. pragmatic) and source (lexical specification, linguistic
composition vs. world knowledge).
Independently, the Presupposition Projection Problem has been extensively studied (Karttunen & Peters 1979;
Soames 1982). Presupposition projection in conjoined complex sentences shows a distinct pattern. Certain
connectives are ‘filters’, allowing projection exclusively on certain occasions. Experiments exploring presup-
position projection from conjunction and disjunction confirm principled symmetric behaviour for ‘and’ but
asymmetric behaviour for ‘or’ (Kalomoiros & Schwarz 2022). To illustrate, Contrast (3) and (4), where ‘quit
VPing’ presupposes ‘used to VP’ and ‘#’ indicates infelicity in the out-of-blue context.
(3) a. John used to smoke and quit smoking.
b. # John quitted smoking and used to smoke.
(4) a. Either John has never smoked, or he quit smoking.
b. Either John quitted smoking, or he has never smoked.
The two-way interaction is further complicated by polysemy of the subject nominal in ‘co-predication’ construc-
tions, when one polysemous nominal has simultaneous predications selecting for two different senses (Ortega-
Andrés and Vicente 2019).
(5) a. The city has 500,000 inhabitants and outlawed smoking in bars last year.
b. # The city outlawed smoking in bars last year and has 500,000 inhabitants.
An account that treats such selectional restrictions as lexically specified, semantically typed presuppositions
(Asher 2011) which place stringent formal requirements has difficulty accounting for the contrast in (5). Prag-
matic factors, factoring in worldly knowledge about the ontological dependency relations between territories
and political representations as concepts, seem to be at play.
Moreover, the choice of connective manipulates sentence acceptability in identical ways. To illustrate, observe
how the contrast between (5) and (6) parallels that between (3) and (4).
(6) a. Either the city has 500,000 inhabitants or outlawed smoking in bars last year.
b. Either the city outlawed smoking in bars last year or it has 500,000 inhabitants.
A presupposition projection algorithm, independently motivated to explain (3) and (4), can thus be naturally
extended to account for felicity data like (5) and (6). The observed similar patterns strongly argue for a pragmatic
treatment of selectional restrictions especially since a refined pragmatic account of presupposition projection,
empirically supported recently, has been developed (Schlenker 2009).
We argue that selectional restrictions are pragmatic presuppositions of a special type that arise during compo-
sition. Furthermore, they are constrained by ‘natural language metaphysics’ (Bach 1986), a level of cognitive
representation intermediate between linguistic and world knowledge.

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Our approach better accounts for selectional restrictions’ weakly typed, coarse-grained, constraint-like be-
haviour and sensitivity to linear order. This work has implications for semantics-pragmatics distinction,
linguistic-conceptual interface and compositionality.

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Self-denigration in academic settings: Ritualized relational


equilibrium in doctoral defense sessions

Lecture

Dr. Alireza Jalilifar 1 , Dr. Nadia Mayahi 1


1. Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz

Drawing on the constructivist grounded theory methodology, this mixed-methods study aimed to explore self-
denigration in dissertation defense sessions as a tri-cultural politeness phenomenon influenced by the context
of situation. Self-denigration in academic contexts, particularly English as a foreign language doctoral defense
sessions, is more than a sign of modesty. It constitutes the native language culture of the interactants, the target
language culture, and the disciplinary culture that lead to the emergence of novel functions of self-denigration.
This study is based on the data obtained from rigorous coding of the transcripts of 53 Iranian applied linguis-
tics doctoral defense sessions, the qualitative analysis of two focus group discussions, and a questionnaire built
on the findings of the focus groups which was validated using confirmatory factor analysis. The findings indi-
cated that self-denigration is the threshold relating the ideational and interpersonal aspects of the interaction
in defense sessions. The meticulous analysis of the data led to the construction of a pragmatic theory of self-
denigration grounded in the data in which self-denigration is theorized as the source of a ritualized relational
equilibrium triggered by the triadic interactional practices of the defense session participants, namely, doctoral
candidates, supervisor(s), and examiners. The theory consists of two constraints and three theorems which can
be evaluated as ritual acts where different intentions tend to intermix to fulfil a variety of functions (i.e., Social
Decorum, Diffidence, Coercive Self-deprecation, Contrived modesty, and Flamboyance). These functions em-
anate from the criticism-generating nature of the defense session where self-denigration seems to have been
conventionalized as an inseparable part of the rituals of the Iranian applied linguistics dissertation defense
sessions. Contrived modesty was found to be the most common intention behind self-denigration in defense
sessions. The findings highlight the significance of self-denigration in managing talk-in-interaction by focusing
on the emerging patterns of self-denigration and the perceptions and experiences of the participants in this
context. This study has pedagogical implications for both doctoral students and academics as it enhances their
theoretical and empirical knowledge about the interactional norms of applied linguistics defense sessions. The
theory suggested in this study seems to be able to justify and predict the behavior of the participants. The abil-
ity to predict what will happen gives the theory relevance for those seeking an element of control over their
environment.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Self-promotion in Academia: Constructing value positions and


identity narratives in job application statements

Lecture

Dr. Mohammed Albakry 1


1. Middle Tennessee State University

Job application statements such as teaching philosophy statements (TPS) and research statements (RS) are
rhetorical and self-promotional documents that focus on pedagogy and the scholarship of job applicants. Such
texts are representative of academic support genres that are not readily available to the public and, thus, can
pose difficulties for applicants who have minimal experience composing in these genres (Swales, 1996; Merkel,
2020). The presentation, based on a corpus of hundreds of statements extracted from job applications for differ-
ent academic positions in the humanities, combines the corpus-based approach and in-depth textual approach
to investigate how job applicants construct value positions, build interpersonal relations, engage in face-boosts,
and express commitments by using metadiscursive features (Hyland, 2005; Hyland & Jiang, 2020). The presenta-
tion also investigates narrative episodes and small stories informed by positioning theory as a broad framework
(Harré et al., 2009; Georgakopoulou, 2015). The analysis reveals that the writers frequently use three stance-
based areas (Boosters, Emphasizers, and Attitude Markers) to craft a persona commensurate with the academic
job advertisements as they interpreted them. It also shows that applicants predominantly employ the central
motifs of growth and transformation through personal learning and experience to weave together the thematic
complexities of their diverse personal stories. The presentation seeks to contribute an important perspective
to the existing literature on academic support genres by highlighting the role of stance and storytelling in how
job applicants in academia share professional values and construct scholarly and teacherly identities.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sensitivity to Inter-speaker Gaps in the Broad Autism


Phenotype

Lecture

Prof. Felicia Roberts 1 , Mr. Wei Siong Neo 1 , Dr. Mai Yamamoto 1 , Dr. Brigitte Kelleher 1 , Dr. Daniel Foti
1

1. Purdue University

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent challenges in


social communication. Pragmatic difficulties have been consistently reported and are considered a hallmark
feature of ASD (Friedman & Sterling, 2019). Challenges manifest broadly, including issues with appropriate
conversational turn-taking (Andrés-Roqueta & Katsos, 2017). Furthermore, caregivers cite conversational skills
as a key outcome priority (Knott et al., 2006). Thus, a better understanding of neural processes that underlie
social communication, especially an examination of turn-taking, may inform clinical assessments and facilitate
targeted support for developing pragmatic and interactional skill. Our approach is to leverage psychophysio-
logical methodologies to examine well-researched pragmatic aspects of interaction that have been attested and
analyzed in naturally occurring conversation. The current paper provides such a starting point by assessing
neural response in persons with ASD to inter-turn silences in conversation.
Given that inter-speaker gaps are typically on the order of milliseconds, event-related potentials (ERPs) offer
optimal temporal precision to map out neural subprocesses as conversation processing occurs in real time.
The current paper builds on work in typically developing adults that employed a series of simulated phone
conversations between two friends that ended with the recipient agreeing to a request by the caller, either after
an appropriate pause of 200 ms or after an extended pause of 700 ms.
Participants
Sixty-three adult participants ranged along a continuum as measured by the Broad Autism Phenotype Question-
naire (BAPQ). During the laboratory visit, participants completed three self-report measures that operationalize
BAP features in similar but non-identical ways, as well as a cognitive assessment (using the NIH Toolbox), and
experimental tasks involving judgment about gaps in conversation while electroencephalography (EEG) signals
were recorded.
Electrophysiological Recording and Processing
EEG data were continuously recorded and EEG signals were sampled at 500 Hz through BrainVision PyCorder
without any online filters. Electrooculography data were also continuously recorded and processed offline.
Preliminary Results
Between-subjects analyses provide evidence that reduced attention to unexpected responses to requests (e.g.,
affirmative responses after unexpectedly long inter-speaker gaps) may be a specific aspect of conversation pro-
cessing implicated in the Broad Autism Phenotype, as evidenced by the significant association between BAPQ
total score and the P3 ERP. Notably, the strength of this association remained unchanged, even after controlling
for age, sex, cognitive ability and language skills. Individuals with greater autism-associated traits seem to be
less neurally sensitive to differences between normal and atypically long pauses.
Andrés-Roqueta, C., & Katsos, N. (2017). The contribution of grammar, vocabulary and theory of mind in prag-
matic language competence in children with autistic spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article
996.
Friedman, L., & Sterling, A. (2019). A review of language, executive function, and intervention in autism spec-
trum disorder. Seminars in Speech and Language, 40(4), 291–304.
Knott, F., Dunlop, A.-W., & Mackay, T. (2006). Living with ASD: How do children and their parents assess their
difficulties with social interaction and understanding? Autism, 10(6), 609–617.

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Sharing Syntax for Complex Interactions

Lecture

Prof. Eleni Gregoromichelaki 1 , Dr. Gregory Mills 2 , Dr. Christine Howes 1


1. University of Gothenburg, 2. University of Kingston

Grammars that take a dialogical view on the formal and semantic properties of natural languages (NLs)
(Ginzburg, 2012; Gregoromichelaki et al., 2009; 2011; Eshghi et al., 2015; Ginzburg & Cooper, 2014) suggest
that integration of multiple voices in a single speaker’s utterance (“quotation mechanisms”) belong within the
remit of standard grammatical frameworks since the same mechanisms are involved in metacommunicative
conversational interaction, eg., clarifications. Gregoromichelaki (2018) goes further arguing against a separate
representational level of syntax (cf. Auer, 2009; 2014).
Instead, it is argued that our notion of “grammar” should include the fact that NL use relies on incre-
mental/predictive processing in a landscape of multimodal affordances picked up and integrated at each
word-by-word processing stage (see also, Gregoromichelaki et al., 2022). This is on the basis of data showing the
grammatical continuum underpinning various supposedly distinct quotational constructions and interactions
between quotation mechanisms and interactional phenomena (split-utterances (Gregoromichelaki et al., 2011),
“mixed syntax” (Slama-Cazacu, 1976), code-switching, puns, non-verbal demonstrations (Clark & Gerrig, 1990;
Clark, 2019; Keevallik, 2013):

Stanley: Louis, I [ref: Stanley] just didn’t [ NPI−licensor] think


Louis: you [ref: Stanley ] ’d ever [ NPI ] hear from me [ref: Louis ] ?
[[continuation & clarification & confirmation request & quotation]]

Jem: Mary, whatever it is you think you know you mustn’t speak of it. Not if you want to stay safe.
Mary: says the horse-thief
[BBC Transcripts, Jamaica Inn, Episode 1]
Miriam: That is the nastiest, dirtiest thing anyone has ever done
Patience: says Black Peter’s strumpet! What are you crying for?
[Jamaica Inn, Episode 1]
Here participants share and adapt grammatical resources that cut across traditional boundaries of syn-
tax/semantics/pragmatics, subordinate/coordinate clause structure, but also notions of footing, epistemics, and
accountability.
The need for such an approach to grammar is also indicated by research on text- and VR-mediated commu-
nication (Mills, 2014; Mills and Gregoromichelaki, 2010; Mills, 2014; Mills et al., 2021). In such cases, action
coordination is established and maintained through resources that are not the linguistic units or constructions
standard theories assume while the effects of mediating technology show the need for expanding our views of
what language use might involve. As human-to-human interactions become increasingly machine-mediated,
the “written language bias” (Linell, 2005) is no longer justified even for written language: text-mediated com-
munication has become conversational, fragmentary, informal but also multimodal through the use of visual
elements like emojis and images as well as sounds and video. The means of communication now available
also support a view of diffused cognition and agency distributed across groups living within human-machine
ecosystems.
These developments in language use and associated mediating technology require reconsideration of traditional
linguistic models to accommodate the integrated use of new styles and resources and the technological and
societal challenges posed by the role of AI-mediated communications we now face in everyday life. We propose a

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dynamic, incremental perspective that takes joint action in a sociomaterial context as the basis for the definition
of the grammar (DS-TTR, Purver et al., 2010; Eshghi et al., 2015; Howes and Eshghi, 2021).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social action formats across languages: The case of initial


proposals in German and Finnish messaging

Lecture

Dr. Katharina König 1 , Dr. Aino Koivisto 2


1. WWU Münster, 2. University of Helsinki

Proposals for a shared future activity are a social action in which issues of entitlement, necessity or commitment
are negotiated (Asmuß/Oshima 2012, Couper-Kuhlen 2014, Stevanovic/Peräkylä 2012). In recent years, Interac-
tional Linguistics has begun to study the different formats with which proposals are routinely implemented.
In English, for instance, speakers take the likelihood of acceptance into account when they choose between
lexically specified proposals, modal declaratives or modal interrogatives (Thompson et al. 2021). Moreover,
sequentiality plays a role: In initial position, speakers rather ask for or solicit proposals. Only later do they use
declarative formats (Robinson/Kevoe-Feldman 2016).
To date, proposals have mainly been studied in spoken interaction, often in institutional contexts. Despite their
importance in everyday conduct, they are sometimes hard to detect in larger corpora (Stivers/Sidnell 2016). In
contrast, text-based interaction in messenger chats yields an abundance of proposing actions. Based on recent
advances in digital conversation analysis (Giles et al. 2015), our paper will be concerned with initial propos-
als in German and Finnish WhatsApp group chats. Our comparative analysis aims at identifying the varying
routinised action formats texters apply to communicate “benefactive symmetry” characteristic of the action
(Clayman/Heritage 2014, Couper-Kuhlen 2014). It also highlights aspects of routinisation as it is afforded by the
organisation of digital interaction in pre-set groups.
We will show that interrogative formats are prominent in both, Finnish and German. However, the languages
differ substantially in terms of how proposals are modalised (conditional mood, modal verbs, modal particles)
and how agents are left unspecified (impersonal verb constructions, indefinite pronouns, ellipsis).
We will discuss the interplay between social action, sequentiality, language-specific resources and technological
affordances. With this we hope to show how an action-based approach to digital interaction can engender
questions for future conversation-analytic research of action formation.
References
Asmuß, Birte/Oshima, Sae (2012): “Negotiation of entitlement in proposal sequences”. Discourse Studies 1/14:
67–86.
Clayman, Steven/Heritage, John (2014): “Benefactors and beneficiaries. Benefactive status and stance in the
management of offers and requests”. In: Drew, Paul/Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (eds.): Requesting in Social Inter-
action. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 55–86.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (2014): “What does grammar tell us about action?”. Pragmatics 3/24: 623–647.
Giles, David et al. (2015): “Microanalysis of online data. The methodological development of “digital CA””.
Discourse, Context & Media 7: 45–51.
Robinson, Jeffrey D./Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi (2016): “The Accountability of Proposing (vs. Soliciting Proposals of)
Arrangements”. In: Robinson, Jeffrey D. (ed.): Accountability in Social Interaction. New York: Oxford University
Press: 264–293.
Stevanovic, Melisa/Peräkylä, Anssi (2012): “Deontic authority in interaction. The right to announce, propose,
and decide”. Research on Language & Social Interaction 3/45: 297–321.
Stivers, Tanya/Sidnell, Jack (2016): “Proposals for activity collaboration”. Research on Language and Social In-
teraction 2/49: 148–166.
Thompson, Sandra A./Fox, Barbara A./Raymond, Chase Wesley (2021): “The grammar of proposals for joint ac-
tivities”. Interactional Linguistics 1/1: 123–151.

1484
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Social Inclusion through Language within a Multilingual


Academic Setting

Lecture

Ms. Anthonia Bamidele 1


1. University of Limerick

The spread of English across the world seems to inform the need for social interactions and inclusion amongst
people who come from diverse multicultural and multilingual backdrops. This makes social inclusion through
language, within the workplace contexts to be accentuated especially in Arabic speaking countries like Bahrain
where English is recognised as a major international language used mainly in Business and Education (Verman-
dere, Vangehuchten, & Van Herck, 2019; Amara, 2018; Angouri, 2013). This research focused on the international
workers in Bahrain who use English and other languages that are available to them in their conversations. This
pilot study investigated through research the following questions: What languages are prevalent and notably
present amongst various multinationals as members of a community of practice within a multilingual academic
setting? And how do these multinationals manage their different language ideologies and experiences using
English in comparisons to other languages in relation to language choice and language use in a multilingual
academic setting? The objective was to identify language features that were found in the data such as work-
place discourse and workplace language policy using the analytical framework of Spolsky’s (2009) Language
Management Theory. The pilot study adopted a mixed method approach, using quantitative and qualitative
methods in collecting and analysing the data. The survey questions collected demographic profiles such as gen-
der, staff category, age range, nationality, work tenure. Other sections included language proficiency, language
competency, and language use in the workplace. The audio interviews with self-selecting participants, deter-
mined the participants’ perceptions and attitudes towards language use in the workplace. Consequently, the
reliance on survey questions and audio interviews for the preliminary findings, served as the basis for identi-
fying experiences with language in general and potential language policies and ideologies. Hence, the study on
social inclusion reflects the language choices that are applicable in a multilingual academic setting, highlights
the multi-diversity language structures, and indicates which languages are generally permissible for official or
social interactions. It also proffers the apparent need for acceptance of a language policy when most interna-
tional workers come from different countries and speak diverse languages.
References
Amara, M. (2018). Challenges of Arabic language education policies in the Arab World. In The Routledge Hand-
book of Arabic Linguistics (1st ed., pp. 546–559). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315147062-32
Angouri, J. (2013). The multilingual reality of the multinational workplace: language pol-
icy and language use. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(6), 564–581.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.807273
Spolsky, B. (2009). Language Management, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vermandere, D., Vangehuchten, L., and Van Herck, R. (2019). ‘Language policy evaluation in business settings’,
European journal of language policy, 11(1), 25–46.
https://doi.org/10.3828/ejlp.2019.3

1485
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Some Remarks on the Pragmatics of the GPT-3

Lecture

Dr. Sung Do Kim 1


1. Korea University

Some super-powerful AIs like GPT-3 are proficient in syntax and semantics but they still lack pragmatics that
lives in social context, common and tatic knowledge, subjective experience, shared reality, emotion, and body.
In fact, pragmatic information and understanding cannot be controled by data and statistics. Large language
models need to be embodied and live in a social and pragmatic reality. GPT-3 can’t access contextual and prag-
matic information that make possible human conversation. From the point of ethical pragmatics, GPT-3 other
LLMs can be fooled into producing racist, sexist, and biased content that’s deviant from common sense and
devoid of proper sensibilities. These AIs can generate algorithmic written and spoken text and even produce
coherent narraives that have the potential to pass the Turing test. Language is hard, because it is constructed
by layers of situational and social context, intent, emotion. The GPT-3 cannot extract all these pragmatic ele-
ments from words that don’t contain pragmatics. The same sequence of words, ’Do you love me ?” pronounced
between a man and a woman could have fundamentally different pragmatic implicatures in different social
situations. Large-scale language technologies become pervasively used in various forms of communication.
One particular modality is conversational agents that raise a number of social pragmatic issues. In this paper,
we will examine conversational capacity of LLM training paradigm through the lens of pragmatics. We will
provide pragmatic evidences to explain why GPT-3 will not replace the cognitive dynamics of human conver-
sation. In the same time, we will make some suggestions to make align conversational capacity of the LLM with
pragmatic norms. We will start by developing a pragmatic analysis of the architecture of linguistic communica-
tion between human interlocutors and conversational agents of AI. We will then apply this pragmatic model to
formulate adequate norms and rules that might govern linguistic communication between two kinds of agents.
Three main domains of this pragmatic modelling are causal inference, grounding knowledge, and emotion. As
a dataset to test a pragmatic relevance and capacity of the most recent ChatGPT’s dialogue, there are two cat-
egories. I will cast 10 prompts in this pragmatic research to verify the question: can this program understand
causal inference , grounding, contextual information ? The second category of data will be constructed by the
meta-pragmatic dialogue with the ChatGPT. Namely I will check its pragmatic knowledge through a real time di-
alogue about its depth and width of pragmatic knowledge concerning some key concepts such as illocutionnary
and perlocutionnary effect , inference, context.

1486
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speech act and ideological analysis of media report on


selected Boko Haram operation in Nigeria

Lecture

Mrs. Abiodun Ayeni 1


1. Veritas University Abuja

Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād popularly known as Boko Haram (BK) is a hallmark name
that identifies a terrorist sect which believes that Western education is forbidden and, unleashes terror on
educational institutions, as well as on all who believe in, or propagate the education. To them, anyone who
believes in Western education and spreads it is a kafir, which means an infidel in Islam. This Islamic sect
which is largely found in Nigeria believes also that politics in Northern Nigeria has been hijacked by a group of
corrupt false Muslims -kafir. So, the sect wants to wage a war against them and a Jihad -holy war- against the
republic of Nigeria in totality to create an unadulterated Islamic state ruled by sharia law. As a consequence,
this terrorist sect has persistently unleashed physical, mental and verbal terror on Nigerians who do not
share their belief. The Boko Haram sect make use of the widest range of social media platforms to ensure
they are widely heard. These platforms include; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp and a host of others.

Previous linguistic studies on the sect have focused on stance, ideology and speech function (mainly speech and
pragmatic acts) with little attention paid to the combined occurrences of speech acts and ideological positions in
BH discourses. This paper, therefore, investigated the kinds of speech acts the Boko Haram terrorists employed
in their broadcast between 2012 to 2017 in buttressing their ideology about Western education and enforcing
the sharia law in Nigeria. Data was taken from posts relating to BH activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and
WhatsApp, and was analysed using John Searle’s speech acts theory and van Dijk’s model of critical discourse
analysis. The findings reveal the following speech acts in the sampled BH discourses: intimidation, blackmail,
incitement and coercion, which are constructed in social and cognitive contexts. In the social contexts, the
speech acts instantiate religious extremism, sect-based emotionalism and political defensiveness. In the cogni-
tive contexts, the acts express fear and anxiety. The ideological manifestations of the speech acts connected to
the two contexts are separatism and Islamic fundamentalism.

1487
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speech Act Theory of Quotation: Quotation, Indirect


Quotation and Japanese Quasi-quotation

Lecture

Prof. Etsuko Oishi 1


1. Tokyo University of Science

Issues of quotation have attracted philosophers’ and linguists’ interest from the mid-20th century. Philosophers
took notice of uniqueness of pure quotation, and the use-mention distinction was introduced to account for it.
Theories such as (Proper) Name Theory (Quine 1940; Tarski 1956), Demonstrative Theory (Davidson 1979) and
Identity Theory (Frege 1892; Searle 1969; Washington 1992) were advocated to describe pure quotation, while
other types of quotation, namely, mixed quotation (Davidson 1979, Cappelen Lepore 1997), scare/emphatic
quotes (Predelli 2003, Abbott 2003) and open quotation (Recanati 2001, 2010) pose challenges.
To adequately analyze these types of quotation, the present lecture introduces a discourse-oriented speech act
theory of quotation: (i) a phone, a pheme and a rheme as a locutionary act (Austin [1962]1975: 91-92) are en-
closed within quotation marks and (ii) how each contributes to the meaning of the utterance depends on the
type of the illocutionary act the whole utterance performs (i.e., illocutionary-act-type sensitive). The theory is ex-
tended to explain differences between direct/mixed/open quotation and indirect quotation: a direct/mixed/open
quotation is used when (i) the rhetic act in the original discourse was significant for performing the illocution-
ary act and (ii) indicating the rhetic act in the original discourse is important for producing illocutionary and
perlocutionary act in the current discourse. To scrutinize illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of quoting
further, the lecture describes a type of quasi-quotation in Japanese: by putting sentence-final particles which
indicate (i) the speaker’s affirmation and request for the hearer’s confirmation or (ii) the speaker’s doubt and
question for the hearer (as a tag question in English) at the clause-final position, the speaker brings to the cur-
rent discourse the affirmation or doubt as if it is a quotation of the illocutionary effect produced in another
discourse.
References
Abbott, Barbara. 2003. Some notes on quotation. In Philippe De Brabanter (ed.), Hybrid quotations, 13–26.
Amsterdam:John Benjamins.
Austin, J. L., [1962]1975. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cappelen, Herman & Ernest Lepore. 1997. Varieties of quotation. Mind 106. 429-450.
Davidson, Donald. 1979. Quotation. Theory of Decision 11. 27-40. (Reprinted in Davison 1984: 79-82.)

Frege, Gottlob. 1892. On sense and reference. In Peter Geach & Max Black (eds.), Translations from the philo-
sophical writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.
Predelli, Stefano. 2003. Scare quotes and their relation to other semantics issues. Linguistics and Philosophy 26.
1-28.
Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1940. Mathematical Logic. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Recanati, François. 2001. Open quotation. Mind 110. 637-687.
Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-conditional pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Searle, John, 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarski, Alfred. 1956. The concept of truth in formalized languages. In Logic, semantics, metamathematics:
Papers from 1923-1938, 152-178, tr. J. H. Woodger. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Washington, Corey. 1992. The identity theory of quotation. Journal of Philosophy 89. 582–605.

1488
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speech and thought presentation: the norms and


contemporary present-tense fiction

Lecture

Prof. Reiko Ikeo 1


1. Senshu University

This paper discusses how the concept of the norms of speech and thought presentation is related to how speech
and thought is presented in actual texts with reference to contemporary present-tense fiction, and thereby,
reviews the meaning of the norms. Leech and Short (1981) argue in Style in Fiction that the norm or baseline for
the presentation of speech is DS (direct speech) and the norm for thought presentation is IT (indirect speech).
The “norm” is explained in terms of the “semantics of reporting”; how speech and thoughts are formed and
(re)presented in social practice including literary fiction. Leech and Short explain that speech can be observed
and perceived by others and thus it can be represented in the form in which it is directly manifest to the listener,
using the original speaker’s words and expressions. On the other hand, thoughts, they argue, are not accessible
to direct perception and this results in a presentational mode which conveys only the content of what was
thought being acceptable as the norm.
Two decades later, Semino and Short (2004) tested Leech and Short’s claim with their corpus data, consisting of
both fictional and non-fictional texts. Semino and Short state that their data lends quantitative support to Leech
and Short’s claim. As for speech presentation, Semino and Short have shown that the direct forms are the most
frequent of all the forms in both the fictional and non-fictional sections. With thought presentation, Semino and
Short report that FIT (free indirect thought) is the most frequent of the thought presentation categories.
Contemporary present-tense fiction also seems to have a different configuration of speech and thought presen-
tation categories. In my corpus data of 21st -century present-tense fiction, direct forms of speech are the most
frequent, which additionally confirms Leech and Short’s claim about the norm for speech presentation. For
thought presentation, the data show that FDT (free direct thought) is the most frequent category. This does not
agree with the norm of thought presentation. The analyses of present-tense narrative additionally indicate that
both direct and indirect forms of thought presentation are used.
In the two corpora discussed above, the norm of speech presentation has been confirmed as direct speech, but
the categories which are most frequently used in thought presentation do not agree with the norm. However,
this does not necessarily justify abandoning the idea of the norm of thought presentation. These disagreements
of the most frequent thought presentation categories can be explained by the term of deviation from the norm.
The discrepancy between the norm and the corpus data of the thought presentation categories also suggests
that the concept of the norm should be defined within the scope of a bigger, more general corpus.
References
Leech, G. and Short, M. 1981. Style in Fiction. London: Longman.
Semino, E. and Short, M. 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English
Writing. London: Routledge.

1489
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Speech reporting in a historical socio-pragmatic perspective:


an investigation of 18th- and 19th-century Flemish witness
depositions

Lecture

Ms. Magda Serwadczak 1


1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Universiteit Antwerpen

Represented speech is generally considered to play a pivotal role in courtroom discourse, especially in trial
proceedings (cf. Collins 2001, Grund & Walker 2021). Case decision-making often entails a continuous negoti-
ation of words and meaning, and requires witnesses and suspects to frequently engage in ((in)direct) speech
reporting. This, however, involves a series of complex choices made by speech reporters, who attempt to elicit
past speech events and allow the audience to interpret them. Specific representation strategies might be used
to construct the credibility of the reporter or to influence the audience’s perception of past speech events and
those involved in them. Although speech reporting (in institutional contexts) has received quite a great deal of
attention in synchronic linguistic inquiries, diachronic studies, especially in Dutch, remain limited.
In an attempt to fill this gap, this study investigates a corpus of 18th - and 19th -century witness depositions used
in trial cases held at Flemish courts. The corpus currently entails 3,191 documents (1,122,785 words) from the
Belgian National Archives in Bruges (Rijksarchief Brugge), which had been transcribed and digitized as part of
the Witnesses project (www.getuigenissen.org). They are examples of speech-based texts, which means that they
are based on actual, real-life speech events. For the purpose of trial proceedings, oral testimonies delivered by
the witnesses and suspects were committed to paper by legal scribes. Therefore, studying represented speech
not only entails investigating the choices made by speakers (the original speech reporters), but also potentially
those made by the courtroom scribes.
The current study sets out to explore different forms of reported speech preserved in the corpus. In doing so,
a variety of speech representation devices is investigated, with an empirical focus put on speech tags (particu-
larly speech introducing verbs) and reporting expressions. The goal of the study is twofold: on the one hand to
determine if speech representation devices are context-sensitive and subject to sociolinguistic variation and on
the other to see if the (relative) stability of their use changes with time. As it has previously been observed that
modern-day system of marking speech does not in fact mirror the historical strategies of speech representation
(Grund & Walker 2021), inductive analysis of the corpus is carried out: witness depositions and suspect interro-
gations are individually scanned in search for speech representation devices. Once the features had been found
and tagged, a quantitative statistical analysis is carried out in order to count their frequency and distribution
across texts. Overall, this study seeks to shed more light on represented speech in historical contexts in Dutch
and answer questions about the relations between form and function of specific speech reporting devices.

1490
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Spoken and Written L1 and L2 Narratives: A Cross-Modal


Approach

Lecture

Dr. Keiko Nakamura 1


1. Meikai University

There has been a significant amount of research on the similarities and differences between spoken and written
discourse, with spoken discourse being described as structurally simple and informal, and written discourse be-
ing considered as structurally more elaborated, complex and formal (e.g., Chafe, 1982). Research comparing spo-
ken and written narratives has also reported both similarities and differences (e.g., Tannen, 1982; Strömqvist,
Nordqvist & Wengelin, 2004). Differences in processing constraints in written narratives allow for more careful
planning, revising, and monitoring in the production process. Written narratives have been found to show a
greater variety of vocabulary, as well as more lexical and syntactic complexity (e.g., dependent clauses, nom-
inalizations, adjectival and adverbial clauses). Furthermore, in written narratives, writers need to lexicalize
and grammaticalize information that may be conveyed in spoken narratives through non-linguistic and par-
alinguistic channels, such as gestures and prosody.
This study uses a large database of narratives by L1 English and L1 Japanese narrators, as well as Japanese learn-
ers of English (L2), to explore the similarities and differences between spoken narratives and written narratives.
Although the database itself contains a wide variety of narratives (e.g., personal narratives, fictional narratives,
collaborative narratives), comparisons will be made by focusing specifically on elicited narratives, to facilitate
systematic comparisons between the spoken and written narratives. The elicited narratives were collected us-
ing the wordless picture book, Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969), adapting the Frog Story paradigm (Slobin &
Berman, 1994). There were two narrative modes: (1) spoken narratives and (2) written narratives (handwritten
and online), and three groups of narrators: (1) L1 English narrators (100); (2) L1 Japanese narrators (100); and
(3) Japanese learners of English (100). Spoken and handwritten narratives were transcribed and all narratives
were coded. The three narratives modes were analyzed for length, lexical and syntactic complexity, and various
discourse strategies (e.g., referential strategies).
Results showed differences in length, lexical and syntactic complexity, and various discourse strategies (e.g.,
referential strategies). In general, the written narratives, regardless of whether they were handwritten or on-
line, were longer and more complex, in terms of propositional content and lexical and syntactic complexity.
However, similarities were also observed. For example, strategies creating involvement in spoken narratives
(e.g., direct speech) which were found in the written narratives. Differences between handwritten and online
written narratives were also observed.
Selected References
Chafe, W. (1982). Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In D. Tannen (Ed.)
Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy. Ablex.
Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you? Dial Press.
Slobin, D. & Berman, R. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Strömqvist, S., Nordqvist, A. & Wengelin, A. (2004). Writing the Frog Story: Developmental and cross-modal per-
spectives. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoven. (Eds.) Relating events in narrative Vol. 2: Typological and contextual
perspectives (pp. 359-394). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tannen, D. (1982). Oral and literate strategies in spoken and written narratives. Language, 58(1), 1-21.

1491
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stance alignment in television sportscasting of a high school


baseball tournament game – another case of open
communication in Japanese

Lecture

Ms. Tomoko Nagayama 1


1. Kanagawa University

This paper discusses Japanese sportscasting talk-in-interaction of a high school baseball game from an interac-
tional sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on stance alignment (Du Bois, 2007) in the talk. With the announcing
and the commentary, which Ferguson (1983) points out, sportscasting counts as a case of open communication:
actual participants expect distant audience as side participants who stay away from the physical space of the
talk and at least one of the actual participants acts as facilitator to provide “empathy channel” (Okamoto, 2018),
which intends to have those expected side participants share and empathise with the ongoing situations. I ana-
lyzed a videorecording of a televised sportscasting of a high school baseball tournament game at the prefectural
stage of Kanagawa, Japan, in 2022 , which was broadcast live by the local television network in the region with
a TV professional announcer and an expert commentator. Typically, the announcer presented the stance lead
and invited the commentator to provide the stance follow rhythmically, sequentially and historically within as
well as across successive events in the ongoing game. This case of open communication necessitates the verbal
articulation of the actual participants to be heard by the expected side participants. Seemingly acting as the
empathy channel, the announcer frequently presented the stance lead and tried to involve his interlocutor in
the local stance alignment. Interactional stance alignments of the participants, however, varied depending on
which phases of the sportscasting they put themselves in. In the announcing the announcer usually did not ask
for the commentator’s confirmation, which in a sharp contrast he frequently carried out in the commentary. It
is certainly true that the commentary phase presumes some prior event(s) to metapragmatically comment on
and accordingly the commenting utterance is likely to become the stance follow. It should be noted, however,
that it is not so unusual for the two phases of sportscasting to inseparably get fused in the talk-in-interaction. The
institutional distinction between the participants did not exactly match the discursive classification between the
announcing and the commentary: the announcer, who appeared to have represented the expected side partic-
ipants in this case of open communication, presented his interpretation and verbally attempted to solicit some
kinds of expert words of endorsement. Consequently, the stance lead by the announcer was frequent, while the
commentator remained quite amenable offering few substantial remarks. These phenomena I suspect might
prove certain traces of the discourse of high school baseball sportscasting in Japan.
References
Du Bois, J. W. (2007) The stance triangle. In Englebreston, R. (Ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Eval-
uation, Interaction, 139-182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Ferguson, Charles A. (1983) “Sports announcer talk: Syntactic aspects of register variation” Language in Society
12(2), 153-172.
Okamoto, Masashi (2018) “Kikitekoudou ga haramu nijuu no tashashikousei – Manzai no tsukkomi kara miru
kikitekoudou kennkyuu no shatei” (Double other-orientedness that listenership contains – a research range
covered with studies of listener behavior from a perspective of the thrust of manzai), 59-88. In Murata, K (ed.)
Research on Listenership in Communication Studies. Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobo.

1492
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Sustainability communication as an identity-negotiation


strategy: A case study of Instagram business accounts from
the food industry

Lecture

Dr. Marie-Louise Brunner 1


1. Trier University of Applied Sciences, Environment Campus Birkenfeld

Sustainable business models provide a competitive advantage, particularly in the medium and long term (Bonini
& Swartz 2014). However, if companies are unable to successfully communicate their sustainable achievements
and impact, they are unable to profit from this effect. Sustainability communication is a complex topic since
it has to strike a balance between making concepts easily understandable for the public and the incredibly
complicated realities of sustainability research (Prexl 2010). One site where this balance needs to be constantly
met are social media.
The study uses a multimodal discourse analysis (O’Halloran 2011) approach to analyze data from 10 German
and 10 English Instagram accounts of companies and NGOs from the food industry selling sustainable products.
The analyzed business accounts were selected based on their active use of Instagram as well as the sustainable
concepts and presentations of their products and companies.
My analysis investigates how sustainability communication is used to contribute to creating a brand identity and
focuses on three basic identity negotiation strategies that can be subsumed from previous research (see Brunner
2021): 1) I explore how companies’ own identities are foregrounded by using sustainability communication. 2)
I analyze how a differentiation from a perceived ‘Other’ (non-sustainable) product can contribute to creating
a company’s own identity. 3) I analyze how companies carefully position themselves in the context of a larger
societal discourse on sustainability.
This study provides first insights into how sustainability communication works as an identity-negotiation strat-
egy in a business context on Instagram. Findings show that companies develop their own specific identity and
style on Instagram which creates a consistent image in terms of sustainability. The Instagram account often
becomes an extension of the website and is used for more personal interactions and engagement, to demon-
strate impact on a more personal level, and, of course, to showcase the product and the sustainable concept in
the best light. All in all, the analyzed food companies are very good examples of how sustainable concepts can
contribute to building a successful brand image on Instagram.
References:
Bonini, S., & Swartz, S.. 2014. Profits with purpose: How organizing for sustainability can benefit the bottom
line. McKinsey & Company.
Brunner, Marie-Louise. 2021. Understanding intercultural communication: Negotiating meaning and identities
in English as a Lingua Franca Skype conversations. Berlin: J.B. Metzler.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2011). Multimodal discourse analysis. The Bloomsbury companion to discourse analysis, ed.
by Ken Hyland; and Brian Paltridge, 120-137.
Prexl, A. (2010). Nachhaltigkeit kommunizieren – nachhaltig kommunizieren. Analyse des Potenzials der Public
Relations für eine nachhaltige Unternehmens- und Gesellschaftsentwicklung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag.

1493
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Task openings during EFL oral proficiency exams

Lecture

Mr. David Ryska 1


1. Masaryk University

In this presentation, I focus on how university English as a foreign language (EFL) students use English in a
paired or grouped speaking task during an oral proficiency exam. Although students are supposed to cooperate
during the task, discuss a given set of ideas, share their views, and arrive at a mutual decision, and although
the rating criteria for exams such as those within the Cambridge English Qualifications include a category seem-
ingly related to the concept of interactional competence (Hall & Pekarek Doehler, 2011), the assessment is usu-
ally based primarily on the quality of a candidate’s monologue while dialogic and interactional abilities are
overlooked (Huth, 2021; Roever & Ikeda, 2021). Recent years have therefore seen attempts to describe various
manifestations of learners’ interactional competence in the oral assessment setting with the aim to distinguish
interactional features across various levels of proficiency and thus contribute towards the creation of rating
scales which would better reflect natural interaction. While many of these studies focus on collaborative turn
construction in general (e.g. Lam, 2018; Rydell, 2019; Hırçın-Çoban & Sert, 2020; Hırçın-Çoban & Çimenli, 2022),
little attention has been given to a systematic description of how the designedly collaborative exam tasks are
initiated by learners after having received instructions from the interlocutor.
My analysis builds on the dataset of video-recordings featuring 44 paired or grouped interactions between Czech
university EFL students who are taking an oral proficiency exam that follows the B2 First format (assessment
criteria included). By employing the method of multimodal Conversation Analysis, I investigate the variety
and complexity of both verbal and multimodal resources employed by students with various final test score to
initiate the collaborative task and develop it into a fully-fledged discussion.
The findings have revealed that a successful task initiation is largely dependent on two factors: 1) the com-
plexity of resources used by a student to formulate the first discussion topic or a question and to relinquish
the floor afterwards, and 2) the other student(s)’ ability to produce a contingent first response. Regarding 1),
the first turns of higher-scoring students are generally shorter, more frequently accompanied by gazing at the
co-participants to monitor their recipiency and to signal a potential transition-relevance place (Goodwin, 1981),
and concluded by an opinion-seeking question (e.g. “what do you think?”, see e.g. Balen et al., 2022). As for 2),
while higher-scoring students are able to follow up on the first turn by paraphrasing, summarising, or in other
ways extending the previous contribution (cf. Lam, 2018), their lower-scoring peers orient extensively to the
task prompts instead, opening a new topic without addressing the previous one.
The discussed findings expand our understanding of the construct of interactional competence and its devel-
opment, particularly in relation to topic management and recipient design, and have the potential to inform
future oral assessment practices.

1494
18th International Pragmatics Conference

That’s everything we need: Everything-cleft constructions in


spoken British English

Lecture

Ms. Eleni Seitanidi 1 , Dr. Nele Põldvere 2 , Prof. Carita Paradis 1


1. Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, 2. Lund University/University of Oslo

This study examines the use of everything in cleft constructions in spoken British English (everything that we
do is evidence-based). It investigates if everything in such constructions, in addition to having a quantificational
function, can also create the smallness and the exhaustive meanings which have been considered character-
istic of all- rather than everything-cleft constructions (Tellings, 2020, p. 6). The ‘smallness’ contribution of all
expresses the idea that what is being discussed is ‘not much’, whereas its exhaustive reading expresses the
meaning of something being ‘no more than’, e.g., all (that) John ate for lunch was a banana (Homer, 2019, p. 1;
AUTHORS, forthcoming).
We use the Spoken British National Corpus (BNC) 1994 (BNC Consortium, 2007), the Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al.,
2017), London—Lund Corpus 1 (Greenbaum & Svartvik, 1990) and London—Lund Corpus 2 (AUTHORS, 2021)
totalling 22.9 million words to address two questions:

1. How frequent are everything-cleft constructions in spoken British English?


2. What are the formal and semantic properties of everything-cleft constructions?

We approach these questions from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective (e.g., Langacker, 2016) focusing on the
construction’s contexts of use. We combine quantitative and qualitative analysis by analysing the frequency of
occurrence of everything-clefts, their constructional variants and pragmatic functions.
Fifty-five everything-cleft constructions occurred in our data. Regular everything-clefts (everything I do is
right) were the most frequent (71%—39 instances), followed by demonstrative/ deictic everything-clefts (that’ s
everything we need) (24%—13 instances), and reversed everything-clefts (the bibliography is everything you’ve
used to influence you) (5%—3 instances). In the regular everything-cleft constructions, which often contain
evaluations, everything has a quantificational function meaning ‘all the things discussed in the everything
clause’. However, when it occurs after the copula, everything can create the exhaustivity reading which is
associated with clefts and all-clefts, but not the smallness reading. Instead, everything can at times create a
sufficiency reading whereby what is discussed is ‘enough’.

References
AUTHORS (forthcoming)
AUTHORS (2021)
BNC Consortium. (2007). The British National Corpus, XML Edition. Oxford Text Archive.
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554
Greenbaum, S., & Svartvik, J. (1990). The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English. In J. Svartvik (Ed.), The
London-Lund corpus of spoken English: Description and research (pp. 11–59). Lund University Press.
Homer, V. (2019). That’s all. In R. Stockwell, M. O’Leary, Z. Xu, & Z. L. Zhou (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th West
Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 1–21). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Langacker, R. W. (2016). Nominal grounding and English quantifiers. 3(1), 1–31. BDSL (Bibliographie der
Deutschen Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft).
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and build-
ing a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319–344.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov

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Tellings, J. (2020). An analysis of all-clefts. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5(1), 111.
https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1092

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Babel Fish Out of Water: Discourse-Pragmatic Variation


and the Role of Contact Languages in World Englishes

Lecture

Dr. Sven Leuckert 1


1. Technische Universität Dresden

World Englishes research is inexorably tied to the investigation of languages in contact with English: Regional
substrate languages (i) are in direct competition with English in various contexts, (ii) are used in conjunction
with English in code-switching and translanguaging (e.g. Dovchin 2021), and (iii) heavily influence the linguistic
features that eventually become nativised parts of World Englishes on all linguistic levels (Sharma 2009), includ-
ing pragmatic features (see Chapter 5 in Mesthrie & Bhatt 2008). While a lot of important research on World
Englishes is carried out by linguists in former colonies of England and the USA who are speakers of relevant
contact languages, a significant bulk of World Englishes research is produced by linguists in Western contexts
for whom this is likely not the case.
In this contribution, I intend to illustrate the importance of in-depth typological knowledge of relevant contact
languages by means of two case studies on discourse-pragmatic phenomena in Indian English (IndE), specifically
topicalization (Lange 2012; Leuckert 2019) and the ‘intrusive as’ construction (Lange 2016). While both features
are linguistically complex and can only be understood properly by including a range of intra- and extra-linguistic
factors, the typological structure of their contact languages emerges as crucial in their analysis. Both features
are used more frequently when a language user is proficient in a contact language that has a similar structure.
However, as Sharma (2009) notes for various features of IndE, the situation is not one of 1:1 transfer but, instead,
transfer depends on specific morphosyntactic constraints that are often difficult to disentangle for researchers
with little or no proficiency in the respective language(s).
From a methodological point of view, I argue that, in line with decolonization efforts, World Englishes scholars
should not discard contact languages as secondary in importance but instead put emphasis on them. In addition
to addressing the impact of contact languages in World Englishes contexts, this can be done by thorough analysis
of their typological make-up and devoting space in research products to them. More importantly, however,
directly involving researchers and speakers of contact languages – if possible – can shine a light on their work
and provides a kind of access to contact languages that is not possible otherwise.
References
Dovchin, Sender (2021). “Translanguaging, emotionality, and English as a Second Language immigrants: Mon-
golian background women in Australia.” TESOL Quarterly 55(3): 839-865.
Lange, Claudia (2012). The Syntax of Spoken Indian English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lange, Claudia (2016). “The ‘intrusive as’-construction in South Asian varieties of English.” World Englishes
35(1): 133-146.
Leuckert, Sven (2019). Topicalization in Asian Englishes: Forms, Functions, and Frequencies of a Fronting Con-
struction. London: Routledge.
Mesthrie, Rajend & Rakesh M. Bhatt (2008). World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sharma, Devyani (2009). “Typological diversity in New Englishes.” English World-Wide 30(2): 170-195.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The commodification of pluricentricity in language teaching:


Taiwanese Mandarin teachers in the neoliberal gig economy

Lecture

Ms. Sandra Kaltenegger 1


1. City University of Hong Kong

Neoliberalism and the rise of the gig economy have caused a major shift in the labor market for language-related
service providers. In traditional forms of employment, the employer took up the role of intermediary who
matches clients with service providers, yet a growing number of service providers now rely on digital platforms
to find their clients directly (Vallas & Schor, 2020). These online trading sites allow them to access a ‘planetary
labor market’ (Graham & Anwar, 2019) that transcends the spatial limitations of traditional labor markets, yet it
also makes them linguistic entrepreneurs in that they need to “strategically exploit language-related resources
for enhancing [their] worth in the world” (De Costa et al., 2016, p. 696). This environment of self-branding
or self-marketing (Gershon, 2014) encourages the commodification of language in two ways, “language-as-skill
and language-as-identity” (Heller, 2010, p. 103)—the first relies on a taylorist regulation of language by means
of standardization and efficiency, whereas the latter highlights authenticity. The commodification of language
and its impact on language-related service providers has been studied with a particular focus on English in
relation to native speakers vs. non-native speakers (e.g. Curran & Jenks, 2022). Other language contexts and the
tensions within the group of native speakers remain less explored.
To fill this gap, this study looks into the gig economy of Chinese language teaching and Mandarin teachers
from Taiwan who offer their language teaching services on a popular online tutoring platform. This group of
participants is chosen intentionally because Taiwanese Standard Mandarin (Guóyŭ) is a pluricentric variety
of Mandarin, meaning that it differs from the dominant variety of Mainland China (Pŭtōnghuà) in terms of
not only lexis and pronunciation but also script system (traditional vs. simplified) (Kaltenegger, 2020). This
circumstance makes intralinguistic standard variation a salient issue that influences the self-marketing of Tai-
wanese Mandarin teachers on the online tutoring platform. To explore these teachers’ experiences and the
varied ways they conceptualize their selves and their linguistic repertoires within the context of neoliberalism,
this study analyzes semi-structured interviews with these teachers and their platform profiles. The analysis
takes a chronotopic-scalar approach which conceives of time and space as inherently linked to each other and to
matters of social appropriateness and linguistic normalcy within hierarchically layered power relations (Blom-
maert, 2015). Thus, this approach can simultaneously account for Taiwanese Mandarin teachers’ identity work
(Blommaert & de Fina, 2017) and imaginations of authenticity and linguistic standardness (Sanei, 2021) within
the variously scaled space-times of the neoliberal market (Park, 2017). By bringing together multiple lines of
research (chronotopy, pluricentricity, globalization), this study gains new insights into the ways in which the
pluricentric nature of a language is commodified while, at the same time, the self is constructed within a ne-
oliberal gig economy.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Copula Polarity Marker in Wagdi and its Reformulation in


Contrastive Contexts

Lecture

Mr. Vyom Sharma 1


1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

The Copula Polarity Marker in Wagdi and its Reformulation in Contrastive Contexts
This paper introduces the Copular Polarity Marker (CPM), a polarity marker for Copular Constructions (CC). I
propose that the CPM in Wagdi is a discourse-sensitive element and gets reformulated to the default proposi-
tional negator (PNEG) in a contrastive context.
The primary data in this paper is from Wagdi, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Bhil tribes and other
communities in Southern Rajasthan. In the example below, sentence 1b is the negative counterpart of sentence
1a, which is a CC. nathi in 1b is the CPM in Wagdi. It differs from the PNEG ne, which occurs with verbal
predicates, as shown in sentence 1c.
1.a. Lala rupaaro he (Wagdi)
Lala beautiful be.PRS
‘Lala is beautiful’
b. Lala rupaaro nathi
Lala beautiful CPM
‘Lala is not beautiful’
c. Lala keri ne khaa-e
Lala mango PNEG eat-IMPV
‘Lala does not eat mangoes’
I propose the following:

• CCs are not event-based propositions. The Davisonian notion of semantic event requires that it is tempo-
rally bound (Maienborn, 2011). I demonstrate that CCs are not time-bound and thus cannot be negated
by PNEG. Instead, a CC has negative polarity at the discourse level.

• The CPM in Wagdi is a polarity focus marker. Let us set up a context, which creates alternatives for the
predicate in a CC to induce contrast:

Context: Lala was sick, so he went to the hospital. He met Ram, who gave him some medicines. Lala is speaking
to Sita the next day, praising Ram as an amazing doctor. However, Sita already knows that Ram is not a doctor,
but a nurse at the hospital. The following conversation ensues:
2.a. Lala: kevu padega, ram khub asal daaktar he!
Say.INF MOD.FUT Ram very good doctor be.PRS
‘Have to say, Ram is a very good doctor!’
b. Sita: #ram DAAKTAR NATHI, nars he
c. Sita: ram DAAKTAR ne he, nars he
Ram doctor NEG be.PRS nurse be.PRS
‘Ram is not only a doctor, he is a nurse!’ (Wagdi)
I follow Poletto’s (2008) and Servidio’s(2015) account of focus polarity markers in Northern Italian Dialects (NID)
to propose that CPM nathi in Wagdi is a polarity focus marker. In example 1b, nathi generates a set of two
propositions:a world where the speaker believes Lala is beautiful, and a world where he does NOT believe Lala
is beautiful.

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As shown in example 2c, PNEG ne is allowed in a discourse that triggers a set of multiple propositions contrastive
to one another: a world where Ram is a nurse, or Ram a manager, or Ram is a doctor. But since CPM can only
generate two propositions, the CC with nathi is reformulated with PNEG ne in contrastive contexts.
References
Maienborn, Claudia. “Event semantics.” Edited by Claudia Maienborn Klaus von Heusinger (2011): 232.
Poletto, C. (2008). On negative doubling. Quaderni di lavoro ASIT, 8, 57-84.
Servidio, Emilio. “Polarity focus constructions in Italian.” (2015).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Cyclic negative nature of exceptive markers: From


implicit to explicit The case of Hebrew bilti (’not’)

Lecture

Dr. Ruti Bardenstein 1


1. Ben Gurion University and Shenkar College

The Hebrew negation adverbial bilti ‘not’ seems to function very differently in Biblical Hebrew than it does in
Contemporary Hebrew. This talk addresses this difference and discusses its evolution. The main question ad-
dressed in this paper is: How has Hebrew bilti, originally an exceptive marker (with sentential scoping), ended
up functioning solely as a privative in contemporary Hebrew? First, this paper argues that the biblical usage of
bilti was expanded and turned into a polyfunctional (or ‘polysemous’) item. This happened via a constructional-
ization process which led to grammatical changes (’grammaticalization’): The initially implicated negation (via
a generalized implicature) turned explicit (semantic). In addition, in Hebrew’s later periods, the usage of bilti
was narrowed and it became a privative. Thus, firstly, a pragmatically motivated path of constructionalization
of bilti in Biblical Hebrew is suggested. That is, the “pragmatic negation” that arose via a generalized implica-
ture shifted to the semantic level (performing semantic negation, explicit negation). Secondly, bilti’s functions
in post-biblical Hebrew periods are outlined, tracing its narrowing functions persistently until its fixation in
Contemporary Hebrew as a privative. Lastly, this general path of bilti will be claimed to be ‘universal’ or ‘cross
linguistic’ as follows:
Stage I: Exception= ‘not’ generalized implicature
Stage II: Negation + Exception= ‘only’ generalized implicature
Stage II: Negation + NPI exception = exclusive ‘only’
Stage III: Negation/Jespersen’s Cycle
Stage IV: The implicit (either ‘not’ or ‘only’) becomes grammaticalized (explicit).
Key words: Grammaticalization, Polyfunctionality, Jespersen’s Cycle, Negation, Privative, Construction.
Selected Bibliography:
Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and Other Languages. Historisk-Filologiske Meddelelser 1. Copen-
hagen: A. F. Høst.
Bardenstein, Ruti. 2020. Persistent argumentative discourse markers: The case of Hebrew rectification-marker
be-ʕecem (‘actually’). Journal of Pragmatics, 172. 254-269.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The discursive construction of maternal martyrdom in family


talk

Lecture

Dr. Domenica DelPrete 1 , Dr. Catherine Box 2


1. Columbia University, 2. University of Pennsylvania

The framing of the maternal figure as a self-sacrificing woman, who devotes herself intensely and unselfishly
to the needs of her children (Hays, 1996), has a long history in the ideological discourse of what constitutes a
“good” mother (Dillaway, 2021). This idealized version of motherhood approximates cultural representations
of the mother as a martyr. In this role, a woman forgoes her own needs and subjectivity to attend entirely to
her partner and children. Both scholarly work and writings for broader audience have addressed the negative
emotional consequences of maternal martyrdom for both a mother and her child. Despite admonitions from
mental health professionals (e.g., Lakshmin, 2020; Northrup, 2006; Secunda, 1990) to unshackle themselves from
a martyr mentality, mothers continue to index the role and explicitly equate it to good mothering. According to
Dillaway (2021), the 21st century mother often strives to embody the archetypal “supermom,” balancing work
and family, to inhabit the role of “good mother” and avoid any perception of “lesser” parenting. Despite the
robust body of work exploring the constructs of mother and martyrdom, exactly how a mother discursively
constructs herself as a martyr in interactions with her family has not been sufficiently explored.
To address this lacuna, we conducted a case study on mother-adolescent daughter interaction, which consisted
of seven and half hours of videotaped naturally occurring interaction between a mother and her cisgender
adolescent daughter in their family home. Data were analyzed primarily from an interactional sociolinguistic
perspective, proven fruitful when investigating roles and identity in family talk (e.g., Gordon, 2009; Johnson,
2018; Tannen, 2006), and transcribed utilizing the conventions of conversation analysis (Jefferson, 1988). The
following questions guided this research: First, how does the mother discursively construct herself as a mar-
tyr in conversations with her daughter? Second, what interactional consequences emerge from the mother’s
displays of martyrdom in conversations with her daughter?
Findings reveal that the mother’s discursively constructs as a martyr by: (1) victimizing herself, (2) engaging in
self-praise, and (3) denying her emotional distress. This discourse analytic study provides a microscopic view of
the discursive construction of maternal martyrdom in everyday family conversations, as well as its interactional
outcomes. It also calls for what we term discursive consciousness raising, or the prompting of individuals to
become more aware of their discursive behavior, including how other interlocutors receive this behavior. From
a broader perspective, we also aim to encourage mothers to repudiate notions of good mothering as synonymous
with martyr-like maternal practices. This increased self-awareness may result in more harmonious interactions
between mothers and their daughters.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The dynamics of coding human arguments in Datooga:


Integrating functional-typological and socio-interactional
approaches

Lecture

Dr. Alice Mitchell 1 , Ms. Mandy Lorenzen 1


1. University of Cologne

This paper investigates the coding of arguments with human referents in Datooga, a Southern Nilotic language
spoken in Tanzania. In dealing with the vast literature on argument realization, we draw on and attempt to inte-
grate two different traditions to the study of (person) reference: on the one hand, discourse-oriented, functional-
typological approaches (e.g., Givón 2017, Haig & Schnell 2016) and on the other, conversation analytic, socio-
pragmatic, and anthropological linguistic approaches, for which we use the cover term ‘socio-interactional’ (e.g.,
Enfield & Stivers 2007; Garde 2013). By combining these approaches, we aim to investigate the extent to which
the morphosyntactic realization of human arguments in Datooga is sensitive to cognitive and discourse-related
factors as well as to interactional dynamics and in particular to the social relations that hold between discourse
referents and speech participants.
Following a functional-typological line of enquiry, the paper first examines the coding properties of human ar-
guments in a corpus of narrative and conversational texts in Datooga, annotated using the GRAID scheme (Haig
& Schnell 2014). Certain cross-linguistic tendencies are borne out in the Datooga data, such as the finding that A
arguments are overwhelmingly human and typically nonlexical, in contrast to S. We assess the claim in the liter-
ature that human participants are typically introduced into the discourse via S arguments, identifying a range of
other possibilities for Datooga. We also provide quantitative details on the high levels of zero argument coding
in our corpus and consider how referent tracking might function under these circumstances. Recognizing the
highly context-specific nature of reference, we then look at human argument coding from a more fine-grained,
qualitative perspective, showing how “apparent referential obscurity” (Garde 2013:133) is partly motivated by
social-relational concerns. Local sociocultural knowledge about roles and responsibilities can also help account
for what outsider researchers may perceive as referential indeterminacy. Finally, we underline the point that
speakers’ referential choices do not only reflect cognitive, discursive, and/or social ‘principles’ but that they also
serve to create contingent indexical effects (such as displaying epistemic and affective stances towards human
referents). As such, analysts’ attempts to characterize the coding of human arguments can only ever be partial.
Enfield, N. J & Tanya Stivers. 2007. Person reference in interaction: linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garde, Murray. 2013. Culture, interaction and person reference in an Australian language: An ethnography of
Bininj Gunwok communication. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Givón, Talmy. 2017. The Story of Zero. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haig, Geoffrey & Stefan Schnell. 2014. Annotations using GRAID. Version 7.0.
Haig, Geoffrey & Stefan Schnell. 2016. The discourse basis of ergativity revisited. Language 92(3). 591–618.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The effect of explicit pragmatic instruction on production of


pragmatic routines

Lecture

Dr. Naoko Osuka 1


1. Meiji University

This study investigates the effect of explicit pragmatic instruction on acquisition of pragmatic routines used in
requests, refusals, and thanking. Pragmatic routines are multi-word strings recurrently used in the same form
by a speech community in specific situations (Bardovi-Harlig, 2012), such as “Thank you for having me” and
“No thank you”. Although there are many benefits in using pragmatic routines for communication, previous
studies have reported that it is difficult for second language (L2) learners to acquire them. The researcher has
found in her previous study that exposure to the target language during studying abroad has a very limited
effect on acquisition of pragmatic routines. A necessity for explicit pragmatic instruction was suggested, and
this study was designed. Thirty-three Japanese college students participated in this study. They received three
one-hour periods of instruction once a week for three weeks. One lesson focused on one speech act. Each lesson
consisted of a noticing-the-gap activity, metapragmatic explanation, and production practice. In the noticing-
the-gap activity, the participants compared their own speech act performance and the native speaker models
to notice the gap between them. Then the researcher gave them metapragmatic information about the target
pragmatic routines, such as the level of politeness and directness. Finally, in the production practice, the par-
ticipants were given several situations to practice using the target pragmatic routines in pairs. Evaluation was
conducted through a computer-animated production task (CAPT). The CAPT is a kind of oral Discourse Comple-
tion Tasks (DCTs) which uses animation videos to help the participants understand the situations clearly. The
CAPT used for this study was developed by the researcher, and it included 16 scenarios with 20 target pragmatic
routines. The participants performed the CAPT online three times: before the instructions (pre-test), immedi-
ately after the instructions (post-test), and one month after the instructions (delayed-post-test). The frequencies
of the target pragmatic routines produced by the participants were compared among the tests by chai square
tests and Fisher’s exact tests. The results showed that 15 out of 20 pragmatic routines significantly increased
the frequency at the post-test. Furthermore, at the delayed-post-test, the frequency was maintained in most of
the pragmatic routines, with only one exception. These results suggest that explicit pragmatic instruction could
have a strong short-term and a medium-term effect on learners’ production of pragmatic routines.
Reference
Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2012). Formulas, routines, and conventional expressions in pragmatics research. Annual
Review of Applied Linguistics, 32, 206-227.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Ideology of the Jordanian Media Women’s Discourse: Lana


Mamkgh as an Example

Lecture

Dr. Amani Atieh 1


1. Fahad bin Sultan University

This study aims at examining the patterns of ideology reflected in the written discourse of women writers in
the media of Jordan; Lana Mamkgh is taken as an example. This study critically analyzes the discursive, linguis-
tic, and cognitive representations that she employs as an agent in the institutionalized discourse of the media.
Grounded in van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis approach to Sociocognitive Discourse Studies, the present
study builds a multilayer framework that encompasses van Dijk’s triangle: discourse, society, and cognition.
Specifically, the study attempts to analyze, at both micro and macro levels, the underlying cognitive processes
and structures, mainly ideology and discursive strategies, which are functional in the production of women’s
discourse in terms of meaning, forms, and functions. Cognitive processes that social actors adopt are under-
lined by experience/context and semantic mental models on the one hand and social cognition on the other.
This study is based on qualitative research and adopts purposive sampling, taking as an example a sample of an
opinion article written by Lana Mamkgh in the Arabic Jordanian Daily, Al Rai. Taking her role as an agent in the
public sphere, she stresses the National and feminist ideologies, demonstrating the use of assertive, evaluative,
and expressive linguistic and rhetorical devices that appeal to the logic, ethics, and emotions of the addressee.
Highlighting the agency of Jordanian writers in the media, the study sought to achieve the macro goal of dis-
pensing political and social justice to the underprivileged. Further, the study seeks to prove that the voice of
Jordanian women, viewed as underrepresented and invisible in the public arena, has come through clearly.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Indonesians’ View on Deadline: How It is Expressed


Metaphorically

Lecture

Ms. Dyta Septiyatik 1 , Dr. Sailal Arimi 1


1. Universitas Gadjah Mada

Metaphor is inseparable from human language, including from its use in everyday life. Discussing about human
life, it is notable to talk about punctuality as it is related to almost every single duty or activity undergone
by human. In addition, while an individual is speaking, he or she is likely to use metaphorical expression to
deliver what is actually intended which goes beyond the sentence meaning (Black, 1962). By utilizing qualitative
descriptive approach, this study aims to discover the meaning behind metaphorical expressions uttered by
Indonesians regarding the concept of deadline. The data was collected from the tweets shared by Indonesian
Twitter users. Furthermore, in analyzing the gathered data, the relevance theory from Sperber and Wilson was
used (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). The result showed at least three ideas: (1) deadline is often used metaphorically
by Indonesian Twitter users; (2) majorly deadline is perceived negatively, or if not, it is something that cannot
be avoided; and (3) metaphorically, deadline is pictured as alarm clock and shadow. To sum up, deadline can be
either something good or something bad, depending on the context. Specifically, the metaphorical expression of
deadline is found within workers and students. It is suggested for upcoming researchers to expand the context
to more various variables other than working and college life.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The interactional achievement of authenticity in heritage


environments

Lecture

Prof. Antje Wilton 1


1. Freie Universität Berlin

This contribution focuses on the role of material, bodily and linguistic resources in the interactional establish-
ment of authenticity in so-called heritage environments. In the data presented here, interactants engage in and
with environments that are characterized by pastness as a material quality (Holtorf 2013). In these perspicuous
settings (Garfinkel 2002), authenticity emerges in and through a shared perceptual and interactionally accom-
plished experience of the material characteristics and interactional potentials of the heritage environment as
a way to connect with its past(ness). The study employs multimodal interaction analysis (Mondada 2013) of
video-recorded and transcribed guided and unguided visits (Mondada 2017) to historic sites and archaeological
open-air museums to show how embodied actions, visual inspection, sensual explorations such as touching and
smelling, and talk are integrated into the ongoing interaction to investigate, establish or reject a claim of authen-
ticity (Boccardi 2019). In order to do so, interactants need to mediate between the primary reality of the present
(the here-and-now of their visit) and the secondary reality of the (depicted) past (Gibbons 2003, Stukenbrock
2014, Clark 2016). The data show that in these mediations, interactants employ linguistic, embodied and mate-
rial resources to engage in activities that combine reflexive and immersive elements, and which are integrated
into institutionally enforced interactional formats such as demonstrations, hands-on activities and unguided
explorations (Kesselheim & Brandenberger 2021). The results of the study are expected to have implications
not only for the analysis of situated multimodal interaction in heritage environments as architecturally rele-
vant spaces (Hausendorf & Kesselheim 2016) in which to establish authenticity, but also for professionals in
archaeology and the heritage sector aiming to understand how original and recreated heritage environments
are interactionally appropriated by visitors with regard to their perceived authenticity.
Boccardi, Giovanni. 2019. Authenticity in the Heritage Context: A Reflection beyond the Nara Document. The
Historic Environment: Policy & Practice 10(1), 4-18.
Clark, Herbert. 2016. Depicting as a method of communication. Psychological Review 123(3), 324–347.
Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism. Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Gibbons, John. 2003. Forensic Linguistics. An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. London: Blackwell.
Hausendorf, Heiko & Schmitt. Reinhold 2016. Interaktionsarchitektur und Sozialtopografie: Basiskonzepte
einer interaktionistischen Raumanalyse. In: Hausendorf, Heiko, Schmitt, Reinhold & Kesselheim, Wolfgang
(eds.): Interaktionsarchitektur, Sozialtopographie, Interaktionsraum. Tübingen: Narr, 27-54.
Holtorf, Cornelius. 2013. On pastness: a reconsideration of materiality in archaeological object authenticity.
Anthropological Quarterly 86 (2), 427pp.
Kesselheim, Wolfgang & Brandenberger, Christina. 2021. The Social Construction of Embodied Experiences:
Two Types of Discoveries in the Science Centre. Linguistics Vanguard 7(s4): 20200101, 2-12.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2013. Interactional space and the study of embodied talk-in-interaction. In: Peter Auer,
Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (eds.): Space in language and linguistics. Geographical,
interactional, and cognitive perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter, 247–275.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2017. Walking and talking together: Questions/answers and mobile participation in guided
visits. Social Science Information 56(2), 220–253.
Stukenbrock, Anja. 2014. Pointing to an ‘empty’ space: Deixis am Phantasma in face-to-face interaction. Journal
of Pragmatics 74, 70-93.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Intercultural Interaction and Sociocultural Adaptation


Experiences of Asian Students in Estonia

Lecture

Prof. Anastassia Zabrodskaja 1


1. Tallinn University

Asian students come to Tallinn University to study the two-year master’s programme “Communication Manage-
ment”. Their reasons for studying in Estonia vary, but the most mentioned is the desire to gain international
experience in a European Union country with a good and affordable quality of life. During the first fall semester,
each student takes the Basics of Intercultural Communication course, where students are encouraged to observe,
monitor, and report on any culturally defined and “different” situation. By the end of the course, students are
completing a comprehensive essay in which they must make connections between similar practical experiences
and ways of adapting to them.
An interpretive phenomenological study was chosen as the research strategy. It refers to the qualitative method
of research; it is best suited to explain the phenomenon of “acculturation”. Acculturation has two dimensions:
the extent to which one preserves one’s heritage culture and adapts to the host society. According to Merriam
(2009:13), qualitative research aims to understand “the meaning people have constructed, that is how people
make sense of their world and the experiences they have in the world”. It also helps us interpret the experiences
and feelings one has had from a particular phenomenon. In my study, this contributes to an understanding of
the true meaning of “acculturation” and the feelings associated with this phenomenon among Asian students at
Tallinn University. In their essays, students generally find that their adjustment is easy in terms of their learning
environment, but they note that their adaptation to the local climate, food, language, behaviors, and values is
difficult and complicated, resulting in culture and identity shock.
I use an interactive model of foreign-language proficiency, communicative competence, effective intercultural
interaction, and sociocultural adaptation (Masgoret and Ward 2006) to highlight the strategies Asian students
used to cope with the Estonian social and academic environment. Language and cultural differences proved
to be major problems in the acculturation process of Asian students in Estonia. I will show how Asian students
overcome obstacles by adapting to various aspects of academic study and integrating into a new sociocultural
environment.
References
Masgoret, A.M., Ward, C. 2006. Culture learning approach to acculturation. D.L. Sam, J.W. Berry (Eds.), The
Cambridge handbook of acculturation psychology, 58-77. Cambridge: CUP.
Merriam, S. (2009), Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

1508
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The management of (dis)agreement in conversation:


Argumentation as a sequential adjustment of epistemic
positions

Lecture

Dr. Franco Pauletto 1 , Dr. Biagio Ursi 2


1. Complutense University of Madrid, 2. Université d’Orléans

Based on the theoretical and methodological framework of conversation analysis (Schegloff, 2007), this quali-
tative study aims to offer a detailed account of four argumentative sequences from a telephone conversation
between acquaintances recorded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Argumentation is conceived here
as a temporally organized, finely coordinated activity that is carried out along a continuum that goes from
agreement to disagreement rather than being characterized as the opposition of two dichotomous positionings
(i.e., full agreement versus full disagreement). The conversation is indeed highly topical: two friends discuss,
from opposite and sometimes conflicting positions, the usefulness of the lockdown just decreed by the Italian
government (March 2020).
The study aims to provide methodological and analytical tools for the analysis of argumentation in talk-in-
interaction, which, from our perspective, is an eminently collaborative, locally situated activity that draws on
participants’ prior knowledge. In the sequences analyzed, the interactants calibrate their contributions turn
after turn to exhibit and negotiate their epistemic access to the topic under discussion. Specifically, each turn-
at-talk embodies the participant’s shifting epistemic positioning on a gradient that goes from [+ knowledgeable]
to [- knowledgeable] (Heritage, 2012). From a sequential and temporal viewpoint, the current turn-at-talk rede-
fines the context within which the co-participant will calibrate their contribution in order to produce a coherent
responsive action (Heritage, 1984: 242).
Our study is based on an emic perspective – that is, relevant to the participants themselves – rather than on
pre-established analytical categories, and aims to highlight the temporal unfolding of the argumentative (and,
therefore, epistemic) configurations, as they emerge turn after turn in talk-in-interaction. More particularly, we
will focus on the sequential emergence of disagreements and disaffiliative actions produced by participants,
through the reference to specific pieces of information and the negotiation of respective epistemic status on
the topic at hand, on a turn-by-turn basis. Additionally, we will analyze the mobilization of specific social cat-
egories (namely, the elderly as a fragile and exposed group) and the moral implications arising from them in
argumentative sequences.
References
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on
Language and Social Interaction, 45, 30-52.
Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Polity Press.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (vol. 1). Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.

1509
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The metapragmatics and materialities of transnationalism:


Imagining and enacting care for migrant workers

Lecture

Dr. Lydia Catedral 1 , Dr. Farzad Karimzad 2


1. City University of Hong Kong, 2. Salisbury University

If we understand metapragmatics as that which allows social actors to reflect upon indexicals and their contexts
of use (Silverstein 1993), then we can understand the metapragmatics of transnationalism as facilitating reflec-
tion on the multiplicity of interconnected and shifting contexts (and their associated indexicalities) within and
across national borders (Hall 2014; Lo & Park 2017). In this paper, we build on this concept of transnationalism
to analyze how migrant-led and migrant-serving organizations based in Hong Kong reflect upon and enact an
expansive vision of situated care for migrant workers. More specifically, we propose to think of the metaprag-
matic reflection of the leaders of these organizations as operating within a fractal system of transnationalism
that they navigate in various ways as they zoom in and zoom out to take different chronotopic-scalar positions.
We show how, in taking these positions, they are able to presuppose and (re)create the discursively imagined
and materially experienced aspects of space-times associated with the diverse situations of migrant workers. In
this way, the fractal system we propose can account for both metapragmatic reflection and the perlocutionary
effects of such reflection.
Our data come from the first authors’ ongoing research into the discourses of and about Filipino migrant domes-
tic workers in Hong Kong, and the resulting ethnographic engagements she has had with grassroots, migrant
domestic worker-led organizations, and the select NGO’s that support the migrants’ direct action and organizing
work. In this paper, we focus on discursive moments in which leaders of these organizations reflect on “how
contexts work” in relation to the transnational trajectories of and difficulties encountered by migrant workers
in and beyond Hong Kong. We also examine how this reflection is linked to the transformation of these organi-
zations’ imaginaries, structures and material practices. Specifically, we show how these leaders engage in three
semiotic processes within the fractal system of transnationalism: (1) Constructing links between the material-
ities and imaginaries of the differently scaled space-times in which migrants find themselves; (2) Attributing
topical salience to different categories relevant to migrant workers; and (3) Engaging with the fractal details of
space-time to understand the specificities of migrants’ embodied experiences. All of this, we argue, facilitates a
holistic practice of care as it allows these organizations to engage migrants’ needs in less predetermined ways.
As one example, reflection guided by these semiotic processes led to the expansion of organizational missions
to include not only Filipino migrants, but also migrant workers of other nationalities in Hong Kong who share
the same visa and employment status.
By highlighting these multi-scalar and complex metapragmatic negotiations, as well as their perlocutionary ef-
fects on the material world, this work adds new dimensions to theories of care, transnationalism, and semiotics
more broadly. More specifically, we argue that the fractal system of transnationalism provides a framework
for thinking about care as interconnected, interpersonal and institutional; transnationalism as inclusive of –
but not limited to – connections between home and host countries; and semiotic processes as not only leading
to simplification, but also to complexification.

1510
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The metapragmatics of swearing: The indexical field of fuck

Lecture

Dr. Hsi-Yao Su 1
1. National Taiwan Normal University

This study examines the metapragmatics of swearing and the indexical field of fuck in Taiwanese culture.
Specifically, it explores public reactions to a swearing incident in a high-profile, live broadcast awards cere-
mony (the Golden Bell Awards, the Taiwanese equivalent of the Emmy Awards) in October 2022. The recipient
of the Best Actress Award, Ying-Hsuan Hsieh, thanked the wrong production team in her acceptance speech
and said ‘fuck’ out loud when she realized her mistake. Public reactions were mixed but largely supportive,
which is intriguing since swearing in public and by a female are both stereotypically seen as inappropriate
in Taiwan—though scholarship addressing swearing as (im)politeness behavior has repeatedly shown the
perception of swearing as context-dependent. This study analyzes Hsieh’s apologies, key opinion leaders’ posts,
and responses to these posts and related news reports. Informed by Christie’s (2013) discursive pragmatic
approach to (im)politeness, this study draws on linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic concepts of
indexicality, enregisterment, and language ideology and explores the following questions:

1. How is Hsieh’s swearing evaluated?


2. What indexical/ideological meanings are associated with Hsieh’s use of fuck and swearing in general?
What are the more conventionalized meanings and the more emergent, fluid, context-dependent mean-
ings associated with fuck and swearing?
3. What contextual assumptions and implications are revealed in these evaluations? What do these tell us
about speakers’ beliefs about language (i.e., language ideologies)?

The study attempts to map out an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of fuck and swearing and details the process
by which critical aspects of contexts affect specific evaluations. Though swearing in such a high-profile
context is quite atypical, the data show clear evidence of a metadiscourse that normalizes the use of fuck,
along the line of (1) authenticity (that Hsieh’s reaction to her mistake is genuine), (2) professionality (that
Hsieh is just like the nominated character she has played), (3) harmless emotion (that Hsieh is directing the
frustration toward herself), and (4) entertainment values (that the swearing invokes surprise and laughter).
Some commenters, however, still see swearing in a high-profile event as problematic and question whether
swearing in English, a foreign and global language, alleviates the perceived level of offense. It is concluded that
a discursive approach focusing on indexicality allows us to explore the processes through which various social
and indexical meanings are associated with fuck and swearing. This atypical incident of swearing reveals
much about ideologies of appropriateness, authenticity, emotion, and bilingual language use.

References
Christie, C. (2013). The relevance of taboo language: An analysis of the indexical values of swearwords. Journal
of Pragmatics 58, 152-169.
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 453–476.

1511
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The notion of ‘Freedom’ in Right-Wing Libertarian Populist


Discourse

Lecture

Dr. Marcia Macaulay 1


1. York University

In the winter of 2022 what was called “The Freedom Convoy” of trucks travelled from many areas of Canada
and entered the capital city of Ottawa on 29 January. This ‘convoy’ remained for one month causing enormous
disruption in the city. On 14 February 2022 the Federal Government invoked the Emergencies Act to remove
the trucks that had taken over the city’s central core. The ‘convoy’ effectively squatted in the city bringing
with it its own support systems including gas delivery. Hot tubs and bouncy castles appeared overnight within
the area taken over by the truckers. These truckers were protesting a Canada-wide vaccination policy that
required all truckers within Canada and those crossing the American border to be vaccinated for Covid 19.
Their anger at having to be vaccinated was expressed by a call for ‘freedom.’ Ernesto Laclau would term such
usage as an “empty signifier.” This is a referring expression that can trigger multiple meanings. Why was a
refusal to be vaccinated expressed in terms of ‘freedom’? What did ‘freedom’ mean in this context of protest?
What was particularly marked by these calls for freedom was the presence of Canadian flags embossed with
Nazi swastikas as well as the presence of American Confederate flags. For most Canadians this discourse of
‘freedom’ was both confusing and frightening. This paper examines the notion of ‘freedom’ in the discourse of
the “Freedom Convoy” using two theories from Pragmatics:
Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory and Positioning Theory. I examined the 622 twitter posts from the principal
convoy account: Freedom Convoy 2022. Of these, 278 referenced ‘freedom’ as a lexeme, including synonyms
or antonyms. Of these, approximately 45% were “empty signifiers” conveying only positive connotation as in
“freedom fighters.”
The remaining 55% concerned ‘freedom’ in two broad conceptual categories: bodily integrity and physical
boundaries or borders. All expressed ‘freedom’ in terms of negative face or threats to negative face. Bodily
integrity was expressed in terms of bodily autonomy, “my body my choice,” medical autonomy, and further as
“medical experimentation,” and even child abuse, “masking children is child abuse.” Freedom of movement
was an even more dominant concern. This was expressed in terms of border restrictions to and from Canada,
specifically the ArriveCan app requiring 14-day quarantine for unvaccinated truckers entering Canada. Equally
this concerned visiting the sick in nursing homes, attending children’s birthday parties, and flying. Such threats
to negative face were understood as imposing “apartheid” and ‘feudalism.’ “Democracy” was a concomitant
concern. In terms of Positioning Theory, loss or threat to bodily autonomy or freedom of movement was un-
derstood as a loss of ‘rights.’ In 2012 at the Positioning Theory Conference (Univ. of Buffalo), Rom Harré noted
that in Magna Carta only responsibilities are articulated and not rights. In contrast, the Freedom Convoy 2022
articulates only ‘rights.’ There is no positioning of responsibilities. The Convoy represents a very specific form
of right-wing libertarian populism.

1512
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatic duality of humor during oral corrective


feedback

Lecture

Dr. Hilal Ergül 1


1. University of Northern Iowa

This study focuses on the role of teacher humor during oral corrective feedback (OCF) provided in language
classrooms. Meta-analyses have shown humor to yield mixed results in terms of teaching effectiveness (Banas
et al., 2011; Martin et al. 2006; McMorris et al., 1997). The discrepancies among these findings may be explained
by the instructional humor processing theory (Frymier & Wanzer, 2021; Wanzer, Frymier, & Irwin, 2010), which
posits that when the affect during the interaction is positive, the humor is perceived by the students as appro-
priate, and the processing ability of the student is enhanced; humor can have a positive impact on learning.
Combined with the analytical framework for OCF (Lyster & Ranta, 1997), and the General Theory of Verbal Hu-
mor (Attardo 2020; Attardo & Raskin, 1991), this study draws on seven EFL teachers’ use of humor during OCF
in adult intensive English programs at the intermediate proficiency level. Approximately 16 hours of classroom
speech data were analyzed using ELAN video transcription and annotation software. Findings indicate that
humor may act as a distractor if used during the OCF sequence. As humor engages the teacher and the learners
in laughter and play, the focus on the erroneous production may be lost. While the humor clearly contributes
to a positive classroom atmosphere in these instances, it seemingly negates the desired accuracy effects of the
feedback. The pragmatic implications of these conflicting messages embedded in humor during OCF will be
discussed.
References
Attardo, S. (2020). The Linguistics of Humor: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Attardo, S., & Raskin, V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. HUMOR:
International Journal of Humor Research, 4(3/4), 293–347. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.1991.4.3-4.293
Banas, J. A., Dunbar, N., Rodriguez, D., & Liu, S.-J. (2011). A review of humor in educational settings: Four decades
of research. Communication Education, 60(1), 115–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2010.496867
Frymier, A. B., & Wanzer, M. B. (2021). Humor competence in the classroom. In M. Strick & T. E. Ford (Eds.), The
Social Psychology of Humor (pp. 130–148). Routledge.
Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative
classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 37-66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263197001034
Martin, D. M., Preiss, R. W., Gayle, B. M., & Allen, M. (2006). A meta-analytic assessment of the effect of humorous
lectures on learning. In B. M. Gayle, R. W. Preiss, N. Burrell, & M. Allen (Eds.), Classroom Communication and
Instructional Processes: Advances Through Meta-Analysis (pp. 295–313). Routledge.
McMorris, R. F., Boothroyd, R. A., & Pietrangelo, D. J. (1997). Humor in Educational Testing: A Review and
Discussion. Applied Measurement in Education, 10(3), 269–297. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324818ame1003_5
Wanzer, M. B., Frymier, A. B., & Irwin, J. (2010). An explanation of the relationship between instructor hu-
mor and student learning: Instructional humor processing theory. Communication Education, 59(1), 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520903367238

1513
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The pragmatics of high boundary tones in German

Lecture

Mr. Timo Buchholz 1 , Dr. Jet Hoek 2 , Prof. Klaus von Heusinger 1
1. Universität zu Köln, 2. Radboud University Nijmegen

A high boundary tone at the end of a clause has been analysed as cueing a meaning like “incompleteness”,
while a low tone signals “completion” (Westera et al. 2020). In work on relative clauses, this has led to an
assumption that at interclausal boundaries, high tones cue stronger integration of the upcoming clause into
the preceding syntactic structure than low tones (Sanfelici et al. 2021). To our knowledge, there has been no
experimental work on the effect of high tones in coordinated structures.

In an original forced choice experiment, we tested the effect of syntactic cues and boundary tones on clause
linkage strength in biclausal structures (syntactically subordinated vs coordinated) in German via a pronoun
resolution task. Participants heard stimuli like (1) and (2), with a first sentence consisting of a main clause with
one subject referent followed by a causal clause with another subject referent. A second sentence consisted of a
nonce verb predicate and an ambiguous pronominal subject. Participants were asked to resolve the ambiguous
pronoun. We assume that resolution of the pronoun to the first clause subject indicates stronger linkage than
resolution to the subject of the second.
(1) Anna hat den Ball angenommen (H%/L%) weil Gabi nicht mehr drangekommen ist. Sie zirfte.
(2) Anna hat den Ball angenommen (H%/L%) denn Gabi ist nicht mehr drangekommen. Sie zirfte.
„Anna received the ball, because Gabi didn’t reach it anymore. She zirf ed.”
We kept the discourse relation (Explanation) constant. The first clause was identical in both conditions. The
second clause was: (1) syntactically subordinated (weil “because” + verb-final word order); (2) syntactically
coordinated (denn “because” + verb-second). This was crossed with the prosodic manipulation, where the in-
terclausal boundary was produced either low (L%) or high (H%).
Subordination led to more resolutions to the first subject referent than coordination, in line with weil-clauses
being more integrated than denn-clauses (Scheffler 2013). The prosodic manipulation, however, interacted with
the type of clause linkage: with subordination, H% increased resolution to the first referent compared to L%,
but with coordination, H% increased resolution to the second referent compared to L%.
We analyse interclausal H% as giving a pragmatic instruction to direct attention to the subsequent clause (spec-
ifying “incompleteness”), with different effects on different types of linkage. In subordination, a highlighted
subsequent clause will be more integrated than a non-highlighted one, allowing more pronoun resolutions to
the first clause. In coordination, the highlighted clause becomes the focus of attention and is therefore more
independent of the first clause than a non-highlighted one.
References
Sanfelici, Emanuela, Caroline Féry & Petra Schulz. 2020. What verb-final and V2 have in common: evidence
from the prosody of German restrictive relative clauses in adults and children. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
39(2). 201-230.
Scheffler, Tatjana. 2013. Two-dimensional semantics: Clausal adjuncts and complements. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Westera, Matthijs, Daniel Goodhue & Carlos Gussenhoven. 2020. Meaning of Tones and Tunes. In Carlos Gussen-
hoven & Aoju Chen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody, 443-453. Oxford: OUP.

1514
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy

Lecture

Prof. Sandrine Sorlin 1 , Prof. Tuija Virtanen 2


1. University Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3, 2. Åbo Akademi University

The myriad expressions in everyday use to refer to hypocrisy testify to the indignation people feel at recognizing
it in face-to-face or mediated discourse. Even though hypocrisy is a verbal phenomenon par excellence, it has
rarely, if ever, received due attention in the study of language. Importantly, it is a relational phenomenon well
worth investigating in pragmatic terms. The objective of this talk is three-fold: we will start by showing why
the notion of hypocrisy deserves a pragmatic analysis and try to explain why it has received so little attention
in pragmatic studies (as well as elsewhere). We will then attempt to delimit the notion in pragmatic terms by
resorting to more well-established concepts such as face, (im)politeness (and mixed messages), tact, flattery,
deceit/lying, and irony/sarcasm. This will help us disentangle close notions such as ‘polite hypocrisy’ and ‘hyp-
ocritical politeness’. Delimiting the pragmatic space of hypocrisy serves our third objective of theorizing the
phenomenon. Based on a wide range of English-language data from speech and writing of different kinds, as
well as selected examples of both individual and collective or organizational hypocrisy, we will draw a first
pragmatic model of the phenomenon. The model comprises five layers: (i) the different types of hypocrites and
(ii) the kind of hypocrisy they are practicing, (iii) the language games they favour, (iv) the kind of social action
they each engage in, and (v) the degree of exposure of the hypocrisy, by which we mean whether hypocrisy
is concealed, metapragmatically revealed, exposed by a third party, or remains tacit between interactants en-
gaged in a game of joint pretence. Devising this general model of hypocrisy, we will exhibit the many different
hues it can take and thereby show that hypocrisy needs be considered in a new pragmatic light. In particular,
we will defend the point that hypocrisy can have a ‘civilising force’ that has been underestimated. Lastly, we
will argue that the study of the phenomenon calls for a renewed philosophy of language that would not take
as its premises truth, sincerity, relevance and sufficient information or unambiguous language: these linguis-
tic virtues should be more realistically regarded as the ethical horizon towards which every individual should
tend. People conceal, dissimulate and lie, for reasons that are not always amoral but partake of some coopera-
tion that is not first and foremost linguistic but social. Ranging from pro-social to entirely unethical, hypocrisy
constitutes a wider socio-pragmatic strategy than might be suspected at first sight. The study of verbal hypocrisy
is expected to have an impact on how politeness and related pragmatic theories are conceived and it is likely to
throw novel light on the social games carried out in interactions.

1515
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Pragmatics of Tense Shift: Historical Present in Modern


Hebrew Personal experience stories

Lecture

Prof. Zohar Livnat 1


1. Bar Ilan University

The Historical Present tense (HP) in narratives refers to anecdotal or continuing past events. It typically alter-
nates with the past tense during the story, and is limited to event clauses that belong to the plot outline (Schiffrin,
1981).
The current study is based on a corpus of 65 stories relating a personal experience told by 45 native Hebrew
speakers. The stories were found in elicited texts, in which the interviewees were asked to speak freely about
any subject they wished. In the resulting discourse, units were identified that may be defined as a “story” accord-
ing to the framework proposed by Labov (1972), in which speakers describe in the first person an experience
they themselves had. The corpus contained 352 verbs in the Historical Present tense. The most frequent verbs
in HP are verbs of saying (144 tokens), verbs of motion (54 tokens) and verbs of sensory perception and under-
standing (45 tokens). The talk will focus on verbs from the latter two groups and will describe their functions
in the story.
Previous studies have indicated that the functions performed by HP verbs, which include marking the begin-
ning of a new textual unit, dramatization and vividness, evidentiality, involvement and decreasing the distance
between the speakers, differ from one language to another. The research I will present in the talk investigated
this question for the first time in modern Hebrew.
The structural function was found to be striking, and a shift from past tense to HP was evident at frame-shift
points, in proximity to structural discourse markers that indicate transitions between discourse units, words
that mark a change in the course of the plot and time markers that situate the segment that follows in a new
time frame.
The “vividness” function was found to be significant as well, however regarding verbs of motion and perception
(“I arrive/enter/turn, I see/hear…”), HP verbs seem to vitalize the past events, not necessarily in the sense of
bringing them into the “present” of the time of speech, but rather in the sense of creating involvement in the
discourse (Chafe, 1994), which is achieved by the speakers giving both their physical and cognitive point of view,
in a way that enables the recipient to experience and understand them via the speaker’s sensory experience.
Thus, sensory perception verbs are important because they support the presentation of the speaker’s point of
view, but the action indicated in them is not necessarily important. They serve rather as an introduction to
surprising information that advances the plot. From the point of view of the addressee experiencing the story,
the Historical Present marks a rise of tension at the beginning of the segment that will lead to the peak, and
highlights the new element that is about to come. (Thoma, 2011) Thus, it appears to be “dramatic” in the sense
that it creates expectations for the appearance of an element having tellable value.

1516
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Relationship Between Mood and Modal Concord in


Spanish Directive Complements

Lecture

Dr. Tris Faulkner 1


1. Kalamazoo College

Directive predicates have meanings that are similar to ‘order’, ‘require’, ‘recommend’, and ‘advise’. Being voli-
tional in nature, directives are said to form part of the core group of subjunctive-taking predicates. This means
that, like desiderative (e.g., querer que ‘to want that’) and purpose clauses (e.g., para que ‘so that’), they are ex-
pected to, and generally do, take the subjunctive. However, findings from the present investigation suggest that,
in spite of this description, there are certain atypical contexts in which indicative directive complements are
strongly preferred; i.e., when there is MODAL CONCORD between the matrix and subordinate predicates.
Geurts and Huitink (2006) define modal concord as the phenomenon in which a sentence with two modal op-
erators, is interpreted as if it contained only a single modal expression (p. 1). They state that there are two
constraints that influence the manifestation of a concord construction. The first is that the two modal expres-
sions in question have to be of the same type; for example, both have to be deontic, or teleological, or bouletic,
or epistemic, and so on (p. 3). The second is that both have to have “the same, or at least similar, quantifica-
tional force” (p. 3); (e.g., weak, weak necessity, strong necessity, etc.) (see: Portner 2018). In the present study,
I demonstrate that, in the case of Spanish, similar concord can occur in directive clauses. I show that when a
matrix directive embeds another modal predicate (of similar or equivalent strength and modality), the gram-
matical mood of the subordinate complement becomes the indicative. In the case of subjunctive complements,
they are seen to be preferable to indicative, only when there is no concord between the embedded and main
directive predicates; which, tends to be in line with typical or standard directive constructions. These findings
are significant, not only because directives are normatively described as requiring the subjunctive, but also
because no previous studies have examined a link between mood and modal concord.

1517
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Relative Effects of Corrective Feedback and Language


Proficiency on the Development of L2 Pragmatic Competence:
The Case of Request Downgraders

Lecture

Prof. Yuan-shan Chen 1 , Dr. Hui-Tzu Hsu 2 , Dr. Hsuan-Yu Tai 3


1. Department of Applied English, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, 2. Language Center, National
Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, 3. Department of English, National Kaohsiung University of Science and
Technology, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Over the past decades, corrective feedback (CF), whether oral or written, has been extensively researched in
SLA research (Li and Vuono, 2019). Much empirical evidence supported the relative effects of different CF types
(López, Steendam, Speelman & Buyse, 2018; Zhang & Cheng, 2021) and the facilitative effects of CF on writing,
speaking and grammar, whereas little attention has been paid to the effect of CF on L2 pragmatics (Kasper
& Schmidt, 1996). Despite its pivotal role in SLA research, only a handful of studies to date have addressed
the effect of corrective feedback on L2 learners’ pragmatic development (Nguyen, Do, Nguyen, & Pham, 2015;
Nguyen, Do, Pham & Nguyen, 2018).
To close the research lacuna, the current study aims to (1) investigate the interface between CF and language
proficiency on the learners’ development of English request downgraders, and (2) to explore how these learners
perceived the CF they received. A total of 80 Chinese EFL learners of English were recruited, with 40 third-year
English majors as the high-proficiency group and 40 first-year non-English majors as the low-proficiency group.
Two CF types (direct vs. metapragmatic) and two proficiency levels (high vs. low) resulted in four quadrants,
namely (1) high proficiency + direct feedback (HD), (2) high proficiency + indirect feedback (HI), (3) low profi-
ciency + direct feedback (LD), and (4) low proficiency + indirect feedback (LI). Internal request downgraders
(syntactical and lexical/phrasal) were the targets of investigation. The learners were given a dialogue construc-
tion task with five high-imposition request situations as the pretest to examine their use of request downgraders.
Next, they received explicit instruction, including the consciousness-raising session, the modeling session, and
the feedback + revision session. After the instruction, an immediate posttest was administered one week later
and a delayed posttest was administered six weeks after the instruction. Finally, an online questionnaire with
ten statements on a five-point Likert scale was given to probe these learners’ perceptions of CF.
The findings showed that the high-proficiency group performed significantly better than the low-proficiency
group across the three tests. Second, metapragmatic feedback was more beneficial than direct feedback for both
the high- and low- proficiency learners, probably because the former led to higher level of depth of processing
than the latter (Kim and Bowles, 2019). Third, all the learners improved over time on the posttest and the
learning effect was retained, as shown in the delayed posttest. Fourth, considering the effect of proficiency and
feedback types, the facilitative effect of feedback overrode that of proficiency. Lastly, while all the learners held
positive attitude towards the two CF types, they indicated that it was more challenging for them to revise the
answers in terms of metapragmatic feedback.
Several pedagogical implications can be derived from the present study. First, the ‘explicit instruction + feed-
back’ approach we adopted in this study has been demonstrated to be beneficial to Chinese learners of English to
learn request downgraders. Second, the strengths and weaknesses of the two CF types could be used as teachers’
considerations in teaching.

1518
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of group memberships or identities in


communicators’ production: a relevance-theoretic approach

Lecture

Ms. Kyu Hyun Park 1


1. Northumbria University

This paper discusses how ideas of group memberships or identities can affect communicators’ linguistic be-
haviours. It adopts a relevance-theoretic approach (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) to expand the discussion of
the principles of relevance theory. The main focus of identities in pragmatics has been on how specific language
use can reveal a user’s identity in “a particular societal context” (Mey, 2001: 20). According to this approach,
the identity of speakers can be identified by the way they construct their utterances. This paper, on the other
hand, focuses on what communicators do when they categorise the group memberships or identities of their
addressees. This paper also discusses what communicators believe they are doing when they create their utter-
ances.
The empirical work was carried out by observing conversations. Pairs of friends were recruited to participate
in this study. Each participant had two interactions: one with their close friend and another with a stranger.
The study compared the two interactions. It focused on the communicators’ various assumptions depending on
the type of audience and how these assumptions affected their production. The participants had an interview
following the two interactions to discuss their opinions on their interlocutors and their production.
According to the observation and interview findings, the communicators spontaneously categorised the group
memberships or identities of their addressees even though they did not mention the categorisation explicitly.
Their presumptions regarding the group memberships or identities of their addressees helped them formulate
their utterances, particularly when they lacked information about their addressee (i.e., when they interacted
with a stranger).
This paper argues that this result is the communicators’ communicative acts that they spontaneously search
for their addressees’ expectation of relevance and formulate their utterances to meet the expectation of rele-
vance. This shares some ideas of the relevance-guided comprehension heuristic (Wilson and Sperber, 2002).
The communicators believed they were generally aware of their addressees’ expectation of relevance based on
how they categorised the group memberships or identities of their addressees. As a result, the communicators
constructed their utterances in order to meet the expectations of their addressees for relevance by drawing
conclusions about them.
References:
Mey, J. L. 2001. Pragmatics and Identity. Papers on Language and Society. 5, pp.20-30
Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell
Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 2002. Truthfulness and Relevance. Mind. 111, pp.583-631

1519
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of proficiency level in pragmatic marker recognition


and production

Lecture

Dr. Annarita Magliacane 1 , Dr. Ariadna Sánchez Hernández 2


1. University of Liverpool, 2. Complutense University of Madrid

Conversational skills are assumed to develop with practice and have not received enough prominence in in-
structed contexts despite being a pivotal aspect of learners’ pragmatic competence (McCarthy & McCarten 2018).
Recent research (Jones 2021) posits that teaching conversation strategies can enhance their acquisition and
stresses the crucial role that noticing has in the learning process. Noticing, and therefore recognition, are indeed
key elements of pragmatic development as they are preliminary steps for the development of any productive
ability (Sánchez & Alcón-Soler 2019). However, despite such a pivotal role in pragmatic development, research
on pragmatic recognition is rather limited (Barron 2019).
This study fills this research gap by focusing on the recognition of pragmatic markers (PMs) in spontaneous
conversation. PMs are linguistic constructions which help the smoothness of interaction (Beeching 2016) by
performing a series of functions (i.e., managing the conversation, constructing turns, showing listenership).
More specifically, this study presents the design of a research instrument (a test) to assess PM recognition and
explores the relationship between PM recognition and production in English as a second language (L2). The
test includes different tasks: (i) PM recognition in aural excerpts showcasing different varieties of English; (ii)
identification of PM use and functions; (iii) awareness-raising questions about informants’ PM use, and (iv)
prompted oral production. The test was piloted with 53 learners of English with a pre-intermediate (n = 13), an
upper intermediate (n = 19) and an advanced (n = 21) proficiency level.

Firstly, the test internal consistency was analysed, revealing high reliability scores. Moreover, an analysis of
frequency and variety of PMs in the fourth task pointed out to the validity of the task for the intended purpose.
Altogether, these results showed the potential of this instrument to assess PM recognition and production in
English as an L2. Secondly, PM knowledge across proficiency levels was explored, with findings revealing an
effect of proficiency on both the ability to recognise and produce PMs. These findings will be discussed in terms
of their implications for English language teaching and English language varieties, illustrating the application
of this research instrument for future research as well as for the design of teaching material.
References
Barron, A. (2019). Pragmatic development and stay abroad. Journal of Pragmatics, 146: 43-53.
Beeching, K. (2016). Pragmatic markers in British English: Meaning in social interaction. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Jones, C. (2021). Conversation Strategies and Communicative Competence. Candlin & Mynard, Hong Kong.
McCarthy, M., & McCarten, J. (2018). Now you’re talking! Practising conversation in second language learning.
In C. Jones (Ed.), Practice in second language learning (pp. 7–29). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Sánchez-Hernández, A., & Alcón-Soler, E. (2019). Pragmatic gains in the study abroad context: General patterns
and learners’ experiences. Journal of Pragmatics, 146: 54-71.

1520
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The role of prosody for the expression of illocutionary force:


a corpus-based study of the pragmatic system of Questions in
spoken Italian and French

Lecture

Prof. Emanuela Cresti 1 , Prof. Massimo Moneglia 1


1. Università di Firenze

In corpus-based taxonomies of illocutionary acts (Bunt et al. 2017; Weisser 2018; Cresti 2020), questions (seeking
for information acts) range over types with different semantic and pragmatic features. For instance, Total ques-
tions are split into Polar Question (PQ) and Request for confirmation (RC). RC is accomplished when the speaker
“presupposes what he is asking”, not a genuine seeking for information act, but a request for consent (Cresti
2020). However, it is hard to say whether a Total question is a PQ or RC since they share syntactic and lexical
features. The speaker’s state of mind and presuppositions determine these language activities’ nature.
The paper claims that, both in Italian and French, the prosodic performance allows the selection of the pragmatic
value of PQ or RC as a function of their prosodic features within systems strongly constrained by prosody.
The issue is faced through a corpus-based approach. Two highly variated selections of Italian and French in-
teractions (around 4000 utterances each) have been derived from the C-ORAL-ROM corpus (Cresti & Moneglia
2005). A data set of 370 questions in Italian and 335 in French has been settled through a methodology requiring
evaluation of the acoustic source by mother-tongue informants.
The weight of questions in speech is evaluated: something less than 10% of utterances are questions. Their
typology has been defined considering the correlations among syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic features. The
typology appears largely comparable in the two languages despite their different syntactic and accentual prop-
erties (Martin 2009). Beyond Wh- and Total questions, new types with specific prosodic features were found
(Open Question). Types that received little attention in previous literature (Tag questions, Double questions, Al-
ternative questions) have been framed within the same Prosodic strategy (Illocutionary Pattern), according to
Panunzi & Saccone (2018). Illocutionary patterns performing questions record from 10 to 15%.
With regards to Total questions (around 40% in both languages), in Italian, the highest frequency f0 contours
record a “slight valley unbound to tonicity” (Grice et al. 2005; Crocco 2006; Gili-Fivela 2008; Rossano 2010;
Savino 2012) and in French (Delais-Roussaire et al. 2015) a “simply raising contour on the last tonic syllable”,
with variant “low-rise” and a “high-rise” (Delais-Roussaire 2021; Portes 2020). However, a good lot of Total
questions (26% in French and 36% in Italian, much more than foreseen before) presents a “rising-falling moun-
tain contour” that can be clearly distinguished from the rising-falling contour of the assertive illocutionary
types (Fonagy 1973; Portes 2017).

Corpus data shows that when a mountain contour characterizes total questions, the speaker takes an injunctive
stance (Riegel et al. 1994), and the addressee is required to validate a piece of information in the context as a
shared assumption (PQ). On the contrary, the valley contour in Italian and the final rise in French occur when
the speaker asks for consent to his hypothesis (RC). Experiments devoted to validating this pragmatic distinction
are based on substituting the prosodic profile in the same context, confirming the corpus-based finding.

1521
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The semantics of the BE+V-ing form with ALWAYS-type


adverbials

Lecture

Dr. Mariko Goto 1


1. Kyushu Institute of Technology

This study explores why the BE+V-ing construction with always-type adverbials such as always and continu-
ally (always-progressive for convenience) as in (1) tends to sound more emphatic or emotionally colored than
the simple counterpart as in (2), examining Kranich’s view of the progressive for reference.
(1) We are always hearing positive feedback.
(2) We always hear positive feedback.
Based on her quantitative data and using He is always giving people lifts as an example, Kranich (2010: 217)
notes that the always-progressive seems to have developed to express, by default, negative speaker attitude in
the 20th century. However, while Kranich’s (2007: 131) Google search shows that 52% of always-progressives
are used in a negative sense today, my survey indicates that the percentage of those yielding negative reading
is around 57% in 18th-century letters.
Also, Kranich (2007) regards the always-progressive as a special kind of progressive that needs to be treated sep-
arately from other “normal” progressives. However, the line separating the two is not clear enough. Besides,
they clearly share intrinsic features of the BE+V-ing construction. For instance, the construction essentially cap-
tures an internal phase of the participialized situation, on which the conceptualizer focusses. This feature alone
can be sufficient to render the picture more detailed and vivid than the simple form that describes a wide-angle
picture of the whole situation denoted by the verb. Always-type adverbials, whether hyperbolic or not, corre-
spond to a situation repetitively holding at any point in time of perception. Therefore, the always-progressive
can signify the conceptualizer’s recurrent perceptions of an actual particular subset of the participialized sit-
uation. While examples (1) and (2) are both associated with a habitual practice, the former can depict it as a
series of recursive phenomena and the latter a metaphysically continuing phenomenon. This would explain
why example (1) can sound more emphatic than example (2) does.
As to why the use of the always-progressive is slightly biased toward expressing a negative sense, Kranich (2007:
131) attributes it to a sort of clash between the meanings of the construction and always. However, it appears
to make more sense if we link the proportion to Kensinger’s (2007) psychological research evidencing that neg-
ative emotion is remembered more accurately and minutely than positive one. More detailed memories would
help us pragmatically better prepare for the future. The BE+V-ing construction that can induce a clearer pic-
ture than the simple counterpart would be more likely to be employed for describing more detailed and vivid
memory. As the tendency seems to represent an aspect of human nature, the relationship between the always-
progressive and negative nuance in the 18th century and now would not be so different.
Reference
Kensinger, Elizabeth A. (2007) “Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy: Behavioral and Neuroimaging
Evidence,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (4), 213-218.
Kranich, S. (2007) “Subjectification and the English Progressive: The History of ALWAYS + Progressive Construc-
tions,” York Papers in Linguistics (Series 2) 8, 120-137.
Kranich, S. (2010) The Progressive in Modern English: A Corpus-based Study of Grammaticalization and Related
Changes. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

1522
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The sequel of an atypical campaign: a psycho-narratological


approach to Donald Trump’s speeches in his second
presidential run

Lecture

Ms. Belinda Wing-shum Ko 1


1. City University of Hong Kong

The year of 2016 is an atypical year. Not only is the year a momentous time for modern societies in general, but
it is also believed to be a turning point in politics, especially in American politics (Haidt, 2016). On 8 November
2016, Donald Trump was elected to be the 45th President of the United States. A few years after the shocking
electoral victory, Trump announced his second presidential run, which I refer to as ‘the sequel of the MAGA
campaign’. Though unsuccessful, Trump’s (a)typical political narrative discourse remains a fascinating area of
study.
This presentation adopts a psycho-narratological framework (Ko, 2022) to analyse the speeches delivered by
Donald Trump in his 2020 presidential campaign. This integrated analytical framework draws on positioning
theory from social psychology (Bamberg, 1997) and theoretical concepts from narratology (Labov & Waletzky,
1967; Bal, 2017); as well as analytical tools commonly used for political discourse analysis (PDA), namely ideolog-
ical square (van Dijk, 1997), legitimisation strategies (Reyes, 2011) and systemic functional grammar (Halliday
& Matthiessen, 2004). Analysis is guided by the following questions:

• How does Trump represent different social/political actors as typical, recurrent character types in his
2020 presidential campaign narrative?
• How does Trump, as a character-bound narrator in his campaign narrative, constructs his presidential
identity to the public, who are character-bound audience, in an attempt to legitimise himself and his
campaign?
• What are the discursive strategies Trump uses in the in the representation of characters and construction
of presidential identity, and how are they linguistically realised?
• How do the constructions of characters and presidential identity reflect Trump’s ideology in relation to
the wider socio-political context?

The paper contributes particularly to the field of PDA, in which many studies have adopted approaches from
critical discourse analysis (CDA) to uncover the relationship of discourse, ideology and power. The psycho-
narratological framework enables scholars to deconstruct narrative and its elements exploited by political ac-
tors in (re)shaping social/political actors and (re)constructing social/political reality. Through this presentation,
it is hoped that the value of taking a psycho-narratological perspective to PDA can be highlighted and that the
integrated analytical framework presented can offer contribution to PDA and social and political science.
References
Bal, M. (2017). Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of narrative and life history, 7(1-4),
335-342.
Haidt, J. (2016). The ethics of globalism, nationalism and patriotism. Minding Nature, 6(3), 18-24
Halliday, M. A. K., Matthiessen, C. M., Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2014). An introduction to functional gram-
mar. Routledge.
Ko, B. W. S. (2022). A psycho-narratological approach to political discourse analysis: A case study of Donald
Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ Campaign [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. City University of Hong
Kong

1523
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience.
Reyes, A. (2011). Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: From words to actions. Discourse & Society,
22(6), 781-807.
Van Dijk, T.A. (1997). What is political discourse analysis?. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 11(1), 11-52

1524
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The significance of “uncreative” semiotic practices in online


activism: Domestic workers’ resharing on Facebook

Lecture

Ms. Yuyan Liang 1 , Dr. Lydia Catedral 1


1. City University of Hong Kong

Sociolinguistic approaches to semiosis in online spaces can make significant contributions to scholarly discus-
sions of online activism through the tools they offer for exploring the digital dissemination and contestation of
socio-political messages (Yang, 2009; Gao, 2002; Kirner-Ludwig, 2020; Silva & Maia, 2022). Such approaches cap-
ture how users draw on a wide range of resources – including social media affordances (Zappavigna, 2015; Gi-
axoglou, 2018; Georgakopoulou, 2015) and multimodality (Law, 2020; Dynel, 2021) – to recontextualize (Bauman
& Briggs, 1990) semiotic material in novel ways with implications for how socio-political issues are negotiated
and understood in the digital space. While this body of work has primarily drawn attention to users’ “creativ-
ity” in transforming and repurposing earlier semiotic content (e.g., Vishnyakova et al., 2019; Pennycook, 2007),
we argue that we can expand understandings of language and semiosis in online activism by attending to cases
where such “creative” semiotics appear to be absent.
Our data come from an ongoing ethnographic study of the social media practices of grassroots organizations in
Hong Kong led by migrant domestic workers (MDWs). These organizations advocate for the rights and welfare of
MDWs who face various forms of discrimination, social exclusion and exploitation. They engage in direct-action
campaigns, information sharing, education, and welfare programs through both offline and online activities. In
this study, we focus on the online semiotic practices of members and followers of these organizations by exam-
ining how they use social media affordances (e.g., “like”, “comment” and “share”) to interact with the Facebook
posts from official organizational pages. This online ethnography is supplemented with offline ethnography
and interviews to understand the rationale behind these forms of engagement and how organizational posts
are perceived more generally.
Our findings show that resharing organizational posts is one of the primary ways in which members engage
online in activism. Organizational posts frequently receive more or equal numbers of “reshares” as compared
to “likes” or “comments”. Typically, members reshare posts directly with little or no customization. To explore
what shapes these apparently “uncreative” resharing practices, we consider the role of ideology and the mate-
rial constraints of the offline world. We show how members’ social media ideologies (Gershon, 2010) are shaped
by their organizations’ socio-political beliefs, goals and values, and how their work-life reality as MDWs (e.g.,
spatiotemporal constraints, old technology) restricts their online engagement. We also discuss how these forms
of online engagement combine with offline practices to impact these organizations’ ability to maintain mem-
bers, reach new audiences and disseminate their political messaging. Ultimately, we argue that such “uncre-
ative” practices are significant for activism as they reinforce the communal ideologies of organized members,
thereby maintaining the traditional, on-the-ground activism of these organizations. We also contend that in-
cluding “uncreative” semiotic behaviors in a theory of online practices is crucial for developing a more holistic
understanding of how “ordinary citizens” (Land, 2009; Allsop, 2016) use online spaces.

1525
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The tension between demoting a minority language and


promoting a multilingual policy: The case of Arabic in Israel

Lecture

Dr. Muzna Awayed-Bishara 1


1. Tel Aviv University

In July 2018, Israel passed a Nation State Law (NSL) that defined Israel as the homeland of the Jewish peo-
ple alone. The law not only reinforced the second-class status of its Palestinian-Arab citizens, but also trans-
formed the status of Arabic as an official language into a language with a special status. Around the same
time, Israel’s Ministry of Education initiated a project for developing a new multilingual educational policy for
its schools. Since its establishment, Israel has administered and maintained two segregated schooling systems:
one for the Jewish (Hebrew-speaking) majority and one for the Palestinian (Arabic-speaking) minority. Segrega-
tion notwithstanding, the new multilingual policy aims to provide different targets for the teaching of different
languages in Israel, with a special emphasis on the need to teach Hebrew and Arabic for fostering intercultural
dialogue between Arabs and Jews (Tannenbaum & Shohamy, 2018). Considering the political orientation of lan-
guage policies which are largely driven by the ideologies, attitudes, and beliefs of various stakeholders (Milani,
2008; Shohamy, 2006), I ask: How do members of the Palestinian-Arab minority perceive the tension between
the demotion of Arabic – their mother tongue and the transmitter of their national and cultural identity – and
the implementation of a new multilingual educational policy?
To address this question, I draw upon recent theorizations in the field of language policy and applied linguistics
that highlight the centrality of studying the communicative practices of minority language speakers as basic
building blocks in the production of democratic societies (e.g., Rampton et al., 2018; Stroud, 2018). Previous
work has identified the legislation of the NSL that cancelled the official status of Arabic as a spur to constructing
a progressive, responsibility-driven sense among Arab educators (Awayed-Bishara, 2020). Therefore, examining
whether a top-down multilingual policy serves transformative agendas entails studying the bottom-up practices
and perceptions of marginalized groups, who might be disadvantaged by such policies (Stroud, 2001). Recent
research recognizes such a focus on practice and treats language educational policy as processual, dynamic,
and in motion. This means that policy never just “is,” but rather “does” (McCarty, 2011; Rampton et al., 2018).
On that basis, I investigate whether the legislative change of Arabic from an official language to a language with
“special status” has changed the way Arabic-speaking teachers/students perceive and respond to a top-down
multilingual educational policy. I present data from interviews and ethnographic work that I conducted with
10 teachers (of various subjects) and 10 students from two High schools: one located in a village in Northern
Israel, and the other in a town in the triangle area. Data analysis suggests that cancelling the official status
of Arabic simultaneously negatively impacts its speakers’ sense of belonging, worth, and collectivity but also
encourages the emergence of new forms of activism and ingroup solidarity. Data analysis indicates that for a
multilingual educational policy in Israel to become part of a transformative project towards social justice and
cohesion, there is a need to deconstruct the underlying frameworks that reproduce and perpetuate injustices
towards them (e.g., the NSA).

1526
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The Use of Address Terms by Saudi Facebook Users in Arabic:


A Discursive Approach

Lecture

Dr. Mohammad Mahzari 1


1. Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University

This study aimed to identify the address terms used by Saudi Facebook users and understand the address be-
havior in Facebook. Most of the studies investigated the use of address terms in Arabic in face-to-face commu-
nication, but not on Facebook, a dominant platform for everyday online communication and rich with natu-
ralistic data. A total of 1258 Facebook comments were collected from 36 Facebook walls and analyzed based
on Friederike Braun’s (1988) nouns of address. New types and sub-subtypes were added to Braun’s exhaustive
list because of the Facebook context. While the Saudi Facebook users employed ten types of address terms,
the most common were teknonyms, terms of endearment, proper names, and titles by appointment. Addition-
ally, four types of endearment terms were used, such as fictive terms, affective vocatives, praise attributes, and
diminutives. Of those terms, fictive terms and affective vocatives were the most common sub-types of terms of
endearment. Moreover, the first name was used mostly with titles, such as duktu:r ‘doctor/professor,’ muhandis
‘engineer/architecture,’ and ʔustadh ‘professor/teacher.’ The function of titles was not to have a social distance
with the Facebook poster, but to show appreciation or deference for the addressee. Specifically, titles were em-
ployed by friends, relatives, and colleagues to support a relationship, not to create social distance or reinforce
the degree of formality. Finally, the functions and meanings of Arabic address terms need to be explored in
public online platforms, such as Twitter, public Facebook walls, YouTube, etc.
Keywords: address terms, Saudis, Facebook, Arabic, politeness

1527
18th International Pragmatics Conference

The ‘persuasive advantage’ of narrative in health


communication: Evidence from discussions of
vaccination-related indecision on the parenting forum
Mumsnet

Lecture

Prof. Elena Semino 1 , Dr. Tara Coltman-Patel 1 , Mr. William Dance 1 , Prof. Alice Deignan 2 , Dr. Zsofia
Demjen 3 , Dr. Claire Hardaker 1
1. Lancaster University, 2. University of Leeds, 3. University College London

A substantial body of theoretical and experimental work has contrasted narratives and the provision of in-
formation as persuasion strategies in communication generally and health communication in particular (Nan
et al 2015). Models of narrative processing include three main components that have been claimed to confer
a ‘persuasive advantage’ to narratives by decreasing resistance to persuasion: transportation into the story
world, identification with characters, and emotional involvement (Bilandzic and Buselle (2012). Experimental
research has provided some evidence for this persuasive advantage, albeit depending on a range of factors, such
as genre, medium and length (Ratcliff and Sun 2020). Existing evidence, however, has been primarily gathered
through lab or field experiments. The present study makes a novel contribution by investigating the use of, and
reactions to, narratives vs. information in five threads from the parenting forum Mumsnet Talkwhere contribu-
tors respond to a request for advice from a parent who is undecided about consenting to vaccinating their child
against the Human papillomavirus (HPV). This approach makes it possible to investigate, in naturally occurring
interaction, one particular manifestation of resistance to persuasion, namely, counterarguing. An analysis of
the 525 replies in the five threads revealed similar frequencies of narratives and information as a means of
providing advice, as well as similar frequencies of direct engagement with narratives and information. How-
ever, a difference was found in the nature of the engagement, with narratives eliciting a significantly higher
proportion of supportive engagement, and information eliciting a significantly higher proportion of challeng-
ing engagement. Differences were also identified in the frequency and nature of engagement with different
types of narratives, with narratives of illness receiving a higher proportion of (supportive) engagement than
narratives about vaccine uptake. While there are contextual reasons for these patterns, the findings provide a
new kind of evidence for a potential persuasive advantage of narrative in the context of health-related decision
making. The study also highlights the importance of discourse analytic studies of persuasive strategies in health
communication ‘in the wild’, alongside experimental research.
References
Bilandzic, H. and Buselle, R. (2012) Narrative persuasion. In Dillard, J., & Lijiang, S. (eds) The SAGE handbook of
persuasion : Developments in theory and practice (Second ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications,
200-19.
Nan, X., Dahlstrom, M. F., Richards, A. & Rangarajan, S. (2015) Influence of Evidence Type and Narrative Type
on HPV Risk Perception and Intention to Obtain the HPV Vaccine, Health Communication, 30:3, 301-308.
Ratcliff, C. L. and Sun, Y. (2020) Overcoming Resistance Through Narratives: Findings from a Meta-Analytic
Review, Human Communication Research, 46, 412–443.

1528
18th International Pragmatics Conference

To bow or not to bow: The Effectiveness of Explicit Pragmatic


Instruction in Japan

Lecture

Prof. B. Bricklin (Brick) Zeff 1


1. Hokkai-Gakuen University

This presentation will address the findings of a study on the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction in
helping Japanese students competently make and respond to greetings in American English. One of the first
things a student learns in another language is how to perform a basic greeting. (Ebsworth, Bodman, & Carpenter
1996)
Although greetings may seem simple and formulaic in their wording, they are “culturally saturated speech acts
that can determine the course of an encounter.” (Dufon 1999) The content and delivery of greeting influence a
first impression or the outcome of a lasting impression. Indeed, there are times when understanding the prag-
matics surrounding various speech acts can make the difference between merely misunderstanding a word
and not recognizing a life-threatening situation. In this study, 120 students were placed in a situation where
the greeting speech act should occur, and their participation was recorded in an authentic oral performance.
All the students were given a computer-based pre, post, and delayed post-test, including various questions de-
signed to evaluate general greeting practices and the use of various expressions and their appropriateness in
different contexts. The students were also asked to demonstrate some awareness of the differences and impor-
tance of practicing greetings in questionnaire responses that followed the study. The treatment groups were
given structured input-based and awareness-raising tasks. (Ellis 2003) This researcher believes that a commu-
nicatively competent person should be able to greet someone in an appropriate manner in the target language.
Without this skill, it is challenging to appear competent. This researcher will present findings from the study
and discussion that explore this idea of language acquisition and how explicit pragmatic instruction fits into
core L2 education goals.

1529
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Trademark(tm): a usage-based theory of the trademark sign


in the U.S.

Lecture

Dr. LaReina Hingson 1 , Ms. Kyra Larsen 1 , Mr. David Chandler 1 , Mrs. Ellie Dearden 1 , Ms. Abby Carr 1 ,
Ms. Amy Clayton 1
1. Brigham Young University

The trademark sign ™ was created for general use by the public as an unregulated legal shorthand for trademark
protections. Since its creation it has been used in a variety of discourse contexts. Much of the existing work on
trademark centers on the legality of the phrases to which the sign is attached. This study examines the use of
the sign itself across written contexts regardless of legal determination of the phrase. Of chief concern was the
question: How is the sign used in written communication to systematically convey meaning, and what meaning
is conveyed? Secondary was the consideration of how interpretations of parody sometimes resulted from such
conveyance.
Using a grounded theory approach (a systematic methodology for developing usage-based theory; Glaser and
Strauss, 1967), we collected data using convenience sampling. Grounded theory has been called for by Philips
and Egbert (2017) as an informative way to study law language. Grounded theory methodology requires data
to be collected until ‘saturation’ had been achieved (Hadley, 2017). In our case, saturation was achieved and
data collected to confirm this, resulting in 237 instances across 8 social media platforms. Using trademark law
to inform our data coding, we developed a theoretical model of the trademark sign.

Trademark sign theory (simplified):


Word Form + Sign TM (branding, ownership, legitimacy) = Mark

This theory was supported and elaborated by pragmatic theories such as relevance theory (under which
information derived from logical deductions and presuppositions are explicature rather than implicature,
an orientation we found simplified our analysis of the legal encoding of the sign ™; Sperber & Wilson, 1986;
Wilson & Sperber, 2012). Under our theory, a set of word forms can be used, and when the trademark sign is
added, it always carries a meaning of legitimacy, branding, and ownership which in turn functions to make the
propositional content of the phrase generic, thereby creating a mark.

For example, Jeep Guy ™ includes the identification of word(s) “Jeep Guy”, the addition of the sign “™” to add
explicit meaning of legitimacy, branding, and ownership to the user of the mark “Jeep Guy ™”. As a mark, the
term “Jeep Guy” no longer refers to a specific ‘guy’, ‘jeep’, or referential ‘jeep guy’, but instead systemically refers
to a new predicate category “Jeep Guy”.
In discourse, this mark can then be used for a variety of functions, including parody. For example, mismatches
in the claim of ownership (i.e. the Self claiming ownership vs. assigning the ownership to another as in
NiceGuy™), branding (i.e. claiming uniqueness for a non-unique product, such as egg™), or legitimacy (e.g.
adding or redacting the meaning of the phrase once it’s been made a mark, as in kenobi’s mullet™ or Hermes
with shades (tm)) make the mark one of parody.

The benefit of this approach is it theorizes the use of the sign independent of the effectiveness of a legal claim,
leaving the legal judgment up to the law and allowing legal judgment to ‘reflect consumers’ perceptions of
language’ (Heymann, 2020).

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Translanguaging, “English only” and silence in the university


classroom

Lecture

Dr. Toni Dobinson 1 , Dr. Qian Gong 1 , Dr. Paul Mercieca 1


1. Curtin University

Translanguaging literature has broadly discussed translanguaging as fostering expressive and creative interac-
tions within classroom contexts. Often overlooked, however, are the responses of students who are encouraged
to translanguage in spaces they previously deemed to be reserved for the dominant language only. Encourage-
ment of expressive translanguaging assumes there will be successful and meaningful uptake; what may instead
occur is student uneasiness with translanguaging due to embedded perceptions of one language being expected
in the classroom. To overcome this barrier, plurilingual students may use their full spatial repertoires which
go beyond language to peer support (social networks), the use of objects in the material ecology of the space
(e.g. laptops, papers and pens) and the use of their bodies. In combination, these assemblages generate mean-
ings according to the situation, the context, and the communicative requirement. Without encouragement for
learners to use their full spatial translingual repertoires, prolonged silence may develop. This silence can be
used for positive contemplation, and processing of new material important to translanguaging, but, equally it
can indicate confusion, insecurities in language competence or subject knowledge, passive disengagement or
demotivation, embarrassment or shame in front of peers.
Using Linguistic Ethnography, we investigate the interactions of eight Chinese university students in two class-
room settings at an Australian university. We examine how explicit or implicit English only norms at this uni-
versity, combined with students’ beliefs about English use, affect translanguaging practices and how English
as an additional language (LX) users incorporate various resources, including spatial repertoires, peer support,
and silence, to varying degrees of success within two different EMI classrooms. The pedagogical implications of
this examination point towards academics and practitioners needing to embrace and legitimise translanguaging
practices, not only at classroom level, but at course, university and policy level.

1531
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Trilingual code switching among Yunnanese migrants from


Myanmar in Taiwan: A conversation analysis approach

Lecture

Ms. Haw-Yuann Maa 1


1. National Taiwan Normal University

Code switching has been studied extensively in recent decades as multilingualism becomes more prominent
with the emergence of language contact and interaction. This phenomenon shows speakers’ linguistic compe-
tence in two or more languages and how they switch from one language to another for various functions during
discourse. In Taiwan, there is a group of Yunnanese migrants from Myanmar who are trilingual speakers of
Yunnanese, Burmese, and Mandarin Chinese. They are the second-generation migrants from Yunnan, China,
who were born and raised in Myanmar and received formal Burmese education before moving to Taiwan as
teenagers for further studies or better job opportunities. Although there has been an extensive study by Chang
(2014) on the anthropological aspect of Yunnanese migrants from Myanmar, no previous studies have looked
into the linguistic features that this group of speakers possess, most notably code switching. They are fluent
in all three languages, and when they talk to each other, they are constantly code switching between the three
languages. This study hopes to examine the conversation among this group of trilingual speakers and find out
the patterns and factors that motivate code switching through conversation analysis despite their similarities in
linguistic, social, and cultural backgrounds. Quantitative and qualitative analysis will be conducted on the con-
versation between three sisters with similar upbringings, focusing on different code switching types, including
extra-sentential, inter-sentential, and intra-sentential code switching. Results from recorded trilingual conver-
sation among the sisters indicate that switches between Mandarin-Burmese and Yunnanese-Burmese showed
similar patterns, while Yunnanese-Mandarin code switch occurred at a much lower rate. This may be due to
the linguistic distance (Wichmann et al. 2010) between the three languages, in which Mandarin and Yunnanese
have a much closer distance and may serve similar social or pragmatic function in discourse. Furthermore,
the usage of ‘we/they code’ (Sebba & Wootton 2013) was also present, despite the fact that there were no other
participants in the conversation.

1532
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Typical/Atypical Inference Levels in Low-Context Culture: A


Comparison of Generation Zs and Millennials in the UK Using
an Asian TV Drama Clip

Lecture

Prof. Mariko Boku 1


1. Ritsumeikan University

Mutual understanding is crucial for avoiding conflicts and disputes in a multicultural setting, and algorithmic
or logical reasoning might be useful for accomplishing this. Some state that logical reasoning does not require
knowledge used in the real world. If this is true, then logical reasoning has limitations for resolving misun-
derstandings in multicultural contexts. The present study aimed to examine whether typical/atypical inference
patterns were present in a “low-context culture” as the term was defined by Edward Hall in Beyond Culture in
1976, by focusing on a procedural schema, or representation of how people perceive or process information,
as opposed to a conceptual schema, or semantic knowledge. This study compared inference levels, or layers
or hierarchies of inference, of Generation Zs and Millennials in the United Kingdom. Participants were 33
UK university students (16 Generation Zs and 17 Millennials, or 18 L1-English speakers and 15 non-L1-English
speakers). The non-L1-English speakers were from India, Mexico, Hungary, Spain, Russia, Germany, China,
Colombia, Malaysia, and Palestine. Participants included 17 males and 16 females, whose average age was 23.1
years. The data were collected by snowball sampling with permission from the ethics committee at a UK uni-
versity. Materials included an Asian TV drama clip and scales for thinking dispositions. The hypothesis was
that there was a difference in inference levels between Generation Zs and Millennials in the UK. The inference
levels were coded for statistical analysis. This paper discusses the results as to whether the inference levels of
Generation Zs and Millennials in the UK are different, as well as the relationship between inference levels and
thinking dispositions. The paper further discusses some limitations and implications of the study.

1533
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Typicalising language shift as inevitability: From German to


English at an Austrian university

Lecture

Dr. Marion Nao 1 , Prof. Kristina Hultgren 1


1. The Open University

The presentation draws on interview data with 18 participants in different roles within teaching, administra-
tion, and governance at university and ministerial level in Austria to examine the accounts they give of the
increasing use of English for academic degree programmes unrelated to English, i.e., with no subject-intrinsic
reason for the use of the language. Among these, we see a typicalising of English and corresponding atypi-
calising of German, the official and most widespread societal language. While bilingualism is projected as an
outcome of Englishisation, or the increasing use of English, domain-specific monolingualism in the form of in-
struction paves the way. Such shift, from German to English, is largely presented as inevitable against the wider
backdrop of an internationalised academe.
The paper is guided by the research question: How is the shift to English for academic programmes typicalised
in participant accounts? In particular, this is explored via framing of formulations that either implicitly or
explicitly link English with ongoing and increasing internationalisation, as both a present reality and future
inevitability of the modern academe. Such typicalisation or symbolic representation, or indeed mapping of
English onto the abstract concept of internationalisation, in itself atypicalises the default alternative, i.e., the
German that has previously solely occupied the terrain, in an assumed bilingual relationship. Nevertheless,
the atypicalising of German does not remain an unstated alternative; it is indeed exemplified in a participant
observation that ‘Germanification is not internationalisation’.
While English has become, or is in the process of becoming, more typical as it increases its presence in the
internationalised curriculum, a shift reflected in the accounts of the participants, there are domains within
domains or speakers among speakers for which/whom it is formulated as atypical, and the German language
as typical. These include stage-based domains of both structure of the degree cycle (bachelor programmes) and
human work and life cycle (older academics), as well as relevance of the wider societal domain to disciplinary
field. Such embedded reversal of typicality is also examined to better understand the contextual constraints
that frame typicality in participant accounts.

1534
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Understanding styling practices through the lens of


metapragmatics

Lecture

Mr. Florian Grosser 1


1. University of Vienna

Styling practices are a well-established topic in Japanese sociolinguistics. Research has refuted the idea that
certain style choices, such as the use of honorifics, directly index the grade of contextual formality in social
interactions (e.g. Okamoto 2011). Styling practices have also been investigated with regard to Japanese-as-L2
users’ acquisition and situated use of “polite” forms (Cook 2008) and, more recently, a focus on how non-native
users perceive and reflect on these styles in classroom settings has emerged (Barke & Shimazu 2022). However,
research on metapragmatic perceptions outside the classroom are still lacking.
This research will build up on these works and show how styling practices can be understood through the lens
of metapragmatics. It will illustrate how use and shifting of speech style is calibrated in semi-formal interview
contexts in which the researcher has to negotiate different degrees of rapport with the interviewees (L1 and L2
users of Japanese), and how the researcher reflects on these interactions in an ethnographic field diary.
The data stem from two sources:

• Audio and video recorded interactions in interviews. The interviews were conducted by the researcher
in Japanese in the context of a doctoral research project that investigates ideologies of language (learning)
that surface in interactions of L1 and L2 users of Japanese.
• Ethnographic vignettes, i.e. the researcher’s self-reflection on his own linguistic practices when look-
ing back at interactions with the research participants. These reflections raise questions about his own
metacommunicative competence as a non-native user of Japanese conducting research with different
Japanese speakers and how to establish a closer relationship while maintaining the “professional for-
mality” in an interview setting.

I will take a discourse-analytic approach to analyze how metapragmatic acts extend over two communicative
events (Wortham & Reyes 2021), i.e., interviews and ethnographic reflections.
The analysis will demonstrate that style choices and perception of choices offer a distinction between levels of
metapragmatic awareness.

• How the interviewer and interviewees actually shift between styles in the interview (first level).
• What the interviewees say about their style choices in interactions they had in the past (second-level).
• How the researcher reflects on his own style choices in interactions in his field diary (third-level).

It is shown that metapragmatic awareness of style permeates all levels and that situated shifting of styles index-
ically presupposes and creates the context (the perceived grade of formality of an interview situation) and the
social relation or rapport between the participants (the calibration of closeness between the researcher and
the participants). The L2 users of Japanese tend to orient to normative perceptions of style while also expressing
doubt whether they want to do this.

1535
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Understanding the Affective Aspects of Chinese Relational


Practice from the Perspective of “Heart” and “Face”

Lecture

Dr. Linlin Fan 1 , Prof. Yongping Ran 2


1. Jinan University, 2. Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Even following recent strides (e.g. Locher and Langlotz 2008; Chang and Haugh 2011; Langlotz and Locher 2017,
2013; Ran and Zhao 2018; Chang 2018: , to list a few), the pragmatic study of interpersonal emotions (i.e., affec-
tive aspects of relational practice) is still in its infancy. The understanding of interpersonal emotions is to some
extant reflected in “face”, which is documented as an emotionally invested phenomenon (see, for example, Ho,
Fu and Ng 2004; Goffman 1967; Ruhi 2009; Spencer-Oatey 2009, 2007; Culpeper 2011). In Chinese context, there
are few attempts to theorize emotions (or qing as the indigenous concept in Chinese linguaculture) under the
umbrella of “face” (e.g. the theorization of “affection-based face”/“qingmian” in Ran and Zhao 2018; Zhao and
Ran 2019; the discussion of emotivity/“qing” and face in Chang 2018). However, there has been debates about
whether “face” is the best metaphor to explain the “relational”, how much face actually is relevant in the re-
lational practice and whether face can adequately explain the relational practice in different cultural contexts
(O’Driscoll 2011; Intachakra 2012; Arundale 2013; Fukushima 2015). Answering the call of Emancipatory Prag-
matics that scholarship should breaks free its analysis “from the confines of theoretical orthodoxies grounded
in dominant thought and practice” (Hanks et al., 2009, p. 2), there are a few tentative attempts in some Asian-
based pragmatic investigations to explain relational practice with the “heart” metaphor alongside the orthodox
“face” metaphor (e.g., Intachakra 2012; Fukushima 2015).
The current study seeks to contribute to this emancipatory line of theorization by 1) presenting interactional
evidence on the relevance of “heart (qing as the indigenous concept in Chinese linguaculture)” in Chinese re-
lational practice; 2) exploring the various strategies for doing “heartwork”, and 3) discussing the relationship
between the orthodox “face (lian/mianzi as the indigenous concept in the Chinese linguaculture)” perspective
and the alternative “heart” perspective. To be specific, we examine medical professionals’ management of inter-
personal emotions (i.e., the interactional achievement of “heartwork”) when they perform the potentially hear-
threatening act (HTA) of “urging payment”. We draw our data from a medical documentary series recorded in
the obstetrics department and neonatology department of a Grade-III Class-A hospital (Chinese hospital ranking
system) in China. The very act of “urging payment” is not in itself heart-threatening in the institutional context
of health care, but it can be rendered “heart-threatening” under certain interactional context. When perform-
ing the potentially heart-threatening act (HTA) of urging payment, the medical professionals are found to make
extra interactional efforts to render interpersonal emotions “ ‘appropriate’ to the situation” (Hochschild 1979).
It is exactly these extra interactional efforts that we are interested in in this particular research.
This research may contribute to the understanding interpersonal emotions in the underrepresented cultural
context of China, and the under-researched medical context of the obstetrics and neonatology.
Key words: interpersonal emotions, medical interaction, heart (qing), face (lian/mianzi)
References (omitted because of word limit)

1536
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Unpacking ‘baby man’ in Chinese social media: A feminist


critical discourse analysis

Lecture

Dr. Qian Gong 1 , Ms. Yifan Chen 1


1. Curtin University

Unpacking the ‘Baby man’ in the Chinese social media: a feminist critical discourse analysis
Yifan Chen, Qian Gong
Abstract
From April to June 2022, Chinese social media, mainly Weibo, witnessed three high-profile gender-related inci-
dents that drew the attention of the Chinese public. These incidents caused widespread wrath among female
groups and sharply accelerated the debate on gender equality on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
In response to the debate, the nomenclature ‘baby man’, in Chinese 男宝, became a popular metaphor of men
as self-centred giant babies coddled by an entire patriarchal society, and the ‘baby boy’ discourse was widely
spread on Weibo.
By adopting the Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) both as a theoretical foundation and a specific
qualitative analysis method, this article seeks to critically examine how gender power and relationships are
discursively produced, represented and resisted through the ‘baby man’ discourse on Chinese social media.
Specifically, it unpacks how ‘baby man’ is linguistically represented and how different ideologies emerge and
are negotiated through the discursive construction of this catchphrase. Through a case study of 43 posts con-
taining ‘baby man’ on Chinese social media, the paper explicates how these posts echo the complex historical
and sociocultural backgrounds of the discourse on masculinity gender relations. The finding suggests that the
‘baby man’ has employed discursive strategies, namely: the double irony in ‘baby man’; the blunt resistance
against both gender and power relation, which deconstruct the heteropatriarchal gender norm through the
mother-son female gaze; and contempt for the nation’s past and current fertility policy. It argues that despite
the perennial censorship, these three discursive strategies help reconstruct the extant gender hierarchy backed
by conservative Confucianist ethics and challenge the political authoritarianism indoctrinated by the state. The
paper concludes that the proliferation of the new term ‘男宝baby man’ has a significant impact on reconstruct-
ing established gender relations and resisting China’s authoritarian political power in a highly-censored online
environment.
Keywords: Chinese feminism, social media, Weibo, baby man, Feminist CDA

1537
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Use of inscribed objects in role-play training sessions at a


Japanese insurance company

Lecture

Ms. Koyuki Mitani 1


1. University of Hawaii at Manoa

Roleplays are widely employed to train novice professionals across various professions. Previous studies on
roleplays have illustrated social members’ interactional work for dual framing of roleplays—a roleplay frame
and a frame that indexes the occasion of the roleplay (e.g., language testing, training for professionals). They
have explicated how participants accomplish roleplays by mobilizing their membership knowledge of the social
settings directed for the roleplays. At the same time, it has been noted that participants orient to the wider con-
texts of roleplays in which the current roleplays are occasioned. For example, Linell and Thunqvist (2003) who
investigate simulated job interviews observe that participants shift their roles as interviewers and applicants
to being unemployed youths and project counselors by conducting advice-giving. This shift is occasioned when
instructing the youths becomes relevant in the on-going simulated interviews. As they showed, dual framing of
roleplays is a practical task for participants. For roleplays designed as training for professionals, dual framing
of roleplays plays a crucial role in instructing novice professionals.
In professions where inscribed objects figure as essential objects (Weilenmann & Lymer, 2014), training novices
in the effective use of the inscribed objects is vital. However, to my best knowledge, no study has conducted
to examine how the use of inscribed objects are instructed through roleplays. This study aims to fill in the
research gap by examining how a trainer at a Japanese insurance company instructs trainees in the use of
insurance brochures in roleplays.
The data come from approximately 33 hours of video recordings of the roleplay training sessions. I adopt multi-
modal Conversation Analysis (Goodwin, 2000; Mondada, 2018, 2019) to delineate the participants’ embodied ac-
tions with insurance brochures, which were constitutive of the organization of the instructional roleplays. The
analysis reveals that instruction is achieved as the participants maneuver two coexisting interactional frames
– a roleplay frame and a training frame - by manually handling insurance brochures in roleplays. Specifically,
I identified two actions that trainers’ dual framing with brochures accomplishes: assisting and correcting a
trainee. For example, while maintaining a roleplay interaction through talk (e.g., question-answer sequence re-
garding a proposed insurance plan), a trainer simultaneously opens a particular page of an insurance brochure
to assist a trainee to formulate the answer to the question, thereby enacting dual framing of the roleplay. The
study explicates how the participants coordinate their actions in the concurrent dual frames to achieve the
situated instructions that cater for the specific instructional needs emerging from the roleplay interaction at
the moment. By illustrating how the two frames are intertwined with each other, I attempt to show that dual
framing of roleplays with a brochure is an instructional resource for the trainer to adapt her instruction to the
trainees’ roleplay performances on site. The findings of the study advance our understanding of the organiza-
tion of roleplay as training by illuminating the role of inscribed objects in instructing novice insurance agents.

1538
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Vaccine indecision on Mumsnet Talk over time: ‘I am still


unsure…’

Lecture

Dr. Zsofia Demjen 1 , Dr. Tara Coltman-Patel 2 , Mr. William Dance 2 , Dr. Claire Hardaker 2 , Prof. Elena
Semino 2
1. University College London, 2. Lancaster University

Vaccinations are among the most effective public health tools at our disposal and have resulted in the eradica-
tion of or reduced morbidity and mortality from multiple communicable diseases. Yet, vaccination programmes
in 90% of countries in the world have been affected by delayed acceptance or refusal of (some) vaccines despite
availability of vaccination services, a phenomenon known as ‘vaccine hesitancy’ (Lancet 2019). Online parent-
ing forums are popular information sources about vaccinations as well as being useful channels for expressing
and discussing concerns (Betti et al., 2021; Campbell et al. 2017). Yet relatively little is known about what con-
cerns are raised ‘in the wild’ (as opposed to in surveys) and how.
In this talk we examine text dispersion keywords (Egbert and Biber 2019) in a boutique corpus of 422 Original
Posts (ca. 68,000 words) expressing indecision and hesitancy around vaccination on the popular UK-based par-
enting site, Mumsnet Talk. We describe how we combined automated and manual strategies to identify the 422
relevant posts amongst the 12,380 in a 31-million-word corpus of vaccination discussions on Mumsnet, before
comparing these to other discussions about vaccinations on Mumsnet Talk. We outline the key concerns related
to indecision (e.g. timing and combination of vaccines, side-effects and adverse reactions in particular personal
circumstances, etc.) and how these change over time. We then zoom in on keywords related to the side effects
of vaccinations (‘effects’ and ‘reaction’) as a special case study to explore how the imprecise use of such terms,
both in our data and more generally in English, might contribute to vaccine indecision.
References
Betti, L., De Francisci Morales, G., Gauvin, L., Kalimeri, K., Mejova, Y., Paolotti, D., & Starnini, M. (2021). Detecting
adherence to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule from user-generated content in a US parenting
forum. PLOS Computational Biology, 17(4), e1008919.
Campbell H, Edwards A, Letley L, Bedford H, Ramsay M, Yarwood J. (2017) Changing attitudes to childhood
immunisation in English parents. Vaccine. 19;35(22):2979-2985.
Egbert, J. and Biber, D. (2019) Incorporating text dispersion into keyword analyses. Corpora, 14:1, 77-104
The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (2019) Vaccine hesitancy: a generation at risk EDITORIAL, VOLUME 3,
ISSUE 5, P281, MAY 01, 2019

1539
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Verbal humor as a discourse strategy in the environment of


adult education: negotiating distance, equality, and othering

Lecture

Dr. Giorgos Giakoumakis 1 , Prof. Marianthi Georgalidou 1


1. University of the Aegean

The aim of this presentation is to study adult learners’ and educators’ discourse strategies and identity con-
struction processes in the context of adult education. More specifically, we investigate humor as a discourse
strategy serving the construction of social identities in communities of practice of lifelong learning. We analyze
data collected via ethnographic participant observation and the digital recording of spontaneous discourse in
the said environment. We apply discourse-analytical approaches to investigate the conversational organization
of adult classroom interaction (McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1985; Seedhouse, 2004; Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain, 2004;
Markee, 2009). We also apply the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo & Raskin, 1991; Attardo, 1994, 2001;
Archakis & Tsakona, 2005, 2006) to tackle the sociopragmatic parameters of humorously negotiating identities
and power relationships in the environment of adult education.
The systematic analysis of naturally occurring recorded speech in the context of Greek adult classroom humor-
ous interactions shows that interlocutors select targets both outside and inside the educational community. In
the first case, humor constitutes a strategy for othering exploited by conversationalists to construct shared be-
liefs and values and strengthen in-group bonding. In the second, it correlates to face management strategies
as it attempts to negotiate power relationships within a traditionally organized educational environment in
which interaction management is considered the right of the instructors. What is more, data analysis reveals
that humorous utterances are selected by educators targeting learners and learners targeting educators alike,
to establish increased levels of intimacy contributing to the construction of a less asymmetric relationship be-
tween the parties involved. Finally, it is shown that via humor, adult learners negotiate identities of equality
transcending age/generation discrepancies in life long educational environments.
Archakis, A., & Tsakona, V. (2005). Analyzing conversational data in GTVH terms: A new approach to the issue
of identity construction via humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 18, 41-68.
Archakis, A., & Tsakona, V. (2006). Script Oppositions and Humorous Targets: Promoting Values and Construct-
ing Identities via Humor in Greek Conversational Data. Stilistyka 15, 119–134.
Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Attardo, S. (2001). Humorous texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis. New Work: Berlin Mouton de Gruyter.
Attardo, S., & Raskin, V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor.
International Journal of Humor Research, 4(3-4), 293-347.
Seedhouse, P. (2004). The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Per-
spective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Liebscher, G. & Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2004). Learner code-switching in the contentbased foreign language classroom.
Canadian Modern Language Review, 60(4), 501-526.
Markee, N. (2009). Conversation analysis: Second Language Acquisition Research Theoretical and Methodological
Issues. London, UK: Taylor & Francis.
McHoul, A. (1978). The Organization of Turns at Formal Talk in the Classroom. Language in Society, 7(2), 183-213.
Mehan, H. (1985). The structure of classroom discourse. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis
(Vol.3, pp. 115-131). London: Academic Press.

1540
18th International Pragmatics Conference

War symbols and anti-Asian sentiments in online animal


rights advocate discourse

Lecture

Dr. Arisa Koba 1 , Mr. Yingqian Zhang 2


1. Nagoya Bunri University, 2. Osaka University

This lecture will demonstrate the results of the discourse analysis of an animal rights group’s Facebook page,
which has been conducted by authors since 2021. The target of the analysis is the Facebook account of an
animal rights advocacy group based in England, its posts, and the comments made on them. We collected our
data from the target account’s posts and comments made by its followers between March to December 2020, the
year which saw a surge of anti-Asian hate speech following the outbreak of novel coronavirus disease. The posts
of the account consist of criticism against animal cruelty worldwide, calls for donations, the promotion of their
goods, etc. The posts and top 30 (or more) comments were analyzed by the authors using the methodology of
critical discourse analysis. Our focus in the lecture will be on comments including war symbols such as “bomb”
or “nuke,” how they are used, and what discourse is (re)produced by them. Our purpose is to examine the way
in which war symbols are used to maintain what van Dijk called “dominance,” or the “discursive strategies
[of elites] for the maintenance of their inequality” (van Dijk 1993), as well as to unveil the process by which
racist discourse is (re)produced in communities which are supposed to be humanitarian, such as animal rights
advocacy group.
We found that in our data, almost all the comments including war symbols such as “bomb/nuke them” were
elicited from posts criticizing Asian countries. The comment below was aimed at a post on May 6th , which
criticized the trafficking of pangolins in China.
No surprise the monsters and to think the British and allies balied the out the 2nd world war, we should of
nukeed the bastard’s like Japan anoughter murdering killing nation [sic]
This comment clearly shows the writer’s position as a “victor country” or the “bomber” and justifies genocide
during war-time. The fact that this discursive strategy was employed toward China, the former Axis, indicates
that its use is not based on the actual war-time ally/enemy relationship but more likely related to anti-Asian
sentiment. Such use of war symbols has been observed with racist connotations. In the “parody” book of O. J.
Simpson’s trial case, titled “O. J.’s Legal Pad,” the drawing of the Judge Lance Ito, the Japanese American judge
who was in charge of this case, repeatedly appears with slanted eyes and is depicted as a “kamikaze” warrior.
There is even a poem attached to one drawing, saying “HIROSHIMA, NUKE JUDGE ITO, BANZAI, BANZAI, NA-
GASAKI” (Lee 1995, Kim 1999). Even though symbols such as “nuke” allude to the “victor/defeated countries” or
“the Axis/Allies” of World War II, our data show that they are opportunistically used in anti-Asian discourse.
While delineating the role of these symbols in forming the writers’ positions and maintaining their dominance,
we will also clarify the process of (re)producing racist discourse, even under a supposedly racially neutral
agenda such as animal rights advocacy.

1541
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What are the emic understandings of attentiveness in


Japanese?

Lecture

Dr. Saeko Fukushima 1


1. Tsuru University

This paper attempts to investigate politeness as consideration in Japanese through the lens of attentiveness
(kikubari, kizukai, kokorokubari, kokorozukai in Japanese). Attentiveness is demonstrated after reading the at-
mosphere in a situation and inferring the other party’s needs. Although the Japanese participants in Fukushima
(2020) considered attentiveness as one of the major constituents of politeness, they wrote only one word, ‘atten-
tiveness’, when they were asked to conceptualise politeness. In this presentation, we probe how Japanese lay
people interpret attentiveness more in detail by investigating Twitter data posted by Japanese people.
600 posts were collected, using hashtags. The keywords included kikubari, kizukai, kokorokubari, and koko-
rozukai. The posts were coded based on analysis of the content. The results show that the posts which were
categorised in ‘People’ (who demonstrate attentiveness, including lay people and celebrities) accounts for the
biggest proportion (38.44%) in the data. The posters not only made positive evaluation towards them, but they
were also helped by the attentiveness demonstrated by lay people. The posts, which describe the celebrities,
showcase the posters’ admiration towards celebrities who can demonstrate attentiveness and/or posters think
that the celebrities succeed, as they can demonstrate attentiveness.
The posts which were categorised in ‘Importance of attentiveness’ has the second highest frequency (21.17%) in
the data. Some posts state the importance of attentiveness in general, and some other posts the importance of
attentiveness in business. There were some posts, which were categorised in ‘Pointing out the lack of attentive-
ness’. The posters not only point out the lack of attentiveness of other people, but also the posters themselves. It
is shown that posters want to be able to demonstrate attentiveness from the posts categorised in ‘Desire of the
posters’. Although the number of the posts was not many, there were some posts which define attentiveness,
which show that some people pretend to be a nice person, and which praise the posters themselves. The posters
in the latter two say that they can demonstrate attentiveness. The posts which express negative interpretation
of attentiveness were the fewest (1.14%) in the data.
These results show that Japanese lay people evaluate attentiveness positively in most cases and that they think
they should demonstrate attentiveness. These results may be related to ideology in Japanese culture, namely
that attentiveness is a virtue. Some posts, however, indicate that there are some people who cannot demonstrate
attentiveness these days.
In the presentation, some representative posts in each category are also investigated qualitatively, and polite-
ness in Japanese is discussed in relation to attentiveness.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

What disruptive effects in cognitive processing should be


taken into account in sign language interpreting? The case of
interpreting in a medical context

Lecture

Mr. Alain Bacci 1 , Dr. Franck Amadieu 1 , Dr. Fred Paas 2 , Dr. Florence Encreve 3
1. CLLE, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France, 2. Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3. Université Paris VIII

Interpreting is a very complex task from a cognitive point of view, as it involves the quasi-simultaneous process-
ing of information in several sensory channels under time pressure. The problem is even more complex when
interpreting from a vocal language (VL) to a sign language (SL), as the visual channel is then called upon both to
process the language and to process the feedback needed for communication. The fact that these activities can
easily overload the cognitive system makes the task of the interpreter, but especially the training for this task,
difficult.
Cognitive load theory (CLT) can be particularly useful in providing guidelines for the design of training for the
interpreting task. CLT aims to optimise the learning of complex cognitive tasks by transforming contemporary
scientific knowledge about how cognitive structures and processes are organised (i.e. the cognitive architec-
ture) into guidelines for instructional design. To achieve this goal, cognitive load researchers attempt to de-
velop pedagogical control of cognitive load by designing methods that substitute productive cognitive load for
unproductive cognitive load. The principles used by CLT can be used to design interpreter training.
Our thinking on the design of interpreter training is based on two approaches. The first is based on the use of
cognitive load theory, which takes into account the cognitive complexity of the interpreter’s task and can pro-
vide guidelines for training design. The second approach is to identify the heuristics and strategies that experi-
enced interpreters have developed to reduce cognitive load when interpreting, and to transfer this knowledge
to learners through appropriate exercises.
This research, which aims to better understand how interpreting works in order to better teach it, is based on
a cross-sectional exploration of several studies:
- 5 filmed observations of French vs. French sign language interpreting carried out under usual working con-
ditions followed by introspective interviews with interpreters to study the actions implemented when they en-
counter cognitive obstacles (explicitation of heuristics, identification of strategies to solve interpreting prob-
lems).
- Verification on a larger corpus of interpreting in order to identify the most frequent treatments. This corpus
is currently being built up (massive collection of interpretations made during television news programmes).
- An experimental study aimed at identifying the most effective and transferable cognitive processes: interpre-
tation of a 20-minute conference specifically designed to lead 15 interpreters to implement a maximum number
of processing and problem-solving strategies in interpreting.
The pragmatic dimension, i.e. taking into account the speakers and the context, is an important source of cog-
nitive load. It is therefore an integral part of this research. F/LSF interpreting in a medical environment, where
the medical gesture, the position of the speakers and the management of gaze are particularly important, will
be illustrated during the conference.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

What happens to interpersonal pragmatics when everybody


swears? Relational and identity functions of swearing in Only
Murders in the Building

Lecture

Dr. Karyn Stapleton 1 , Dr. Kristy Beers Fägersten 2


1. ulster university, 2. Södertorn University Stockholm

INTRODUCTION: SWEARING & INTERPERSONAL PRAGMATICS


Swearing fulfils interpersonal pragmatic functions, which we have previously investigated (Stapleton, 2010,
2020; Beers Fägersten, 2012, 2017; Beers Fägersten & Stapleton, 2017, 2022; Stapleton et al. 2022). It readily
serves negative relational purposes such as aggression, insult, and impoliteness; but equally, it may achieve
positive outcomes such as humour, affiliation, facework, and intimacy/trust. In addition, swearing shows intra-
individual variation and can serve as a powerful identity resource.
The power of swearing in achieving these effects lies, at core, in its potential to shock and offend. In turn, this
means that swearing, more than most other linguistic activities, is highly context-dependent for its meaning
and consequences. The latter derive largely from the social constraints associated with different categories of
speaker and different interpersonal settings.
RESEARCH TOPIC & DATA: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYBODY SWEARS?
The mystery-dramedy series Only Murders in the Building (OMitB, 2021–) takes place in New York City and fea-
tures a cast of characters reflecting high socio-demographic variation. Airing on the Disney+ streaming service,
the series is not subject to FCC regulations regarding the use of obscene language and hence, OMitB includes
frequent swearing. All of the otherwise diverse array of characters have in common the recurring use of swear
words, such that swearing does not differentiate characters or settings. The interpersonal swearing behaviour
exhibited by the cast of characters thus conflicts with research evidence of swearing as occurring mainly among
interlocutors who are socio-demographically similar and, in the context of television series, mainly among a
subset of characters.
This paper explores the impact of such ubiquity on the interpersonal functions of swearing; and on its reception,
both by the characters themselves and potentially by the viewers of the series. A systematic sample of episodes
has been transcribed and subjected firstly to a quantitative content analysis of frequency, swear word tokens,
and character/situational variables: and then to a qualitative discourse analysis of interpersonal pragmatic
functions. We consider three specific research questions: (1) What relational purposes are achieved by swearing
as shown in the series? (2) Do the swearing practices used by the characters index any socio-demographic
variables or situational features? (3) What can this analysis tell us about the role of pragmatics in swearing
and/or the relationship between scripted versus naturalistic swearing practice?
REFERENCES
Beers Fägersten, K. (2012). Who’s Swearing Now? Cambridge Scholars Publishers.
Beers Fägersten, K. (2017). ‘The role of swearing in creating an online persona: The case of YouTuber PewDiePie’.
Discourse, Context and Media 18: 1-10.
Beers Fägersten, K., Stapleton, K. (2017) ‘Introduction’. In K. Beers Fägersten, K. Stapleton (eds). Advances in
Swearing Research. Benjamins.
Beers Fägersten, K., Stapleton, K. (2022). ‘Swearing’. In Handbook of Pragmatics Online. Benjamins.
Stapleton, K. (2010). ‘Swearing’. In M. Locher, S.L. Graham (eds). Interpersonal Pragmatics. de Gruyter.
Stapleton, K. (2020). ‘Swearing and perceptions of the speaker: A discursive approach’. Journal of Pragmatics
170: 381-395.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Stapleton, K. Beers Fägersten, K., Stephens, R., Loveday, C. (2022). ‘The power of swearing: What we know and
what we don’t’. Lingua 177 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2022.103406

1545
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What is hidden from you: Implicit pragmatic phenomena in


Hungarian fake news headlines

Lecture

Dr. Zsuzsanna Németh 1 , Dr. Katalin Nagy C. 1 , Prof. Enikő Németh T. 1


1. University of Szeged

The study of various types of false information (e.g. lying, disinformation, fake news) has recently become a
central topic in pragmatics (e.g. Meibauer 2019). One of the aims of this line of research is to find automatic
ways of detecting presumably false information on the basis of linguistic analysis of texts. A special attention
is devoted to fake news and their headlines (e.g. Chen et al. 2015). Former research focuses on search for overt
linguistic elements, such as pronouns, forward referencing devices, superlatives, definite referring expressions,
and intensifiers (Scott 2021).
Transmission of false information frequently uses implicit pragmatic contents that seem to be challenging to
identify, because they do not have explicitly available forms. Németh T. et al. (2022) provide some methods
to retrieve such implicit phenomena from corpora. Continuing this line of research, the present paper aims
to examine three hidden phenomena in fake news headlines: implicit arguments (e.g. implicit subjects and
objects), implicit contents in speech acts (incomplete propositional content, implicit illocutionary force), and
implicatures (both conventional and conversational). The investigation is based on a corpus consisting of 1000
Hungarian health-related fake news headlines and 1000 non-fake ones.
Relying on manual qualitative and automatic analyses, the main results of the research are the following. While
non-fake news headlines are intended to be more informative, fake news headlines often create an information
gap (cf. Scott 2021) or suggest implicatures to arouse addressees’ curiosity manipulatively. Three manipulative
strategies are revealed. (i) In contrast to other types of language use, in the case of fake news, implicit arguments
in the headlines are not always resolved in the body of the article, but are used as a manipulative strategy to
generate clicks. (ii) Some headlines contain speech acts with incomplete propositional content. Although the
explicitly conveyed part of the content is enough to make addressees be able to infer the illocutionary force of the
speech act, the information gap triggers a psychological effect on them and makes them click on the headline.
(iii) As for implicatures, they are more frequent in fake news headlines than in non-fake ones, presumably
because their use allows to avoid responsibility for manipulative information transmission. Finally, it can be
concluded that a corpus-based analysis of implicit pragmatic phenomena is possible in fake news headlines
and qualitative, manual analysis and a suitable pragmatic annotation may contribute to automated fake news
detection.
References
Chen, Y. – Conroy, N. J. – Rubin, V. L. 2015: Misleading Online Content: Recognizing Clickbait as “False News”.
Conference paper. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2823465.2823467 (Accessed 26. 10. 2022).
Meibauer, Jörg (ed.) 2019: The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Oxford, OUP.
Németh T., E. – Nagy C., K. – Németh, Zs. 2022: How to investigate implicit pragmatic phenomena in corpora.
Paper presented at the 9th INPRA Conference (21–23 June 2022, Brisbane, Australia).
Scott, K. 2021: You won’t believe what’s in this paper! Clickbait, relevance and the curiosity gap. Journal of
Pragmatics 175: 53–66.

1546
18th International Pragmatics Conference

What role play and elicited conversation can tell about L2


interactional competence?

Lecture

Mr. Jingxuan Wu 1 , Prof. Carsten Roever 1


1. University of Melbourne

In L2 interactional competence (IC) studies, role plays and elicited conversations are the most commonly
adopted data elicitation methods. However, no studies to date have compared role play and elicited conver-
sation task to investigate what information about L2 IC these two methods can elicit. This study fills this gap.
Data were gathered from 54 L2 learners of Mandarin Chinese at four proficiency levels and 12 native speak-
ers of Chinese. Participants were assigned to dyads consisting of similar proficiency level. Each dyad did one
elicited conversation task and two role plays.
This study found that elicited conversation tasks were more capable of eliciting topic management, including
topic initiation, extension, and shift sequences. Role plays have strengths in eliciting large-scale sequential or-
ganization to manage disaffliative social actions (i.e. preference organization). Specifically, in role plays, inter-
locutors can deploy pre-expansions, insert-expansions, and post-expansions to organize requests and refusals
as dispreferred social actions. Dispreferred actions were observed in both instruments, but the preference or-
ganization for disagreements shows clear instrument effects, especially for upper-intermediate level learners.
In elicited conversations, these learners organized disagreements as preferred social actions, characterized by
immediate response, straightforwardness, and less mitigation. By contrast, upper intermediates’ refusals in
role plays showed typical features of dispreferred social actions. Their refusals were usually delayed by se-
quential and linguistic devices, and a higher degree of elaboration, implicitness, and mitigation were observed.
The instrument effect was less observable in the advanced level learner’ and native speaker corpora. This study
has implications for research in L2 interactional competence and for language assessment targeting particular
aspects of learners’ IC.
Keywords: L2 Interactional Competence, Role plays, Elicited conversation, method, comparison

1547
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When it comes to quantifiers, argumentativity is not only


about quantity

Lecture

Mrs. Nicole Katzir 1 , Prof. Mira Ariel 1


1. Tel Aviv University

The intuition that (1a) is more persuasive than (1b) is presumably accounted for by several’s preference for
expressing higher quantities than a few (see Newstead et al., 1987; van Tiel et al., 2021, inter alia):
1a. The exam was difficult. Several students failed.
1b. The exam was difficult. A few students failed.
However, we argue that quantity alone is not enough to explain this argumentative difference between the two
quantifiers. To do so, we present an experimental study and a corpus study. Our findings suggest that (a) several
indeed contributes to a stronger argument than a few, (b) it conveys a larger quantity, and (c) it construes its
nominal complement as being composed of individuated entities.
In the experimental study, participants (N=93) read negative product reviews, which included a quantified nom-
inal with one of the quantifiers (e.g., the remote control had a few/several useless buttons). They performed two
tasks. First, they marked on a scale how satisfied the review writer was with the product. Since all reviews
were negative, if several is argumentatively stronger than a few, items with several should receive lower cus-
tomer satisfaction (CS) scores. In the second task, participants assessed the quantity expressed by the quantified
nominal.
Results showed that items with several received lower CS scores than items with a few (p<.001). Additionally,
items with several were assessed as conveying a higher quantity (p<.001). A linear mixed-effects model revealed
that higher assessed quantities led to lower CS scores (p<.01). However, the quantifier had a significant effect
on CS scores, whereby the choice of several as a quantifier also leads to lower CS scores (p<.001). That is, there
are factors beyond quantity that affect CS scores.
An examination of the discourse profiles (Ariel, 2008) of the two quantifiers in COCA (Davies, 2008-) reveals
that the distributional patterns associated with each quantifier are indicators of the discourse prominence of
the entity denoted by the nominal complement and of argumentative strength (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1983). As
predicted, several is associated with high prominence, whereas a few is associated with low prominence.
Inspired by their diachrony, we argue that argumentativity, quantity, and individuation are motivated differ-
ently for each quantifier: for several, individuation motivated stronger argumentativity, which in turn moti-
vated association with a larger quantity. For a few, its focus on the small size of the quantity motivated weaker
argumentativity and, thus, a lower degree of individuation.
References
Anscombre, J.-C., & Ducrot, O. (1983). L’argumentation dans la langue. Mardaga.
Ariel, M. (2008). Pragmatics and Grammar. Cambridge University Press.
Davies, M. (2008-). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 600 million words, 1990-present.
https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
Newstead, S. E., Pollard, P., & Riezebos, D. (1987). The effect of set size on the interpretation of quantifiers used
in rating scales. Applied Ergonomics, 18(3), 178–182.
van Tiel, B., Franke, M., & Sauerland, U. (2021). Probabilistic pragmatics explains gradience and focality in
natural language quantification. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(9).

1548
18th International Pragmatics Conference

When Your Conference Presentation Takes An Atypical Turn:


Audience’s Question(ing) Design in Question & Answer
Sessions

Lecture

Ms. Pınar Topal 1 , Dr. Hale Işık-Güler 1


1. Middle East Technical University

“Asking a question is not an innocent thing to do,” as inquiries into what the recipient has said or done may in-
volve potential disaffiliation (Steensig and Drew, 2008, p.7). Conference Question & Answer (Q&A) sessions, in
particular, crystallize this interactional phenomenon as a nexus for submitting one’s work to the inspection of
academia. In line with this notable point, the present study explores a hitherto neglected field of research within
the domains of academic discourse: the language of conferencing. The production of ‘talk for an overhearing
audience’ is a prominent characteristic of conference Q&As, as the audience members vigilantly attend to their
institutional role-related rights: the entitlement to appraise the focal participants’ turns. The focal participants
(i.e., the presenter and the enquirer audience members) may at any time “depart from formal turn-taking” and
its typical manifestation as a result of this characteristic (Drew and Heritage, 1992, p.27). Correspondingly, while
the typical design of audience interrogatives is ascribed as information-seeking, genuine questions, Q&A ses-
sions also host atypical instances of objections to and questionings of presented works. Such departures from
typical information-seeking questions towards questions that convey disagreement make conference Q&As a
paramount site of struggle over academic identities, as they open the face of the presenter to threats by the
negative evaluations that might come under the disguise of questions. In these sequences, the audience’s at-
tempts at policing and gatekeeping, as well as the presenters’ means of resisting and accepting, are displayed
through interactional-pragmatic phenomena. Our analysis offers a discursive account of the video recordings of
25 Turkish Q&A sessions held during a Linguistics conference, in an attempt to explore the appraisal resources
(Martin & White, 2005) and the rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2002) orientations that the presenters and
audience members employ in their atypical turns. Features of the audience’s atypical turn design, such as dis-
affiliative and evaluative question design, as well as the presenters’ strategies to restore routine conduct during
conference Q&A sessions, are micro-analysed. The findings indicate that the members of the audience actively
enact their here-and-now position as an information-receiving audience (and the K- epistemic stance that this
role assumes) in the formation of genuine, information-seeking questions. Questioning, however, is found to
instantiate the audience’s relative epistemic status (e.g., a senior with credentials of a potentially higher role in
academia) against the presenting academic (e.g., an early-career researcher) in the larger context of academia
through evaluative language. The study offers insights into the institutional ‘fingerprints’ of the professional
community of academia, saturated in conference Q&A talk. The findings are conducive to the discursive litera-
ture on evaluative language and the institutional impoliteness embedded in the language of conferencing and
have potential implications for our understanding of spoken academic discourse.

References
Drew, P., & Heritage, J. (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge University Press.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.

Steensig, J., & Drew, P. (2008). Introduction: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction. Discourse
Studies, 10(1), pp.5-15.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Who is the city for? Perceptions of ‘urban’ namesigns in


semiotic landscapes of gentrification

Lecture

Dr. Gabriella Modan 1


1. The Ohio State University

This paper is an examination of interpretations of the word urban in namesigns in central-city DC neighbor-
hoods. I conducted semi-structured interviews with African American, White, and Latinx residents and work-
ers in central DC (the main ethnic groups in this part of the city). Participants were first shown closeup images
of namesigns with the word urban, then images of the facades on which the signs were placed, and asked to
discuss what kind of businesses the signs might represent, who the target clientele might be, and if their in-
terpretations changed between the closeup and face images, before going on to a more general discussion of
their associations with the word urban. Taking an ethnographically informed approach to the study of semiotic
landscape (Blommaert 2013), I analyze how, given the interview data, material aspects of the landscape (type-
face, color, building materials, store products, etc.) either foster or work against the resignification of urban
as meaning hip and expensive. Underlying this new meaning are longstanding associations of urban in the US
context as, alternately, dangerous, decaying, lively, diverse, or Black. When the visual and linguistic semiotics
worked together to convey a sleek distinctiveness, urban directly indexed general hipness or, for some African
American participants, Black hipness, while indirectly indexing qualities associated with the disinvested city
(much like Hill’s 2008 finding that Mock Spanish directly indexed a relaxed demeanor while indirectly indexing
a racist and demeaning image of Latinxs). When the various semiotic systems sent conflicting signals, partici-
pants either attributed older meanings to urban, or they had difficulty parsing the semiotics and couldn’t figure
out what kind of business the sign might represent. While the newer meaning of urban was available to all par-
ticipants, the older meanings were more available to African American and Latinx participants, and the Black
pride meaning was only invoked by African American participants. Much like the new school signs conveying
distinction that Trinch and Snajdr (2020) identified in gentrifying Brooklyn, NY, urban signs are part of a glob-
ally circulating symbolic economy that prop up and work in concert with 4th wave gentrification processes that
rely heavily on “placemaking” (c.f. Gehl 1987) and upscale commerce – processes that benefit developers and
capital interests, and often at the expense of the people mostly closely tied to semiotics wielded in the symbolic
economy.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Working through idio-pragmatics: An approach in translation


to analyzing historical contrastive pragmatics

Lecture

Dr. Damián Robles 1


1. Lamar University

Recently there has been an increase in research in the areas of historical pragmatics and im/politeness (c.f.,
Kádár and Paternoster 2015; Jucker and Kopaczyk 2017; Kádár and House 2020). Previous studies—from Brown
and Levinson, and others—have presented theories and applications relating to the analysis of politeness, and
more recently, impoliteness phenomena (e.g., the work of Culpeper, Bousfield, Locher, among others). Interdis-
ciplinary approaches, in translation, dubbing and subbing, in literature and other fields have been the focus of
current trends in pragma-linguistics and pragma-philology as well. Yet, studies on historical contrastive prag-
matics and impoliteness research are lacking. Specifically, very little work has been done on Spanish historical
data or on translations of historical Spanish literary works.
The present study applies the approach of idio-pragmatics to analyze historical pragmatics found in impolite
discourse. It utilizes translation as a means of socio-historical analysis of 16th and 17th century face-aggravating
language. Approximately 50 passages with a high frequency of vos were identified using a search function.
These were then carefully analyzed to ascertain whether a correlation would be found between vos and the use
of impoliteness. The passages were taken from the Spanish Brussels 1607/1616 and England 1612/1620 editions
of Don Quixote in translation, and manually transcribed. The purpose of this investigation was two-fold. On
the one hand it presents an approach to analyzing historical pragmatics/impoliteness using translation; and on
the other hand, it describes the status and overarching dynamics of vocatives and terms of verbal aggressive
nominal address in one of Cervantes’ most celebrated literary creations, Don Quixote.
Preliminary findings show that impoliteness formulae in Don Quixote, embodied by the case of puta (’whoreson’)
and its variations, are literary tools to reinforce character development, stance, relational interaction, mood
change, and so on. In the case of puta, this address term comes in multiple polysemic conventions ranging from
an insult to a form of flattery. Impoliteness in Don Quixote reflects also prevalent meta-pragmatics concerning
Early Modern Spanish period society, tirades against incivility, condemnation of bad religious practice, and
attacks on others’ physical and intellectual image.

1551
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Written responses to complaints – strategies and challenges in


EFL interactions

Lecture

Prof. Sara Gesuato 1


1. University of Padua

The fulfilment of interpersonal/transactional goals requires the coordinated inter-actional work of participants
who take turns engaging and reacting to one another (Geis 2005), gradually co-producing discourse. Nowadays,
co-constructed discourse often takes place in the written medium on instant messaging platforms and through
texting devices, giving rise to “fingered speech” (McWhorter 2013). Non-native speakers’ responding behaviour
in co-constructed spoken interaction is known to be potentially pragmatically deficient (House 1996) due to lim-
ited relevant input and instruction in the foreign language (FL) classroom. “Written” dialogic exchanges may
pose similar challenges. It is thus worthwhile to explore goal-oriented reacting practices in written communi-
cation produced by FL speakers.
This study considers 150 written responses to complaints (about 15,000 words) elicited from EFL university
students (mostly Polish, Spanish and Italian speakers) through WDCTs relevant to scenarios adapted from the
literature and/or partly reconstructed from the author’s interactional experiences. It examines both the conven-
tions of means (strategies) through which they are realised, identified inductively through repeated readings,
and their conventions of forms (wording), explored through a bottom-up approach by identifying recurrent
phraseologies (n-grams).
The texts illustrate moves which variously appeal to the addressee’s reason and/or emotions, and are differ-
ently distributed across scenarios. The moves overlap with those found in apologies (i.e. Expressing regret;
Accounting for the damage caused; Offering to repair, Pleading for understanding; Committing to positive fu-
ture conduct; cf. Aijmer 1996; Trosborg 1987) and are similarly phrased (e.g. encoding the writers’ negative
emotional impact of unintentional damage: am very sorry for; did not realise that).
The texts’ illocution is effectively conveyed, despite marginal lexico-grammatical mistakes (e.g. “I’m so sorry for
have parked my car in your spot”). Also, openings and closings reveal awareness of the interlocutors’ relative
status and role-relationship (e.g. “OMG; Good luck”; vs “Dear Ms X; Kind regards”). However, the interlocutors’
face needs are occasionally threatened through such moves as Shifting the blame and Downplaying the damage
(e.g. “I know that you asked me to do it but you have to be responsible for your actions”). Also, in contrast to
the communication practices instantiated in a smaller comparable native-speaker corpus (36 texts, about 1,700
words), it appears the complaints infrequently contain a text-final repetition of the illocution, and are focused
on the account for the damage caused.
The findings suggest that the role of a complaint recipient and respondent may be arduous for speakers of a FL,
because it involves managing contrasting goals (i.e. appeasing the addressee and not losing face) and engaging
in responding behaviour on the interlocutor’s terms.
References
Aijmer K. (1996) Conversational routines in English: convention and creativity, London – New York: Longman.
Geis, M. (1995) Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House J. (1996) “Developing pragmatic fluency in English as a foreign language: routines and metapragamtic
awareness”, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18(2): 225-252, Special Issue: The Development of Pragmatic
Competence.
McWhorter J. (2013) “Txting is killing language”, TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_languag
30 August 2013).
Trosborg A. (1987) “Apology strategies in native/non-natives” Journal of Pragmatics 11(2):147-167.

1552
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘Atypical’ Ethics of Asylum Interpreters: From Invisibility to


Advocacy

Lecture

Dr. Fabrizio Gallai 1


1. Università degli studi Internazionali di Roma

Asylum interpreters are required to ‘faithfully’ interpret what is being said during the interview – a central
tenet of their Codes of ethics. However, they have often been found in the relevant literature (e.g., Jacquemet
2011, Pöllabauer 2004, 2015, UNHCR 2010, 122-123) to act as ‘principals’, i.e., prompting applicants to respond,
summarising a testimony, or editing out information. Researchers have partly attributed such omissions, addi-
tions, distortions, and other deviations from ethical principles – such as neutrality and impartiality – to a lack
of properly trained interpreters and interpreting service users.
This paper aims to respond to this need for qualified interpreters - both within the EU and beyond - by analysing
a variety of ethical issues in the context of asylum interpreting. My data consists of real-life asylum interviews
involving registered English-Italian interpreters.
In order to investigate the effects of asylum interpreters’ ethically ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, I apply a rigor-
ous and originally structured methodology. Modelling implies two levels of analysis to be foregrounded in the
representation of naturally occurring language, extending from the micro-process oriented cognitive sphere
to the sociological dimension of the macro-processes of communication. On one hand, the sociological aspects
of interpreting as an activity taking place in – and, at the same time, shaping – a particular interaction were
analysed through the lens of Goffman’s (1981) participation framework. On the other, an interest in the mental
processes underlying language use led to the adoption of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) relevance-theoretic
framework in order to show how and if interpreters convey implicatures triggered by the original utterance,
matching the intention of the source text speaker (Gutt 19991/2000).
The results of this (micro-interactional and macro-ideological) empirical study show the distinctive attitudes
and narratives of asylum interpreters, whose behaviour does not follow the main ethical principles for inter-
preting, which are “codified and reaffirmed collectively by its practitioners” (Pöchhacker 2016, 167). Their role
is no longer to be seen as a fixed notion as they adjust their positioning along a spectrum from invisibility to
advocacy. They further show that interpreting can empower practitioners and the people they work for, and en-
gage stakeholders (and, ultimately, the State) through an emphasis on cross-pragmatic competence (Alves 2007,
and Alves and Gonçalves 2003, 2007). In particular, pragmatic alterations in interpreters’ renditions can be said
to have an impact on modern interviewing techniques, as it has the effect of moving the interpreter into focus,
taking power away from the officer (due to the turn-taking system) and destroying the impression of a dyadic
exchange.

1553
18th International Pragmatics Conference

‘We must guard everything very carefully because we know


that there are many people here…’: identity and othering in
intercultural workplace conflict resolution meetings

Lecture

Dr. Ping Du 1
1. University of Nottingham Ningbo China

This study aims to explore how cultural and professional identities are constructed, negotiated and deployed
as resources for cultural othering in intercultural conflictual interactions. The analysis draws on the dataset of
an ethnographic case study of intercultural conflict resolution in an organization in China, which comprises 16
audio-recorded meetings (29 hours), eight interviews, observation notes, organizational documents and emails.
This organization has seen continuous tension and non-cooperation between the international and Chinese
managers, which culminated into a major management crisis when four Chinese managers handed in resigna-
tion. The two sides reported in the interviews different views of the causes of the conflict. The Chinese managers
attribute the tension mainly to one international manager, Jack, who is seen as ‘biased, uncooperative and ir-
ritable’. The international managers consider “indirect communication, hierarchical management and lack of
western qualifications” on the Chinese side as major problems. The conflict resolution process lasted for three
months. During this period, the Chinese CEO, Wang, conducted a series of group meetings and private meetings,
in order to ‘achieve mutual understanding and collaboration’ (Wang in the meetings). The conflict resolution
resulted in positive outcomes in general. A new management structure was established, and collaborative re-
lationships were consolidated between most of the international and Chinese managers, while two managers
(including Jack and a Chinese manager) were demoted.
This project will focus on Jack’s interactive strategies as a case study, and investigate the processes in which
cultural and professional identities are interactionally constructed and negotiated through positioning (Bam-
berg, 1997) in narratives. This study is also interested in exploring how the cultural other is constructed in the
identity construction processes and how these processes manifest ‘larger ideological processes and structures’
(Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 585). Preliminary analysis indicates that the cultural / professional identities are con-
structed through a range of strategies for positioning in different narratives, for example, ‘the hero narrative’
(van Dijk, 1984), which normally consists of four elements, namely, a us (good people) vs. them (bad people)
polarization, an inflexible culture-based morality for demarcation, a imagined battle between us and them, and
a territory (the organization) that ‘we’ (the ‘heroes’) are protecting from ‘them’. It is found that while denying
being biased, Jack constantly constructs a superior cultural identity that is featured with ‘moral integrity’ and
‘professionalism’. It is argued that instead of the task-oriented goal of problem solving, the processes of con-
structing superior identities and cultural others serve mainly a relationship-oriented goal, that is, winning the
perceived game of power and control. This study will provide a sample at the micro level for our understand-
ing of the larger scale intercultural collaboration at the macro level in the post-pandemic and ‘post-globalized’
world.
References:
Bamberg, M. G. W. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History,
7, 335–342.
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies,7
(4-5), 585-614.
van Dijk, T. A. (1984). Prejudice in Discourse: an Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

1554
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Alone in the nest”: The discourse of war and peace in the


online activity of Mansi internet users

Lecture

Dr. Csilla Horvath 1


1. University of Helsinki

The aim of the paper is to describe and to analyse the discourse discussing the events, consequences, attitudes
concerning the Russian-Ukrainian War of 2022, created by Mansi users of social media pages, with special at-
tention to the differences in narrative between the Russian- and Mansi-medium discourses. The presentation
briefly introduces the situation of Ob-Ugric language use, the history of the Mansi press, the pre-war model of
Ob-Ugric peoples’ digital discourses and use of internet. The presentation focuses on the Mansi journalists’ and
public figures’ role, and compares their position to the Russian mainstream media as well as to the majority
public discourse.
The Mansi language is an endangered Uralic language, spoken in Western-Siberia. Although the prestige of
the Mansi language and culture is rising, the number of speakers is critically low. Mansi plays limited role
in its Russian-dominated, multi-ethnic and multicultural environment, its use is heavily affected by the loss
of the traditional way of life and rapid urbanisation as well. While the Ob-Ugric peoples have been regarded
as followers of traditional, nomadic lifestyles, the majority of Mansi live in multi-ethnic urban environment,
which, besides intensifying language shift, also creates new tools and domains assisting language maintenance
and language revitalization.
The data about Mansi language use were collected during fieldwork in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug
(eight times between 2006 and 2019) via semi-structured interviews and participant observation carried out
at Ob-Ugric institutions and communities in Khanty-Mansiysk. The data on digital linguistic vitality, online
language use and discourse about the Russian-Ukrainian War were obtained via online observation at various
social media pages.

1555
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Aside from being sexy, what do you do for a living?” A


sociopragmatics study of the responses to conversational
openers in dating apps

Lecture

Ms. Clara Cantos Delgado 1


1. Complutense University of Madrid

In online dating, conversational openers are of key importance (see Dai & Robbins 2021,
Kavroulaki 2021) and humour is a resort often used in these initial exchanges. However, this can be a risky
strategy. This study analyses the responses from young adults in the UK (18-26) to four formats of intently hu-
morous conversational openers: one-liners, sexually charged remarks, physical compliments and negging. The
data sample was controlled regarding English language fluency to minimize cultural shock. Drawing on the
literature in the field, it was decided to take into consideration the variables of gender, and sexual orientation
since they were perceived to be a potential cause of variation in the responses (see Hoffman et al. 2020). The
purpose of this investigation is therefore to answer the following research questions: RQ1. What are Tinder
users’ opinions and responses to intently humorous conversational openers? and RQ2: What differences can
be observed considering the variables of gender and sexual orientation? To comply with the Association of
Internet Researchers’ ethical guidelines, data was collected via questionnaires and a total of 100 answers from
each of the collectives were examined (T=400). The responses were then analysed following an inductive self-
made taxonomy, based on their level of cooperativeness, including subcategories which tallied factors such as
the usage of humour, or self-descriptions in cooperative ones; or the utilisation of impoliteness strategies (i.e.,
dismissals, pointed criticisms, and insults) in uncooperative ones. The sample was teggaed with the aid of the
program for qualitive analysis, Atlas. ti. The LIWC software was then used as triangulation in terms of senti-
ment analysis. The still preliminary results show that despite the subjectivity of humour use and appreciation,
the general tendency was to acknowledge the boldness and effort of making use of this strategy. It proved its ef-
ficacy by both maintaining its initial purpose (namely, ice-breaking, expressing sexual interest, complimenting
or begging), and providing another frame for interaction (the humorous one), which people used to follow up
on the joke, comment upon it, etc., with the ultimate consequence of keeping the communication channel open.
In terms of gender and sexual orientation, it was found that in the context of dating apps, women’s initiative
was highly valued, and their use of humour was positively perceived by both male and female users alike. Con-
trastingly, the results regarding heterosexual male users were inconsistent in this regard. A complete analysis
of the data will enable us to establish statistically significant tendencies and patterns.
Dai, M., & Robbins, R. (2021). Exploring the influences of profile perceptions and different pick-up lines on
dating outcomes on tinder: An online experiment. Computers in Human Behavior, 117.
Hofmann, J., Platt, T., Lau, C., & Torres-Marín, J. (2020). Gender differences in humor-related traits, humor
appreciation, production, comprehension, (neural) responses, use, and correlates: A systematic review. Current
Psychology, pp. 1-14.

Kavroulaki, E. (2021). “Congratulations! You just won the title for ‘worse Tinder opening line’ ”. Inappropriate
behaviour and impoliteness in online dating. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 10 (1): 13-37.

1556
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“Ecocide is our reality now” – a cross-cultural analysis of the


Twitter response to the brown coal mine in Turów

Lecture

Dr. Martina Berrocal 1 , Prof. Nadine Thielemann 2


1. Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 2. WU Wien

This paper analyzes the case of the Turow lignite mine, located in Czech-German-Polish border region, which
sparked an international dispute due to its negative environmental impact on the neighbouring settlements.
The problem included, among other things, vanishing groundwater, subsidence caused by the operation of the
mine etc. . This controversy provoked a direct and immediate response from diverse public(s) on Twitter.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the discourses that emerge on Twitter. We compiled a corpus of tweets
tagged by the hashtag #Turow (Zappavigna 2018) which we filtered according to the outreach. For the study,
we developed a coding scheme based on conceptual units and main pragmatic functions (inform, appeal, ex-
press emotion) (cf. Berrocal & Salamurović, forthcoming) which allowed us to detect and characterize three
discourses along the language lines (EN, CZ, PL) (cf. Klemm 2016).
The results show that all three discourse communities are grouped under the same hashtag, however, they differ
in the stance adopted towards the mine. While the Polish tweets dominantly inform about the issues and events
connected to the mine with an anti-EU touch and in Czech, the tweets express dissatisfaction with how the Czech
politicians are approaching the issue, the English tweets point to a transnational environmental discourse. A
substantial number of tweets call on EU political actors to intervene and to promote EU’s environmental stand,
and a similar proportion of tweets air negative attitudes concerning the adverse environmental impact of the
mine and its political and environmental implications for the EU energy transition. Our analysis thus gives
insights into how differently matters of fossil energy are perceived and negotiated across cultures and at a
transnational level.
References
Berrocal, Martina & Aleksandra Salamurovič (forthcoming). Political Speeches as a tool of Covid19 crisis man-
agement? Discursive and linguistic localization of the crisis in Central Europe and Western Balkans. In Weiss, D.
& Thielemann, N (eds) Remedies against the pandemic: How politicians communicate their crisis management,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Klemm M (2016) 13. Kulturvergleich. In: Klug N-M and Stöckl H (eds) Handbuch Sprache im multimodalen
Kontext: De Gruyter, pp. 300–324.
Zappavigna, M 2018. Searchable talk: Hashtags and social media metadiscourse. London: Bloomsbury Aca-
demic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Plc.

1557
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I don’t know they’re caught, do I? “: Negotiating Epistemic


Access in Dungeons & Dragons

Lecture

Ms. Samantha Finlay 1 , Dr. Catrin Rhys 2


1. Ulster university/Exeter University, 2. ulster university

This paper investigates how participants negotiate epistemic access in games of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).
D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game in which participants jointly create a story through roleplay and dice rolling.
One participant takes on the role of Dungeon Master (DM) and creates the world, while the other participants
roleplay characters in that world. D&D is played almost entirely through narration, and so the world, actions,
events, and characters are constructed almost entirely through talk-in-interaction. This creates a highly distinc-
tive setting in which a speaker’s epistemic access is regularly overtly negotiated.
A further notable feature of epistemics in the D&D setting is that during roleplay, participants observably ori-
ent to two distinct epistemic domains – one that represents the player’s knowledge, and one that represents the
character’s (Finlay & Rhys 2019). While these domains mostly overlap, they diverge when the player knows
information the character does not and vice versa. Furthermore, if, during roleplay, a player claims access to
knowledge that is outside the character’s domain, this can result in a breach. As such, it is important for the par-
ticipants to establish what their characters know in order to avoid causing breaches by displaying information
their character would not know.
This paper builds on this research by analysing how participants negotiate epistemic access in this context.
Because the DM constructs the world through narration, information about the world is only accessible to the
players through his talk. Players negotiate access to this knowledge through information requests that in other
contexts might seem semantically anomalous, eg. “Did I see the child go down?” or “i don’t know they’re caught,
do i?”.The DM will provide either a fitted answer with the requested knowledge, or a non-answer with an ac-
count for not answering – typically that the character does not know this information. This shows that players
are only granted access to information if their characters have access to it; otherwise, the players do not have
the epistemic right to access this knowledge and the DM does not grant them access. The paper thus investi-
gates the distinctive form and interactional environment of information requests through which participants
negotiate epistemic access and orient to character and player epistemic domains in this context. The analysis
provides insights not only into the complexity of epistemic access in roleplay environments but also into the
role of epistemic access in other interactional projects such as decision making.
References:
Finlay, S. & Rhys, C.S. (2019) “Epistemic Stance as a Practice in Conducting Roleplay” Unpublished presentation
at: The International Institute of Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis July 2-5, 2019, Mannheim, Germany

1558
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I will kill you in the appropriate time, place and manner


should the occasion arise” - The role of explicitness in the use
of threatening language

Lecture

Dr. Marianna Varga 1


1. Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

Background There has been numerous substantial linguistic and legal research to define what constitutes a
threat, but there is still scant knowledge of threatening language due to the paucity of empirical studies (Muscha-
lik 2016, Christensen 2019). However, Muschalik (2018) draws attention to an interesting correlation between
the forms and functions of threats by analyzing an American English corpus of judicial opinions containing
legally relevant threat utterances. In this work it has been claimed threats either explicitly denote the ‘who-
does-what-to-whom’ scenario with futurate expressions, violent verbs, reference to the patient and agent, a
plain focus on the speaker and taboo words, or they do not refer to any future events or harmful acts and the
participants in these acts at all. Semi-explicit or semi-vague threats are much less frequent in this corpus. The
degree of explicitness –as the author argues– depends on the function of the threat: due to plausible deniability,
a manipulative threat is less explicit than the retaliative threat.
Aims What constitutes a threat in the legal sense depends on how the law defines it, so it is worthwhile to ex-
tend the research cited above with data from other nations. For this reason, in this research I seek to answer the
following questions by analyzing quantitatively and qualitatively a Hungarian legal corpus: Is there a correla-
tion between the degree of explicitness and the function of threats based on these data, and are written threats
less explicit due to a greater chance of being sanctioned? Given that many times the same person in the same
case threatens differently, it is useful to compare written and verbal threats (e.g. in a special case a man texted:
“My darling, as I look at you, I immediately remember why the smile of the man lying under the tram is not
sincere”, but during a phone call he said: “I’m gonna stomp your guts out”, “I’ll kill your mother” [Translated
from Hungarian.]). The presentation will also discuss some relevant aspects of the comparison between the
American and Hungarian threats.
Data The corpus involves 265 judicial opinions from criminal cases tried in Hungary between 2013-2022. The
sample was selected based on a keyword search of the electronic database https://eakta.birosag.hu/anonimizalt-
hatarozatok. The main criteria for the selection were that the cases should include a criminally relevant threat
and a text or voice material suitable for linguistic analysis.
Results The results are considered useful complements to existing research on threatening and explicitness in
conflictive language use.
References
Christensen, Tanya Karoli 2019. Indirect threats as an illegal speech act. In Christensen, K. Ramshøj – Wood, J.
– Jørgensen, H. (eds.) The Sign of the V. Papers in Honour of Sten Vikner. 113–130. Aarhus: Aarhus University.

Muschalik, Julia 2016. „Performance” ohne Performative. Über Kraft und Wirkung krimineller Drohungen.
In Bülow, L. – Bung, J. – Harnisch R. – Wernsmann, R. (eds.) Performativität in Sprache und Recht. Berlin: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Muschalik, Julia 2018. Threatening in English. A mixed method approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins.

1559
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“It is our duty to secure our own customs” – Attitudes about


migrants, language learning and dialect use in the rural North
of Europe

Lecture

Prof. Lena Ekberg 1 , Dr. Ellen Bijvoet 2 , Prof. Jan-Ola Östman 3


1. Lund University, 2. Uppsala University, 3. University of Helsinki

Much research on migration, language contact and linguistic variation in the last decades has focused on the
challenges that migrants encounter in big cities. In contradistinction to this, our previous work has concentrated
on the social and linguistic encounters that migrants meet with when they arrive in sparsely populated dialect
areas in the North of Europe: one in Finland (Swedish-language Ostrobothnia) and one in Sweden (Värmland,
bordering on Norway). These regions are well known for their dialects that markedly differ from the spoken
Swedish standard – something that may cause problems for people outside the region in general, and for non-
native speakers in particular.
In our previous studies, we have focused on the concept of integration from the point of view of the migrants,
and on how their construction of a new identity is reflected in the dialect features they adopt, or resist adopting
(cf. Ekberg & Östman 2020, Bijvoet & Östman forthc.).
In the present study we focus on “the locals”, i.e. members of the traditional local rural population. Data were
collected through focus-group discussions on site, and by researchers using the local dialects.
For members of the local population, speaking the local dialect is the preferred choice of language. Speaking
standard Swedish is seldom an option for them; they consider this way of speaking to be “pretentious language”.
At the same time, there is an explicitly mentioned understanding that the dialect is hard for migrants. Mem-
bers of the local population, too, see this as an aggravating circumstance for language learning, as well as for
migrants’ possibilities to interact with them. The migrants learn Swedish at school, but they will not hear stan-
dard Swedish in their everyday life. Still, the locals choose to keep to their dialect. As one of them explains: “It
is our duty to secure our own customs”.
In the present study, we use narrative analysis (e.g. De Fina 2013) to investigate the opinions and attitudes
among members of the local population toward incoming migrants and settlers in general, and their expecta-
tions regarding the linguistic integration of migrants in particular. We specifically ask whether the traditional
local residents feel that it would be desirable for the migrants to learn the local dialect? Our results show that to
some locals, it is appreciated if migrants learn the local dialect, to others this is felt to be too much of an invasion
on the local customs of the community.
References
Bijvoet, Ellen & Jan-Ola Östman. Forthcoming. Talkin’ ’bout my Integration: Views on language, identity and
integration among Dutch and Finnish migrants to the Swedish countryside. In Language Contacts and Discourses
in the Far North, ed. by Tiina Räisänen, Jussi Ylikoski & Maria Frick. Palgrave Macmillan.
De Fina, Anna. 2013. Positioning Level 3. Connecting local identity displays to macro social processes. Narrative
Inquiry 23(1): 40–61.
Ekberg, Lena & Jan-Ola Östman. 2020. Identity construction and dialect acquisition among immigrants in ru-
ral areas – the case of Swedish-language Finland. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. doi:
10.1080/01434632.2020.1722681

1560
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“The youths are wiser now”: a progressive discourse analysis


of resistance in Nigeria’s electoral rhetoric

Lecture

Mrs. Chioma Ikechukwu-Ibe 1 , Mr. Sopuruchi Christian Aboh 2


1. Department of Humanities (DipSUm), University of Salerno, Italy, 2. Department of English and Communication, The Hong
Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

Abstract
The past fifteen years have demonstrated Nigeria’s electoral system to have taken a particular dimension, featur-
ing two major political parties in Nigeria - the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressive Congress
(APC), and yielding almost predictable political results. However, in the recent time, specifically in 2022, build-
ing up to the 2023 Nigeria general elections, an atypical tectonic turn has been observed in the Nigerian political
system. In what is present, a third political party- Labour Party (LP), formed in 2002, which has not produced
any Nigerian president since its inception, joined the 2023 presidential race alongside PDP and APC. This ground-
breaking atypicality has transported Nigeria’s electoral movement from its status quo to a momentous epoch
while attracting the media’s attention. In this paper, we rely on the methodological procedures and tenets of
progressive discourse analysis (PDA) in examining Nigerians’ resistance against the two major political parties-
PDP and APC and their presidential candidates. In addition, we critically discuss the support of Nigerians for the
presidential candidate of LP during the buildup to the 2023 Nigeria general elections. Data for the study consist
of 1000 tweets on ‘Peter Obi’ and the ‘#Obidient Movement’ in September 2022. The analysis reveals that tweets
from Nigerian youths on Peter Obi and the ‘#Obidient Movement’ construct resistance via three distinct discur-
sive strategies: identification of PDP and APC as Nigeria’s lifetime anti-progressives, construction of Peter Obi of
LP as the anticipated political saviour, and identification of Nigerians as being politically wiser. The study’s con-
tribution to scholarship is established in the novel approach adopted in discussing Nigeria’s electoral rhetoric
and identifying social media as sites for atypical resistance, stance-taking, social change, and revolution.
Keywords: #Obidient Movement, resistance, general elections, Twitter.

1561
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“We refugee women are capable of sharing our stories and


leading campaigns for a fairer world”: migrant identity and
affective positionings in UK charity refugee narratives

Lecture

Dr. Sofia Lampropoulou 1 , Dr. Korina Giaxoglou 2 , Ms. Paige Johnson 1


1. University of Liverpool, 2. The Open University

This study examines practices of migrant positioning in overtly anti-racist, pro-humanitarian refugee narratives
featured in campaigns of UK migrant charity organisations. We focus on a small corpus of 37 written narratives
posted on the blogs of nine charity organisations and NGOs during the period of January 2017 to August 2021
following changes to the UK immigration and asylum-seeking policy after Brexit. Unlike existing studies that
focus on explicit discriminative representations of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (RASIM)
in the UK media (Gabrielatos&Baker, 2008), we focus on migrant positionings in declared pro-migrant narra-
tives. We investigate linguistic traces of prevalent discourses that, despite the seemingly antiracist nature of the
texts, contribute to sustaining a hegemonic racist ideology. To this end, we focus on traces of liquid racism, an
elusive and ambiguous form of racism that reproduces embodied and culturally racist sign systems (Weaver,
2010).
Our approach combines methods and heuristics from narrative analysis (De Fina&Georgakopoulou, 2019) and
critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995). Our dataset primarily consists of refugee success stories, which
in this case involve narratives of personal experience of emotional turmoil attributed to the long process of
asylum seeking where the focus is on how refugee managed to rebuild their lives. These success stories address
a wide audience, ranging from other refugees to potential donors who might be moved by such stories. Given
the important role of affect in these stories, our analysis pays attention to tellers’ acts of affective positioning,
that is the ways in which tellers position themselves and others affectively within the taleworld, the storyrealm,
and broader master-discourses to construct their identities (Giaxoglou, 2021).
We argue that migrant positionings are used to emblematize RASIM personal experience which are, in turn,
utilized to authenticate acts of appeal for support made by the charity organisation. We show how these sto-
ries covertly reproduce racist hierarchies by mobilising the RASIM personal experience for their wider express
goals. This, in turns, challenges the humanitarian ethos upon which anti-racism is predicated (van Dijk, 2021).
We conclude by calling for greater self-reflexivity on behalf of charity organizations and migrants alike, with
self-critique of the outlets and the forms that encourage the reproduction of racist sign systems. Our study con-
tributes to research concentrating on tracing racism in anti-racist texts and to critical narrative analysis to the
study of migrant narratives.
References
De Fina, A. and A. Georgakopoulou (2019) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Hoboken,
New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell.
Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman.
Gabrielatos, C. and P. Baker (2008) Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A corpus analysis of
discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press, 1996-2005.
Journal of English Linguistics 36 (1): 5-38.
Giaxoglou, K. (2021) A narrative approach to social media mourning: small stories and
affective positioning. New York and Oxon: Routledge.
van Dijk, T. A. 2021. Anti-racist discourse: theory and history of a macromovement. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Weaver, S. 2010. Liquid Racism and the Danish Prophet Muhammad Cartoons. Current Sociology 58(5), 675-692.

1563
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“You may feel a few butterflies in your stomach the first time
walking out on a frozen lake”: Balancing between positive and
negative risk in adventure tourism discourse from “arctic
Lapland”

Lecture

Prof. Annelie Ädel 1 , Prof. Jan-Ola Östman 2


1. Högskolan Dalarna, 2. University of Helsinki

In alignment with the theme of the conference, this study deals with atypical risks and risk-taking. Risk involves
two core elements: adversity (referring to something unwanted) and potentiality (referring to things that may,
but need not, happen). ‘Risk’ is typically thought of as something negative, and as something that should be
avoided at all costs. Risk-taking characteristically has to do with the probability of an unwanted event occurring
(e.g. Hansson, 2018). This type of negative perspective clearly predominates in discourse studies related to risk
(e.g. Crichton et al., 2016; Ädel et al. 2022), not to mention in public perceptions of risk.
However, risk may also, albeit atypically, be seen as something positive and energizing, as in the context of
financial markets (cf. e.g. Giddens, 1999) or in gambling. These types of voluntary risk taking have been ap-
proached through concepts such as ‘action’ (Goffman, 1967) and ‘edgework’ (e.g. Lyng, 2014).
In this study, we explore both negative and positive aspects of risk in the context of adventure/extreme tourism.
Our focus is specifically on how risk is discursively constructed on adventure tourism websites for Sápmi (re-
ferred to as “[arctic] Lapland”), centring on destinations in Sweden (Kiruna), Finland (Rovaniemi) and Norway
(Tromsø). Our primary material from the booking platform Adrenaline Hunter amounts to 12,000 words. In
the material, it is precisely the balance between negative and positive aspects of risk that is foregrounded (cf.
e.g. Imboden, 2012), but in a scalar sense, ranging from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ types, with a negotiable awareness of
how relative what counts as ‘extreme’ may be. We find that “extreme tourism” is a highly relative concept, for
example marketing an everyday activity (like walking on ice) as an “extreme” experience for an audience not
too familiar with snow and ice.
When looking at risk in a tourism context, the issue of sustainability inevitably arises. In tourism discourse,
sustainability may be framed through negative risk but also through positive risk from the point of view of the
tourist (foregrounding benefits of enjoyment and “butterflies”). We investigate the balance between something
that needs to be managed but simultaneously helps construct (a feeling of) “adventure” in relation to different
kinds of responsibility – individual-moral, formal-juridical, and culture-collective.
References
Ädel, Annelie, Catharina Nyström Höög & Jan-Ola Östman. 2022. Risks and responsibilities in the workplace:
Employees discussing evacuation situations. JALPP 16(3): 265–289.
Crichton, Jonathan, Christopher N. Candlin & Arthur S. Firkins (Eds.). 2016. Communicating Risk. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony. 1999. Risk and responsibility. The Modern Law Review 62(1):1–10.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Where the action is. In Goffman, Erving Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face
Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, pp.149–270.
Hansson, Sven Ove. 2018. Risk. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/risk/.
Imboden, Alain. 2012. Between Risk and Comfort: Representations of Adventure Tourism
in Sweden and Switzerland. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 12(4):310–323.
DOI:10.1080/15022250.2012.752624

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Lyng, Stephen. 2014. Action and edgework: Risk taking and reflexivity in late modernity. European Journal of
Social Theory. 17(4):443–460.

1565
Posters
18th International Pragmatics Conference

“I did not realize that emoji are annoying (���)”: Constructing


and challenging norms in the metapragmatic discourse about
emoji

Poster

Dr. Wan-Hsin Ann Lee 1


1. National Taiwan Normal University

The study investigates how the use of emoji is talked about in the Taiwanese context and discusses how po-
liteness shapes the evaluations of such practice to be either typical or atypical in online discourse. The study
is inspired by an online discussion concerning a failed online conversation between a customer and a shop
owner. The customer messaged the shop owner to inquire about the details of a product. The question featured
a transliterated Japanese discourse marker, a greetings sticker and the emoji “tears of joy”. The conversation
ended abruptly with the shop owner’s verbal attack on both the question and the way the consumer initiated
this interaction. This confused customer reposted the conversation on an e-shopping forum asking why the
communication failed. Among over 1200 lines of replies from online viewers, the appropriateness of using
“tears of joy” and emoji in general is extensively evaluated. Some viewers argue that using graphicons to show
friendliness is typical and polite whereas some contest that feigning friendliness is impolite and insincere, in-
terestingly for both identical and distinct reasons. This incident, an online conversation between a customer
and a shop owner, is treated by some as a business transaction, plainly formal and emoji-prohibited. Signifi-
cantly, it is also reckoned by others to be an instance of non-public online interaction, expectedly informal and
emoji-tolerant. These divergent stances foreground how semiotic knowledge about emoji is far from shared
but, remarkably, misrecognized by many as normalized. The study draws from this interesting discussion to
address three questions regarding the metapragmatics of emoji.
1. What are viewers’ respective reasons to describe the use of emoji as typical and atypical?
2. How do speakers’ sociopragmatic concerns lead to contrasting evaluations between typical and atypical prac-
tice?
3. How does the metapragmatic discourse about emoji manifest semiotic ideologies concerning politeness in
digital communication?
The study finds that the contrasting pair of typical and atypical use of emoji is non-fixed, inextricably interwoven
with politeness, and yet reported by many as commonsensical. The rationalization about how to use emoji
appropriately as a piece of mutual knowledge is so established that breaching these supposedly unquestionable
norms usually lead to misunderstandings and severe criticisms. In this case, online discourse remains a site
to attend to how established linguistic norms in offline interaction meet newly emerged phenomena and are
challenged. How politeness is re-defined with the use of emoji and what politeness concerns are prioritized are
worth the attention to allow us a better understanding of digital discourse practice.

1567
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Contrastive Study of Chinese “-ma (嘛)” and Japanese “-jan


(じゃん)”: Focusing on the One-N(P) Sentences and Colloquial
Quotative Forms

Poster

Ms. Qiong Wang 1


1. The University of Tokyo

This study tries to characterize the roughly corresponding Japanese and Chinese sentence-final particle con-
structions “-jan (じゃん)” and“-ma (嘛)” by comparing their pragmatic meanings in the one-N(P) sentences and
colloquial quotative forms. Data is collected from some corpora, including CSJ corpus and CEJC corpus in
Japanese, CCL corpus and MLC corpus in Chinese.
For the one-N(P) sentences, the observation focuses on the meaning of the N(P) and the connection with
the context. It is shown that (1) both “-jan (じゃん)” and “-ma (嘛)” have a strong tendency to occur after kind-
denoting nouns with no modifiers and (2) “-jan (じゃん)” is most likely to be used at the end of the turn, whereas
“-ma (嘛)” is often to be followed with the sentences explaining the N(P) or following the same topic. It is seen
that thematization usage can be found in Chinese “-ma (嘛)”, but not yet in Japanese “-jan (じゃん)”. Thus, both
examples are found natural to use “孩⼦嘛 (child-ma)” in response to the question “Are you tired of her do-
ing so?” to show tolerance and understanding, and to be followed with a comment on children in general as
“孩⼦嘛，�����，����� (child-ma, the flowers of our motherland, the hope of the nation)”. Similar examples can
be only found to comment on the hearer’s childish behavior using “Akachan-jan (baby-jan)”, but it sounds odd
to add more evaluative comments afterward in the same situation as Chinese.
For the colloquial quotative forms, colloquial quotative form “-tte (iu) (っていう)” cooccur with “-jan(じゃん)”
in Japanese and verb “shuo (说)” cooccur with “-ma (嘛)” in Chinese have been compared. (1) Both the two work
for confirming the information with the hearer, and they describe the reported speech information. However,
it is shown that (2) “-jan(じゃん)” is seldom used with the past tense of the colloquial quotative form “-tte (itta)
(っていった)”, and can be hardly used to mark the information collected from the context, but “-ma (嘛)” is used to
mark both “what-is-said” and “what-is-implied”, which also include the information recovered from the context.
The original speaker of the quoted sentence can be either the hearer, the speaker or a third person in Chinese,
and tends to be expressed in the sentence. But Japanese colloquial quotative form is most likely to occur with
information considered as common knowledge by the speaker without mentioning of the original speaker. For
example, “Shizuoka attakai-tteyu-jan (It is said that Shizuoka’s warm-jan)” is a quoted sentence to remind the
hearer of the weather of Shizuoka, while the original speaker is not mentioned in the context.
Some other characteristics of these constructions (e.g. cooccurrence with the first person and the second
person) may also be accounted for in terms of the contrastive analysis presented in this study.

1568
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Contrastive Study of Requests, Apologies, Refusals, and


Expressions of Gratitude in Portuguese and Spanish

Poster

Ms. Beatriz Oliveira 1


1. Universidade de Aveiro

Despite being geographically close, Portugal and Spain considerably differ in their sociocultural norms, which
consequently exert an extraordinary influence on verbal behaviour. Hence, believing in the words of Chomsky
(2006) that language is a product of culture, we are carrying out a study that falls within the fields of intercultural
pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics focused on the production of speech acts.
Speech acts refer to actions carried out mainly by means of language. Even though they are being performed
on a daily basis by speakers of Portuguese and Spanish, their usage has rarely been covered, especially in Por-
tuguese, both as a native and a foreign language. This research investigates the similarities and differences
in expressing the speech acts of requests, apologies, refusals and expressions of gratitude by native speakers
of European Portuguese, native speakers of Spanish, and non-native speakers of Portuguese whose native lan-
guage is Spanish. The choice of these particular speech acts is due to the fact that they can be categorised
as face-threatening acts, according to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) terminology, and therefore suitable
for studying verbal politeness.
Our main goals consist in examining and comparing the similarities and differences in the production of speech
acts and expression of verbal politeness by the native speakers, observing the linguistic and pragmatic strategies
transferred from the native language (Spanish) to the target language (Portuguese). Lastly, analysing whether
the proficiency level of grammatical competence affects the pragmatic competence in what refers to the reali-
sation of these four speech acts.
In order to achieve our goals, we have been collecting data through two versions of a Discourse Completion
Test (DCT) (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989) - one in Portuguese and the other in Spanish, which consists
of twenty different situations that require the production of the targeted speech acts. Each situation is influ-
enced by socio-pragmatic factors of social power and social distance between the interlocutors, as well as the
ranking of the imposition of the action or seriousness of the offence.

1569
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Feeling, a Desire or Something Else? A Case-Study of Idioms


with Voglia and How Learners of Italian as FL and SL Acquire
Them

Poster

Dr. Andrea Civile 1 , Dr. Andrea Fiorista 1 , Dr. Alice Migliorelli 1 , Dr. Mauro Le Donne 1
1. University for Foreigners of Perugia

In foreign and second language teaching, helping learners to become socio-pragmatically competent means
supporting them in developing awareness of sociocultural variables (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and knowledge
about taboos, mutual rights, obligations, and conventional courses of action that apply in the community of
the target language (Roever, 2006). Idioms, from this perspective, are useful communication tools that reflect
the interaction of language systems with the emotion system, which deals with the assignment of values and
opinions to specific entities, events, or situations (Foolen, 1997). However, coping with formulaic constructions,
which interpretations are unpredictable from individual lexical meanings under the effects of regular compo-
sitional rules, is not always an easy task, especially when it comes to consistently distant cultural and linguistic
references (Kecskés, 2014).
In this presentation, Italian formulaic constructions with voglia will be analyzed in terms of cultural significance
to facilitate learners in developing socio-pragmatic awareness. As a matter of fact, this noun can be considered
conceptually transparent, if the meaning “desiring something or someone” is maintained in the in-context; on
the other hand, as grammaticalization stages of the expression hai voglia di might lead to morphosemantic
opaqueness, learners could find it harder to decode (Brinton & Traugott, 2005). For this reason, in order to facil-
itate FL/SL Italian learners in developing such socio-pragmatic awareness, the study aims to design an effective
and ad-hoc teaching intervention.
Before implementing the pedagogical treatment, a data-driven investigation will be conducted with both native
and non-native speakers: the purpose is to observe their degree of awareness in encoding expressions derived
from the target construction avere voglia di, such as avoglia and hai voglia. From this perspective, data analysis
will provide evidence in terms of natives’ perceptions and most common contexts of usage, as well as learners’
difficulties in understanding/producing the formulaic expression. These will form the basis of the final teaching
intervention structure.
References:

• Austin, J. L., Urmson, J. O., & Sbisà, M. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. Amsterdam University Press.
• Brinton, L. J., Traugott, E. C. (2005), Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
• Brown, P., Levinson, S. C., & Gumperz, J. J. (1987, February 27). Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4) (Reissue). Cambridge University Press
• Ifantidou, E. (2014). Pragmatic Competence and Relevance. Van Haren Publishing.
• Kecskés, I. (2014). Intercultural Pragmatics. OUPUSA.
• Kecskés, I. ,& Mey, J. (2008). Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer. De Gruyter.
• Roever, C., & McNamara,T. (2006, July). Language testing: the social dimension. International Journal of
Applied Linguistics, 16 (2), 242–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2006.00117.x
• Taguchi, N. (Ed.). (2009, January 15). Pragmatic Competence. Mouton Series in Pragmatics.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218558

1570
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Pragmatic Approach of Types and Functions of Allusion and


Its Mechanism in Chinese Diplomatic Discourse

Poster

Prof. Mian Huang 1


1. Chongqing Normal University

Although the notion of allusion occurs frequently in the criticism of many works and many writers, little effort
has been made to discuss the various possibilities for different types of allusion and their manifestations in
Chinese diplomatic discourse. This research is an investigation of the different types and functions of allusion
in the statements made by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesmen on the official website of Chinese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The notion of allusion is usually synonymous with an indirect or passing reference
to some event, person, place or artistic work. So, the present paper sets itself to deal with this notion from
a pragmatic point of view. More specifically, the study attempts to answer the following question: What are
the pragmatic functions of the types of allusion used in Chinese diplomatic discourse? Hence, the main aim of
the paper is to answer the question raised previously, and according to this aim it is hypothesized that evalu-
ation, persuasiveness and politeness constitute the pragmatic functions used in Chinese diplomatic discourse
and idioms, proverbs and literary quotes are the most evident types of allusion in China’s diplomatic discourse.
For achieving the aim of the study and verifying or rejecting its hypothesis, a theoretical survey of the notion
of allusion and its types and pragmatic function is carried out to depend on in the analysis of the data in the
self-constructed corpus under study. With the combination of discourse analysis with conversational analy-
sis, it is shown that highly understood in metaphorical senses, allusion draws on metaphor as an underlying
mechanism. This paper argues that it is the resemblant and imaginative properties of metaphor that opens up
possibility for Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesmen to employ allusion to implicitly indicate their intersubjective
stance for interactive purposes on diplomatic occasions.

1571
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Relevance Theoretic Approach to Vlogging in India

Poster

Dr. Urjani Chakravarty 1 , Dr. Gulab Chand 2


1. Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya, 2. Manipal University Jaipur

In the current times, India is at par with the world in social media usage. If the numbers are to be believed on
average Indians are accessing social media for at least 2.25 hours per day. Users of social media have risen to
a whopping 518 million till the year 2020, which is around 43 per cent of the total population of the country.
Research states the trend will be on the rise till 2040. Though Facebook is supposed to be the favorite amongst
the digital platforms, YouTube is coming a close second in the matter of usage. The users are provided with a
voice and a choice to air it whenever they find it necessary. Other than the possibility of freedom of speech
through comments etc., YouTube is also being seen as an employment provider. India as a developing econ-
omy welcomes the possibility of employment opportunities thus provided. The current paper will deliberate
the use of YouTube as a communication medium providing proof of its relevance in the lives of middle class
women. Methodologically speaking, the paper will have a Relevance Theoretic approach (Sperber and Wilson
2002), which explicates creation of the video contents and their reception through viewers’ comments. The
line of argument will establish that middle class women vloggers come under categories of, 1. Regular vloggers
2. Celebrity vloggers 3. Business House vloggers utilize YouTube as a means of socio-cultural conversation and
connection.

1572
18th International Pragmatics Conference

A Study on the Variety of Intensifiers Taught in English


Language Textbooks in Japan

Poster

Mr. Timothy Wilson 1


1. Hiroshima Shudo University

Words can mean many different things depending on the sentence that they appear in, and this can be a problem
for Japanese learners of English who often have trouble telling the different meanings apart, especially when
the words are synonyms or from a specific group of words like intensifiers. We use intensifiers when we want
to increase the power (intensify) of other words, and they have been the focus of different studies over the past
years because of their capacity to influence and enhance communication. Moreover, the differences in the use
of intensifiers between American and British English native speakers have been extensively studied (Biber et al.,
1999; Romero, 2012; Tagliamonte & Roberts, 2005), and it has been found that although there is no significant
difference between the number of intensifiers used there were significant differences in the particular type
used.
This study, therefore, examines the use and variety of intensifiers that are introduced and taught in
communication-focused textbooks in Japan. Four of the most commonly used CEFR A2/B1 level textbooks were
selected (2 American and 2 British) and intensifiers were extracted and analysed, using MAXQDA, according to
their function and use. The results determine which types of intensifiers are most commonly used and whether
there is a difference in the type and quantity of intensifiers taught depending on whether the textbook is writ-
ten in American English or British English. Specifically, it tries to investigate how using intensifiers ensures the
desirable level of appropriateness for teaching these in the Japanese classroom. In the results, it was found that
for the intensifiers so, pretty, really, and too, the differences were marginal and not significant, but the inten-
sifiers very and such were used considerably more in the British textbooks and the difference was significant.
As a result of this, it can be clear that teaching various and appropriate intensifiers to learners helps them to
be better able to choose the right words and reply properly and appropriately when faced with a particular
communicative situation.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written
English. Harlow, UK: Longman.
Romero, S. (2012). This is so cool! – A Comparative Corpus Study on Intensifiers in British and American English.
(Post-graduate thesis, University of Tampere, School of Language, Translation, and Literary Studies). [Internet]
Retrieved from < https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/84065/gradu06287.pdf>.
Tagliamonte, S. & Roberts, C. (2005). “So weird; So cool; So innovative: The use of intensifiers in the television
series Friends”. American Speech 80/3, 280-300.

1573
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An investigation of disagreement between kohai and senpai


by Japanese youth living in the United States

Poster

Dr. Yan Wang 1 , Ms. Mira Parker 1


1. Carthage College

Increased intercultural contact has drawn linguists’ attention to investigating how culture-specific practices
are sustained and/or changed by a different culture. The senpai-kohai (senior-junior) hierarchical relation is
regarded as a significant cultural concept in Japanese society. Consequently, a disagreement, which is a “dis-
preferred speech act” (Pomerantz 1984), or Face-threatening Act (Brown and Levinson 1987), when conducted
by a kohai toward a senpai, is generally regarded as an act challenging social expectations in Japan.
Taking approaches of discourse analysis, this study examines how Japanese young people who have been ex-
posed to western culture utilize various strategies to conduct disagreements while maintaining the hierarchical
order and interactional harmony between kohai and senpai. Two 30-minute semi-authentic conversational data
were collected, each of which has a male kohai and a female senpai who are Japanese college students studying
abroad in the United States. By closely analyzing sequences where a divergence emerges between the kohai
and senpai, this study shows that disagreement patterns are not merely determined by power relation; rather,
other social and interactional factors such as gender, conversation topics, individual personalities, and intimacy
between the speakers all come into play.
In particular, both kohai and senpai tend to use negative politeness strategies such as delays, pauses, and hedge
expressions like tabun “probably” and chotto “a little bit” to decrease the intensity of their disagreements. Yet,
compared to the senpai, the kohai asks more clarification or confirmation questions, which, on one hand, signal
their doubts and point out the problems in the senpai’s prior utterances; and on the other hand, show their re-
spectful attitude toward the senpai, given that asking questions is a form of acknowledging a lack of knowledge.
Further, the kohai often “dilutes” or “disguises” their disagreements with partial agreements or by adding lim-
itations/qualifications to the senpai’s statement. For instance, instead of giving a clear disagreement to oppose
the senpai’s prior complaint about the difficulty of the English language, the kohai slightly shifts the focus by
emphasizing that written English is hard for everyone. In addition, the force of disagreement varies depending
on the topic on which the misalignment occurs; for example, when talking about personal preferences about
food, the kohai is more likely to produce straightforward and strong statements against the senpai in comparison
with topics involving academic ability. Occasionally, the male kohai can even use positive politeness strategies
to tease the female senpai. The data further suggest that the kohai tends to follow the senpai’s lead; namely,
when the senpai presents their different opinions in a forceful tone, the kohai appears to be more assertive in
engaging in the disagreement; while when the senpai uses negative politeness strategies, the kohai also presents
disagreement with more mitigators and more likely makes a compromise to achieve agreement or interactional
harmony with the senpai eventually.
This study suggests that disagreement provides a window to show how communication is influenced by power
relationships in the globalized world.

1574
18th International Pragmatics Conference

An Irish-Algerian cross-cultural pragmatic investigation into


the realization of invitations.

Poster

Mr. Islam Ben Adel 1


1. Univerity of Limerick

It is now a well-established fact that intra-lingual pragmatic variation has been found to exist as a result of
the systematic impact of the macro-social factors, such as region, gender, age, social class, and ethnicity on the
conventions of language use (Barron and Schneider 2009; Barron 2017; Schneider 2021). As such, the macro-
social factors of power and social distance have a significant role in influencing interlocutors’ preferences in
generating and construing speech acts in the dynamic process of interaction (Liu et al. 2021; Félix-Brasdefer
2007). Although extensive research has been carried out on speech acts in Irish English and Algerian Arabic
(cf. Barron 2017; Sekkal 2018), no study to date has examined the effects of power and social distance on the
realization of invitations in Algerian Arabic and Irish English (cf. Félix-Brasdefer 2003; Garcia 2008). Upholding
the principles of variational pragmatics, the present investigation will contribute to understanding the rituals
of conversational exchanges involved in negotiating invitations in the Algerian and Irish societies at both the
intralingual and interlingual levels. Methodologically, the population for this study comprises eighty university
students: 40 Algerian Arabic native speakers and 40 Irish English native speakers. The data for the study has
been collected via open role-plays and retrospective verbal reports (Félix-Brasdefer 2018). The study results
will identify pragma-linguistic variation among female speakers in the Irish and Algerian social groups with
reference to contextual factors, such as distance-closeness, social status, politeness, and (in)directness. The
results will also highlight the underpinning socio-pragmatic processes involved in invitation exchanges in both
groups.
References
Barron, A. (2017) ‘The speech act of ‘offers’ in Irish English’, World Englishes, 36 (2), 224-238, available: doi:
10.1111/weng.12255.
Barron, A. and Schneider, K.P. (2009) ‘Variational pragmatics: studying the impact of social factors on language
use in interaction’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 425-442, available: doi: 10.1515/IPRG.2009.023.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2007) Politeness in Mexico and the United States a contrastive study of the realization and
perception of refusals, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2018) ‘Role plays’ in Jucker, A.H., Schneider, K.P. and Bublitz, W., eds., Methods in Pragmat-
ics, Berlin; Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 305-331.
Félix-Brasdefer, J.C. (2003) ‘Declining an invitation: a cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies in American
English and Latin American Spanish’, Multilingua, 22, 225-255, available: doi:10.1515/mult.2003.012.
Garcia, C. (2008) ‘Different realizations of solidarity politeness: comparing Venezuelan and Argentinean invita-
tions’ in Barron, A. and Schneider, K.P., eds., Variational pragmatics, Amsterdam: Jhon Benjamins, 269-305.
Liu, W., Li, L. and Ren, W. (2021) ‘Variational pragmatics in Chinese social media requests: the influence of age
and social status’, Journal of Pragmatics, 178, 349-362, available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.002.
Schneider, K.P. (2021) ‘Variational pragmatics’ in Haugh, M. Kadar, D. and Terkourafi, M., eds., The Cambridge
handbook of sociopragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 663-686.
Sekkal, M. (2018) ‘Politeness and complimenting within an Algerian context: a socio-pragmatic analysis’, Inter-
national Journal of Social Sciences, 4 (1), 676-689.

1575
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Another Glance at English Directives: How Different Directive


Constructions Prefer to Cooccur in Discourse

Poster

Dr. Hidemitsu Takahashi 1


1. Hokkaido University

Research on directives has been largely concerned with the choice between competing alternative expressions.
This paper focuses on the ways in which two or more directive sentences occur in discourse, as in: “Do me a
favor, will you, Karen? Just between us, Harry Bowman has asked me to go out with him and I have a feeling
he’s married. Would you let me have a peek at his personnel file?” (Sidney Sheldon, Nothing Lasts Forever).
Here, the imperative do me a favor occurs with a request sentence with would you in a single stretch of directive
discourse.
There is a wealth of literature on directive speech acts. Included are a set of felicity conditions for making
proper inferences, politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987, Leech 2014) and the sequential management
of requests and their responses (Clark and Schunk 1980) and the operation of cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms
(Pérez-Hernández and Ruiz de Mendoza 2002) as well as work on grammar and social action involving directive
expressions (Couper-Kuhlen 2014). However, the ways in which directive constructions cooccur in discourse
have escaped serious attention, although analyses from this perspective are expected to help clarify the essential
nature of directive discourse as well as the semantic/pragmatic features of individual directive constructions.
Based on an investigation of a total of 945 tokens of 15 indirect directive constructions collected from 28 Amer-
ican fictional stories, this paper looks at their cooccurrence patterns in discourse and discusses their motiva-
tions. The main findings include: (i) indirect directive constructions in declarative form (e.g. I want you to)
occur with other directive constructions more frequently than those in interrogative form (e.g. Can you); (ii) the
majority of indirect directives prefer to occur with the imperative; (iii) the imperative occurs more frequently
with suggestion constructions than with request; and (iv) several recurrent combinatory patterns can be dis-
cerned – notably, “preface plus specific content of request”, “specific suggestion followed by its enumerations”,
“repetition of one and the same propositional content of request or plea,” among others.
It is argued that contrary to common belief, the imperative in English is not necessarily a “less polite” directive
form, which should be replaced by a more “refined” alternative. Rather, many indirect directive constructions
heavily rely on the imperative, which can be said to be a construction capable of dealing with a wide range of
illocutionary acts due to its schematicity and versatility in meaning.
References
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge
University Press.
Clark H. H. and D. H. Schunk. 1980. “Polite responses to polite requests.” Cognition 8, 111-143.
Cooper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 2014. “What does grammar tell us about action.” Pragmatics 24:3, 623-647.
Leech, Geoffrey 2014 The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press.
Pérez Hernández L. & F. J. Ruiz de Mendoza 2002 “Grounding, semantic motivation, and conceptual interaction
in indirect directive speech acts,” Journal of Pragmatics 34, 259–284.
Searle, John R. 1975. “Indirect speech acts.” Syntax and Semantics 9, ed. by Cole, P. & J. Morgan, 59-82, Academic
Press.

1576
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Atypical Solidarity in an Indonesian Fandom of KPop Idols:


Linguistics Context of Hyperreality and Parasocial
Relationships

Poster

Mrs. Dian Ekawati 1 , Mrs. Maria Teodora Ping 2 , Mrs. Lusi Lian Piantari 3
1. Padjadjaran University, 2. Mulawarman University, 3. Universitas Al Azhar Indonesia

Nowadays, social media platform has become a living document, in which people share events, thoughts,
achievement, protests and various emotions in the real time context. The openness in social media has en-
abled its users to have a particular, consistent form and unique pattern of interaction (Golbeck et al., 2011;
Herrera-Viedma et al., 2015). An example would be the existence of a dialogue between many users in a big
scale, in which they interact anonymously to discuss the same topic. This normally occurs whenever there is an
event which stimulates negative feelings. With such a commonly shared interest, these users build some sort of
communal solidarity, like in the so-called ‘fandoms’. In addition, there is a parasocial relationship phenomenon
between fans in the fandoms with their idols, which eventually strengthen the emotions and intensify a differ-
ent form of solidarity (Eren, 2021). Therefore, this preliminary study aims at analysing extensively the form
and pattern of interaction between members of an immensely popular KPop Idol Fandom as well as seeing
how the solidarity is built and shifted from its typical literal meaning. This study would also like to investi-
gate how hyperreality and parasocial relationships are manifested in a linguistic context. The data for the case
study are obtained from a two-hour online live conversation between this fandom’s members on twitter space.
The data are transcribed and then analysed qualitatively by using a critical discourse analysis approach to see
how hyperreality and parasocial relationships are manifested through language and the interaction pattern.
The tentative findings reveal that the fandom members have emotional closeness with their fellow fangirls, in
which they build such a shared hatred and hence create a ‘punishment’ directed towards a particular target
whom they consider as a hater of their idol and summon this target in order to ask for verbal clarifications. The
‘summon’ includes a ‘judgement’ process which is manifested linguistically through words and expressions of
swearing, verbally uttered prejudice, topics of conversation being led towards judging the target, interruptions
and minimum speaking opportunities for the target. From the conversation, it is shown that the fans seem to
have built an “alternate universe” outside of their reality namely their fandom, in which they form an atypical
solidarity due to the commonly shared idol, context and purpose. This solidarity can be considered as atypical
because it has shifted from the positive meaning into a common interest to hate and judge those considered as
the haters of their idol.
Keywords: atypical solidarity, hyperreality, parasocial relationship
Literatures:
Eren, O. (2021). Parasocial Friendship and Parasocial Love in K-pop Fandom: Supporting
and Forgiving Behavior of Fans in Different Types of Parasocial Relationships-The Case of American BTS Fan-
dom. D.collection.
Golbeck J. Robles C. & Turner K. (2011 May). Predicting personality with social media. In CHI’11 extended
abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 253-262). ACM.
Herrera-Viedma, E., Bernabé-Moreno, J., Porcel, C., Martínez, M.A. (2015): Solidarity in Social Media: when users
abandon their comfort zone - The Charlie Hebdo case, Icono 14, volumen (13), pp. 6-12.

1577
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Autism: deficit or difference? A reconsideration of the way we


assess theory of mind

Poster

Ms. Rachel Cullen 1


1. PhD student

This work investigates the hypothesis autistic people have a different but effective way of communicating. Chal-
lenging the widely accepted view of autistic people as having social communicational deficits (Tager-Flusberg,
2007) which were linked to theory of mind deficits (Baron-Cohen, 2000).
In the last decade there has been a shift towards conceptualising autistic people as neurodivergent based on
natural diversity in human cognition (Kapp, et al, 2013; Pellicano & den Houting, 2022). Milton (2012) reframed
the communication breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people as a ‘double problem’ with responsi-
bility on both sides for its amelioration. Challenging the perception autistic people have social communication
deficits and reframes it as a joint communication problem.
Building on previous work exploring autistic and non-autistic communication linked to theory of mind ability,
this study revisited the Wellman and Estes (1986) ‘spoon test’. A test used to assess knowledge of the distinction
between mental states and tangible objects and as such was seen as a valid way to evaluate theory of mind
development.
100 autistic and 74 non-autistic responses to 6 subtle linguistic changes were analysed: the indefinite article
was changed to the definite in three places and the tense was changed from past to present in three places. It
was theorised these subtle changes would not affect the ability to distinguish between tangible and imaginary
objects if it was a valid measure of theory of mind. It was found these 6 changes significantly affected both
groups differently and the original ‘spoon test’ lacks validity and replication as a theory of mind measure.
In light of these results, I suggest autistic people may process linguistic phenomena differently compared to
non-autistic people. Additionally, it is imperative to investigate if similar theory of mind tests can be rendered
invalid with subtle linguistic changes. If so, this would question the validity of claims surrounding autistic
theory of mind deficits and more widely the way theory of mind is currently measured.
As an autistic person, I am particularly interested in the concept of there being more than one theory of mind.
My work will unpack this proposition and illustrate what it means and how it can be empirically tested.
References:
Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Theory of mind and autism: A review. International Review of Research in Mental
Retardation, 23, 169–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0074-7750(00)80010-5
Kapp, S. K., Gillespie-Lynch, K., Sherman, L. E., & Hutman, T. (2013). Deficit, difference, or both? Autism and
neurodiversity. Developmental psychology, 49(1), 59.
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6),
883-887. ISSN 0968-7599.
Pellicano, E., & den Houting, J. (2022). Annual Research Review: Shifting from ‘normal science’ to neurodiversity
in autism science. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 63(4), 381-396.
Tager-Flusberg, H. (2007). Evaluating the theory-of-mind hypothesis of autism. Current Directions in Psycholog-
ical Science, 16(6), 311–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00527.x
Wellman, H., Estes, D. (1986). Early understanding of mental entities: A re-examination of childhood realism.
Child Development, 57, 910-923.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Autistic and non-autistic adult women’s written narratives of


emotional autobiographical memories

Poster

Ms. Florence Merken 1 , Ms. Philippine Geelhand 1


1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Narrative research has been identified as a great tool in linguistic studies, as it ecologically reveals qualitative
and quantitative differences in individuals experiencing communicative difficulties - but who still show good
structural language skills (Geelhand et al., 2020; Manolitsi & Botting, 2011). Narrative research within the autis-
tic population has until now included predominantly male samples, but it is now argued that the communicative
profile of autistic women might differ from men’s (Sturrock et al., 2020). However, the nature of these differ-
ences is still poorly understood. Moreover, most narrative studies rely on oral tasks; given that autistic adults
tend to prefer written or computer-mediated communication (Gillespie-Lynch et al., 2020), it seems increas-
ingly important to investigate whether the atypical traits in the communication of autistic adults identified in
oral tasks would be replicated in a written one.
With this study, we aimed at offering a better perspective on the specific linguistic challenges that autistic
women face compared to non-autistic women, through a semi-structured task that resembles every-day nar-
rative situations (i.e., memories storytelling). Participants were 15 autistic and 15 non-autistic (NA) cisgender
women, pairwise matched on age (M(age)= 34.73). As the study took place during the lockdown, recruitment
and testing were done online and in writing. Participants were asked to write 4 autobiographical memories,
based on 4 emotion cue words. No time limit was given, but a minimum and maximum number of characters
were allowed for each narrative (1000-1800).
Group differences were found in all aspects of the analysis, the first being the microstructure: autistic women
wrote longer narratives, used more unique and infrequent words and showed greater productivity than NA
women. On the macrostructure level, autistic women showed reduced use of explicit causal connectives. As for
the internal state language, autistic women used less cognitive state terms but slightly more perceptual terms.
Microstructure results seem in line with those observed in written studies that previously included mostly men
(Brown et al., 2014; Price et al., 2020), which could indicate a specific microstructural profile of autistic adults
in writing. Autistic women however wrote longer narratives and used more perceptual terms than NA women,
which shows unique traits that were not identified in predominantly men samples (Finnegan & Accardo, 2018).
Macrostructure and internal state language measures seem to corroborate results observed in oral studies (Geel-
hand et al., 2020), indicating common challenges of narrative expression for autistic adults, in both writing and
speaking. This indicates that although the atypical features of autistic women’s communication may be more
discrete than those of autistic men (Sturrock et al., 2020), they are still not comparable to NA women, suggest-
ing that autistic women still experience challenges that may be harder to perceive. This exploratory study led
to the preparation of a bigger research project investigating both the influence of gender (in a non-binary ap-
proach) and medium of communication (oral or written), which methodology we hope to discuss during the
poster session, in relation with the results presented here.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Autistic children’s novel metaphor comprehension under


reduced uncertainty

Poster

Prof. Agustin Vicente 1 , Dr. Elena Castroviejo 2 , Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum 3 , Dr. Kristen Schroeder 3 ,
Dr. Camilo Ronderos 3 , Ms. Isabel Martín-González 2
1. Ikerbasque Foundation for Science/University of the Basque Country, 2. University of the Basque Country, 3. University of
Oslo

Introduction
Usually, studies about the autistic population’s abilities to understand purely novel metaphors do not provide
any specification as to what properties are relevant to understand them (Kasirer & Mashal, 2016). Yet, one of
the difficulties of dealing with innovative figures of language may be uncertainty about what is meant (Pous-
coulous, 2014), and how to access the relevant piece of encyclopedic knowledge (Melogno & Pinto, 2022). It is
also common that the actual novelty of the metaphors used when testing metaphor comprehension in autis-
tic individuals is not fully controlled for through norming studies with typical population (i.e. Norbury, 2005).
When some context is provided and novelty is controlled for, both ASC children and adults with high function-
ing language perform close to Typically Developing (TD) peers (Vulchanova et al., 2019). Still, some atypicalities
in processing measures are found.
Objectives
Our main goal is to study average-IQ autistic children’s comprehension of novel metaphors controlled through
a norming study with supporting context vis à vis TD children’s comprehension.
A secondary goal is to examine correlations with other measures, and their power as predictors of metaphorical
capacity in ASC. More specifically, the sense convention task (Iversen, Ronderos & Falkum, in prep.), and autism
severity.
Methods
We combine a picture selection task with gaze movements recordings. Our design manipulates two condi-
tions: literal and metaphorical. The metaphorical condition includes a context sentence and a metaphor,
e.g.“Grasshoppers jump a lot [context sentence] That child is a grasshopper [metaphor]. Which one is it?”. The
literal condition is exactly the same but “child” is substituted by “animal”. All metaphors in our study have been
tested for novelty in a previous norming study (N=21).
Analysis plan
We will conduct two types of analyses.The first one will be a group comparison with TD peers on each group’s
relative accuracy. One group will be matched by verbal mental age (PPTV-III) and the other one by chronological
age.
The second type of analysis will be only within the ASC sample. We will look for main effects of any of the
measures cited in the previous section.
References
Pouscoulous, N. (2014). “The elevator’s buttocks”: Metaphorical abilities in children. Pragmatic Development
in First Language Acquisition, 239–260.
Kasirer, A., & Mashal, N. (2016). Comprehension and generation of metaphors by children with autism spectrum
disorder. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 32, 53–63.
Norbury, C. F. (2005). The relationship between theory of mind and metaphor: Evidence from children with
language impairment and autistic spectrum disorder. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 383–
399.

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Melogno, S., & Pinto, M. A. (2022). Devising trainings to enhance the capabilities of children with autism spec-
trum disorder to cope with metaphor: A review of the literature. Frontiers in Communication, 7.

1581
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Between Collective and Individual: A Contrastive Study of the


Expression “Common Sense” in Japanese, English, and Dutch

Poster

Dr. Ruth Vanbaelen 1


1. University of Tsukuba

This work in progress examines the way the concept of “common sense” is used across three languages, i.e.,
Japanese, English, and Dutch. The goal is to investigate if the expression is used to indicate a shared understand-
ing, a personal interpretation, or a continuum between the two extremes of the collective and the individual.
This will help language learners as well as translators to render their thoughts/texts more accurately.
This is a three-step research. Firstly, dictionary entries and definitions for each language are reviewed to com-
prehend the level of individuality that is assigned to the concepts. High-frequency keywords are used as indica-
tors. Next, survey data of 173 participants is analyzed. Respectively 60, 42, and 70 native speakers of Japanese,
English and Dutch provided definitions and examples of the expression “common sense” in their first language
through an anonymous online platform. Finally, attention goes to how expressions are translated between the
languages to increase the understanding regarding differences and similarities.
Survey results indicated that keywords used in dictionaries reappear most frequently in definitions of Japanese
participants, but to a lower degree in English and even less in Dutch. Also, in 34% of the answers of Dutch
speakers and to a lesser extent in English (9.5%), “logic” and related words were used, whereas none of the
Japanese speakers chose these as keywords. In addition, when concentrating on keywords as “group” and “in-
dividual” as well as words related in meaning (e.g., most people/society and own/self), Dutch speakers focused
more on the “individual” than English or Japanese speakers with the latter group leaning the most towards the
“collective”. Detailed analysis of this tendency is under way and in-depth results will be provided on the poster.
The preliminary results indicate that, although “common sense” seems to be commonly understood in different
languages, in this three-language study, the focal point moves along the axis of the collective-individual con-
tinuum depending on the language. Finally, translations proved to be complex. Stand-alone expressions (e.g.,
in dictionaries) often have one straightforward translation, but translations in context (e.g., in novels) tend to
shy away from “common sense”-related expressions. Examples of the language pair Japanese-English, which
according to the above analysis is closer on the collective-individual continuum than Japanese-Dutch, and their
analysis will be presented.
As this is a work in progress, on the technical side, further research will firstly compare the positive/negative
format of the expressions with the actual meaning that is expressed. In addition, supplementary data will be
collected for 1) languages, such as German and Swedish, that use expressions similar to Dutch and 2) languages,
such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, in which, even though marginally, two expressions remain, one leaning
towards the Dutch tendency of individualism and one with a more group-oriented meaning. On the meta-
linguistic side, a closer look at the separate cultures/societies will provide valuable insights on the concept of
collective-individual.
Partially supported by JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) 21H00534 “Contextualization of CEFR and
its application to the study of Japanese language and Japanese language education”.

1582
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Dealing with atypicality in oral and written discourse


concerning refugees who have experienced torture

Poster

Dr. Iphigenia Moulinou 1


1. University of Athens, Greece

The poster I submit presents part of my post-doctoral research οn the social representation and identity of
refugees who have experienced torture (henceforth RsT). It is concerned with the challenges psychologists and
solicitors have to face when presenting in writing or in oral form the story of RsT before the asylum jury. My
approach is ethnographic and concentrates on the diverse linguistic practices of the different actors involved
during the initial stages of assistance, later on through the stages of the asylum application process to the initial
post-migration period. The research is conducted with participant observation in socio-institutional settings in
Greece where professionals work with RsT. The preliminary results of my study are compared with the findings
of researchers in other European host countries.
Two kinds of data will be analyzed: a meeting between NGO solicitors dealing with RsT and professionals of Ba-
bel Day Centre, the oldest and most well-known center which provides mental health service to RsT particularly,
and interviews with these professionals. My presentation will be structured around two particular instances
regarding atypicality issues in interaction. The first focuses on how experts deal with RsT who claim asylum
because in their country they were persecuted for witchcraft, tortured and threatened. The data analyzed con-
sist in interviews with psychologists and solicitors of RsT. Through discourse analysis, and mainly through the
analysis of metapragmatic comments, reported speech and epistemic stance, concerning their interaction with
the asylum seekers and the asylum jury, I examine to what extent western discourse and culture can meet and
deal with discourse on witchcraft, in the asylum context. The second instance focuses on the discourse of psy-
chologists and solicitors who write the reports to be submitted to the asylum jury. I describe how the discourse
of the RsT is re-modelled in the written language of the solicitors, passing from an atypical to conventional
forms. The ethical issues emerging in this transformative process will also be discussed and a comparison with
the findings of researchers in other European countries will be made.
REFERENCES
Beneduce, R. 2018. “Une nouvelle bataille de vérité.”Cahiers d’études africaines
[online] 231-232: 763-792, doi: https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.
Blommaert, J. 2001. “Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium.” Discourse
& Society 12 (4): 413-449.
Blommaert, J. 2013. “Writing as a sociolinguistic object.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (4): 440-459.
Geschiere, P.1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London: University Press of Vir-
ginia.
Jacquemet, M. 2009. “Transcribing Refugees: The entextualization of asylum hearings in a transidiomatic envi-
ronment.” Text and Talk 29 (5): 525–546.
Johnson, A. 2014. “Legal discourse: processes of making evidence in specialized legal corpora”. In Pragmatics
of Discourse. Handbooks of Pragmatics, 3, ed. by K. P. Schneider, and A. Barron, 525-554. Berlin: Mouton De
Gruyter.
Lillis, Th. and J. Maybin. 2017. “Introduction: the dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace
practice.” Text & Talk 37 (4): 409-414.

1583
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Development and Evaluation of Learning Materials on


Vocabulary with Cross-linguistic Similarity -Compared with
Showing Dictionary Definitions

Poster

Ms. Yewen Wang 1


1. Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu University

This paper develops learning materials for Japanese vocabulary which has cross-linguistic similarity to Chi-
nese, and analyzes the effectiveness of learning materials via the experimental method. In this experiment,
Chinese JSL learners were randomly assigned to a control group and an experimental group, respectively. In
both groups, the learners learned 6 Japanese words with cross-linguistic similarity to Chinese. Both groups were
given the same target words, examples, pictures and exercises in the learning materials. The difference was that
the control group was given the dictionary definitions of Chinese and Japanese words, while the experimental
group was given learning materials with some instructed strategies. Before and after the learning process, the
learners took a pre-test and a post-test. All the tests were the same: there were 40 Japanese sentences in the
test; 30 sentences contained the target words in the learning materials; 8 sentences contained Japanese words
with cross-linguistic similarity which did not appear in the learning materials; and 2 dummy questions were
set to test whether the learners answered carefully. 35 participants were involved in the analysis, with 17 in
the control group and 18 in the experimental group. The learners were requested to judge if the meanings
of underlined words were appropriate for the sentences by using a five-point scale (1 indicates inappropriate
and 5 indicates appropriate). The underlined words were selected from previous research, a Chinese-Japanese
homonyms dictionary for Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) Level N1 and N2. Meanwhile, the partic-
ipants were unable to correctly judge the meanings of those words in the preliminary test. The scores were
calculated according to the answers on the five-level scale. In the pre-test, the average scores of the control
and the experimental groups were 122.47 and 116.22. Statistically, there was no significant difference between
the levels of the participants’ performance in the two groups in the pre-test (t=1.883, n.s.). In the post-test, the
average scores of the control group and the experimental group were 162.18 and 165.67. Compared with the
pre-test, the scores of the two groups were significantly improved (control group: t=15.80, p<0.01; experimen-
tal group: t=15.36, p<0.01). Comparing the degree of improvement of the two groups, the experimental group
was better than the control group at the p=0.05 significance level (t=2.366, d=0.800). Thus, both learning mate-
rials were found to be effective in learning words with cross-linguistic similarity. Dictionaries are considered
useful for learning vocabulary, but some studies pointed out that the explanations in dictionaries were not
sufficient. Simply listing and comparing the meanings of L1 and L2 words did not lead to better learning re-
sults. By contrast, the learning materials of the experimental group analyzed the features of word-formation,
provided collocations used in the context of daily life, explained meanings concretely and summarized usage
patterns. The results showed that this could help learners elaborately process meanings and establish new
form-meaning connections that were different from L1. This study suggests that when teaching words with
linguistic similarities, combination of approaches can be used to help learners understand better, rather than
comparing meanings only.

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18th International Pragmatics Conference

Development of Narratives of Second Language Learners of


English

Poster

Dr. Anna H.-J. Do 1


1. New York City College of Technology, City University of New York

Abstract
There is a considerable body of evidence exploring the development of first-language narratives (e.g., Bamberg,
1997; McCabe & Peterson, 1991a; Verhoeven & Stromqvist, 2001). However, there is a dearth of adequate
research investigating narratives of ELLs (cf. Bardovi-Harlig, 1995, 2000).

The study is to assess the narrative skills of second language learners at three distinct stages of their develop-
ment – beginner, intermediate, and advanced. ELL narrative skills include the lexicon, syntax, and pragmatics
areas of speaking expression.
The data used in this study are drawn from narrative stories created by forty 11th and 12th grade ELLs when com-
pared to eight 11th and 12 grade English-speaking students from the same high school. The subjects were given
only pictures with the entire narrative deleted. Subjects were then asked to provide their own oral narrative
version of the story which was tape-recorded and transcribed for analysis.
The study documented serious gaps between the three groups with respect to their use of lexicon, syntax, and
pragmatics. While advanced students, as expected, tended to perform better than beginner and intermediate
students, their use of verb tense, pronouns, and prepositions was not significantly better than the other two
groups.
Due to the lack of research with ELLs, this study would be critical in shedding additional light on these stages
of learning. This study would not only allow ELL teachers to understand more clearly critical gaps in narrative
skills but also provide them with certain tools to modify their instruction and better serve the needs of ELLs.
References
Bamberg, M. (1987). The acquisition of narratives: Learning to use language. Berlin: Mouton. Bardovi-Harlig, K.
(1995). A narrative perspective on the development of the tense/aspect system in second language acquisition.
In Studies in second language acquisition, 17, 2, pp. 263- 291.
_____________. (2000). Tense and aspect in second language acquisition: Form, meaning and use. University of
Michigan: Blackwell.
McCabe, A., & Peterson, C. (Eds.) (1991a). Developing narrative structure. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Verhoeven, L.
& Stromqvist, S. (2001). Narrative development in a multilingual context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

1585
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Disappointed and Distant: The Emotional Facial Expressions


of Ironic Speakers

Poster

Dr. Marc Aguert 1


1. Normandie Univ, UNICAEN, LPCN

As verbal irony was described as a rhetorical device intended to express negativity (Colston, 2015; Roberts &
Kreuz, 1994), we explored the emotions that subtend its use. A set of 104 silent videos was retrieved from Aguert
(2022). In these videos, all the speakers were saying the same utterance (“Honestly, it was really great”), in the
context of a role-play, but with different contexts which led half of them to be sincere and the other half to be
ironic. We submitted these videos to 293 judges, undergraduate students, and asked them to describe the speak-
ers’ mental state in a single word, allowing us to build a corpus of 13 780 words which characterized sincere
and ironic speakers. Analysis of the corpus mainly consisted in calculating a specificity score for each word (a
measure of the frequency of a word in certain parts of the corpus, Lebart et al., 2019) and determining the va-
lence of these words. Results showed that the judges first described the speakers with emotional labels, mainly
negative for ironic speakers (“disappointed” and “sad”) and mainly positive for the sincere speakers (“happy”,
“joyful”). The fact that the most frequent qualifier for ironic speakers was “disappointed” confirms that irony
is a device that appears in contexts where speakers’ expectations have been thwarted (Attardo, 2000; Colston,
2000; Utsumi, 2000). After emotional labels, the words produced by the judges described the speakers’ enuncia-
tive attitude (i.e., their attitude toward their own words). In particular, sincere speakers were qualified as quite
confident (“sure”, “persuasive”, “involved”, etc.), while ironic speakers were qualified as not very confident
(“not sure”, “wary”, “embarrassed”, “skeptical”, etc.). The actual word “ironic” rarely appeared which suggests
that facial expression alone is not enough to conclude that a person is ironic. However, participants at least
perceived that ironic speakers were not sincere, and that they distanced themselves from their words, which
confirms that pragmatic insincerity is an important ingredient of irony (Kumon-Nakamura et al., 1995). Finally,
our results support a conception of facial expressions as a socio-communicative device, fulfilling pragmatic
functions, rather than as the facial display of our felt emotions (Scarantino, 2017).

1586
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Exemplification, Topic Management, and Unexpectedness:


The Case of the Japanese X Toka

Poster

Ms. Motomi Kajitani 1


1. The University of New Mexico

The Japanese exemplification marker X toka has functions that are not often discussed, including (i) managing
topics (Nakamata 2008) and (ii) highlighting X and expressing the speaker’s stance on it, including negative
attitude and unexpectedness (Suzuki 1998; Taylor 2010; Taki 2020; Barotto 2021). Using conversational data
from YouTube videos, this study qualitatively examines these functions from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective.
The results reveal that the construction functions to mark a new topic in topic narrowing (the topic is narrowed
from T1 to T2), shifting (the topic is shifted from T1 to T2), or recapturing (part of T1 is recaptured as T2) as well
as to introduce a topic to an addressee out of the blue. They also show that some topic management function
subtypes involve speaker-, speaker- and addressee-, or addressee-unexpectedness. Overall, the study suggests
that toka functions to put X at the forefront of the addressee’s attention (Talmy 2010) so as to talk about it further.
It also reveals an intricate network of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the X toka, that embraces multiple
layers of (inter)subjectification (Traugott 2003).
References

• Barotto, Alessandra. 2021. Exemplification and categorization: The case of Japanese. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
• Nakamata, Naoki. 2008. Nihongo no toritate joshi to hēretsu joshi no setten: “mo” to “toka” no yōhō wo
chūshin ni. Osaka Prefecture University Bulletin 3. 153–176.
• Suzuki, Satoko. 1998. Pejorative connotation: A case of Japanese. In Andres H. Jucker & Yael Ziv (eds.),
Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory, 261-276. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Taki, Rie. 2020. Rēji no kinō wo motsu joshi no imi bunseki. Ninchi-gengogaku ni okeru kategorī no kanten
kara. Nagoya: Nagoya University dissertation.
• Talmy, Leonard. 2010. Attention phenomenon. In Dirk Geeraerts & Cuyckens Hubert (eds.), The Oxford
handbook of cognitive linguistics, 264-293. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Taylor, Yuki Io. 2010. Functions of Japanese exemplifying particles in spoken and written discourse. Los
Angeles: University of California Los Angeles dissertation.
• Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2003. From subjectification to intersubjectification. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Mo-
tives for language change, 124–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1587
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Explicature and the narrowing or broadening of target texts


by sign language interpreters

Poster

Dr. Campbell McDermid 1 , Anita Harding 1


1. Gallaudet University

Translators and interpreters work between languages and cultures in an attempt to represent the “sense” of a
source text to a target language audience. However, little has been done specifically concerning how sign lan-
guage interpreters represent the meaning of Deaf signers, specifically when the interpreters are constructing
target texts in spoken English. To address this gap, a qualitative study was done with 22 sign language inter-
preters to compare their target texts in spoken English to four source texts in American Sign Language (ASL),
for a total of 44 samples. Using Carston’s (1996) earlier discussion of explicatures, Klaudy’s (1998) taxonomy
of potential changes in translated texts, and work in the field of translation on explicitation, compression and
expansions (Kamenická 2007; Klaudy & Károly, 2005), various strategies were noted in the 44 target texts. Some
strategies may have strengthened the meaning of the ASL utterances for an English audience, for example by
substituting a pronoun (he/she/they) for the role of the individual (the secretary, the engineer), leading to a
narrowing of meaning (Carson, 1996), also referred to as specification (Gumul, 2006; Kamenicka, 2007; Klaudy
& Karol 2005) or particularization (Molina & Albir, 2002). Some additions such as the use of conjunctions to
compound nouns or the inclusion of the article “the” were seen as obligatory and strengthened the target text
meaning. The inclusion of prepositional or phrasal verbs in spoken English to replace a single verb in ASL was
seen as optional and strengthening, as they resulted in more native-like sounding texts. One optional compres-
sion strategy, the use of agentless passive voice in English when the subject was specified in ASL, resulted in
a broader meaning leaving the audience to work out who was performing the action and thus weakening the
“sense” of the target text. Another optional strategy, the use of indefinite pronouns such as “someone” when
the agent was specified in ASL also potentially weakened the target text. By recognizing the strategies used and
examining their potential impact on an audience’s ability to comprehend a target text, it is believed interpreters
can then make more informed choices about how they work from ASL into spoken English.

1588
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Facework of Intimacy and Distancing in Teacher-Student


Interviews

Poster

Dr. Makoto Imura 1 , Dr. Seiko Otsuka 1


1. Osaka Institute of Technology

This study examines role performance and relationship building in teacher-student interactions from the per-
spective of facework (Goffman, 1967) through discourse analysis. Particular attention will be paid to the teacher-
student interactional facework related to the use of honorifics and the teacher’s self-presentation (Goffman,
1981).
Our conversation data consists of 10 pairs of one-on-one teacher-student interviews conducted as part of a long-
term extracurricular project on English extensive reading. The project recruited volunteer students and aimed
to keep them motivated to engage in extensive reading through cooperative learning among students. In the
first year of the project, teachers are expected to play a role of building rapport with students and encouraging
them to read more English books. Interviews were conducted to help the teachers build a good rapport with
the students and at the same time, to understand their situation so that they can motivate them properly.
Japanese has its own honorific system, and the use of honorifics should be considered when analyzing con-
versations, especially when there is a hierarchical relationship between conversation participants. Japanese
honorifics have the function of adjusting and indicating distance from others (hierarchical relationship and
degree of intimacy), and they also have the function of presenting “demeanor” (Goffman, 1981) of the user due
to the ideology of cultural orthodoxy. However, its use or non-use is bound by social norms. While its use from
students to teachers is socially mandated, teachers can choose if they use it to students or not. The use of hon-
orifics by teachers toward students indicates that there is an authoritative distance between them, but also that
they are sophisticated teachers who show some respect to students and treat them as equals. At the same time,
however, it also keeps students at a distance and prevents creating of rapport.
In their interviews, teachers have two conflicting objectives as described above - the need to establish a close
relationship with students so that they feel comfortable discussing their concerns and, conversely, the need to
play the role of a mentor who encourages learning. In this study, we will analyze in particular how and in what
situations teachers try to achieve these two purposes from the perspective of facework, using teachers’ use of
honorific expressions as a clue.
In the analysis, for example, in many situations in which the interactive roles of interviewer and interviewee
are fixed, such as when asking about student’s motivation for participating in the project, honorifics are used at
the end of sentences. On the other hand, non-use of honorifics is observed in situations where the conversation
developed in a reciprocal role manner, such as when discussing students’ personal lives. This may indicate that
facework of authority and that of intimacy are used differently, depending not only on the topic but also on the
participation framework in the interaction.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1589
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Factors Influencing Request Emails by Japanese Learners of


English in Academic Settings

Poster

Dr. Riko Umeki 1


1. Fukuyama Heisei University

This present study aims to better understand factors influencing request emails by Japanese learners of English
(JLE) in academic settings. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in computer-mediated com-
munication including email. In the field of second language pragmatics, previous studies on academic request
emails have revealed important findings related mainly to five aspects: proficiency level of L2, social distance,
social power, familiarity with emails, and the order of discourse moves in emails (e.g., Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007;
Bjørge, 2007; Bou-Franch, 2011; Chen, 2015; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2011; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2016; Savić,
2018). These findings suggest that these five aspects are decisive factors for L2 learners to successfully realize
requests in academic emails. However, very few studies have investigated how they actually influence request
emails by L2 learners. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to examine how factors affect requests realized by
JLE in academic emails. The study collected email data (N =300) from 75 JLE with intermediate proficiency level,
asking them to complete an online written discourse completion test with four different academic settings. The
data was first categorized from four aspects: frame move, strategy, internal modifiers, and external modifiers.
The categorized data was then analyzed using decision tree analysis to predict factors that influenced an out-
come (e.g., category use). The results show that in terms of strategy, “social power” had the most influence on
strategy use. Especially, with social power, “English proficiency level” is most likely to affect strategy use. In
line with Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011), JLE with lower proficiency level tend to use direct strategies such as
Imperatives and Want/ Need statements. Despite the significant influence of “English proficiency level” on strat-
egy use, interestingly, this factor had either no effect or the least effect on category use in frame move, internal
modifiers, and external modifiers. The findings suggest that regardless of English proficiency level, there are
pragmatic features almost inaccessible for L2 learners to acquire on their own without specific opportunities
to learn them. Further research is required in order to establish efficient pragmatic instruction considering the
findings from the present study.

1590
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender and Professional Identity: Variation in Discourse


Particles among Taiwanese Educational YouTubers

Poster

Ms. NienEn Liu 1


1. University of Edinburgh

A popular genre among Taiwanese YouTubers is educational videos. To stand out in the competitive industry,
educational YouTubers are expected to be both entertaining and professional. In this paper, I explore the rela-
tionship between gender and professional identity evidenced by variations in their use of Discourse Particles
(DPs). DPs (e.g. ne, ou, a) in Mandarin are discourse items indicating the speakers’ affective attitude and emotion
colouring (Han, 2019; Simpson, 2014; Tseng, 2006). DPs are shown to index certain gendered or professional
identities. For instance, Chuang (2005) shows that Taiwanese women use certain DPs to infantilise themselves
to represent their cuteness. Starr (2011) also suggested that the use of DPs indicates casualness while their ab-
sence index the professional and distant characteristics. The use of DPs, as a feature of vernacular speech, may
thus index ‘casualness’ and so increase intimacy with the audience and function as a strategy which YouTubers
use to build a following on the platform.
The data is divided into four groups: female science-teaching, male science-teaching, female English-teaching,
and male English-teaching. The two most popular Taiwanese YouTubers within each group are selected. Four
hours of video clips in total (i.e. 30 minutes for each speaker) where they demonstrate the relevant knowledge
backgrounds to the audience form the corpus. After collecting all the DPs from the corpus, I examined the types
of DPs by analysing their positions in utterances, prosodic features, contexts, and minimal pairs.
The results show that English-teaching YouTubers have greater variation in their DP use, featuring more types,
including utterance-medial interjections (e.g. ne, a) and utterance-initial and -final modal particles (e.g. en, wa,
ma, ba) and tokens of DPs to create a casual teaching style whereas science-teaching YouTubers apply fewer
types (mostly utterance-final modal particles, such as ou and la) and tokens of DPs. This finding suggests the
fundamental difference of teaching styles between English and science education, with YouTubers emphasizing
aspects of closeness and distance respectively via their variation in DP use.
While gender was not a major variable across fields, female and male speakers used different strategies to
express their professional identities when they teach different subjects. Female English-teaching YouTubers
use more types, including various interjections and modal particles and tokens of DPs than male ones, while
female science-teaching YouTubers use fewer types and tokens of DPs, particularly the interjections (e.g. ne),
than their male counterparts.
The results suggest that DPs are stylistic variables used by Taiwanese educational YouTubers to manage the
tension between entertainer and professional personas. As science education is still a male-dominant field in
Taiwan, female YouTubers in this genre are inclined to index a more professional speech style than male ones.
In contrast, while the English-teaching genre shows a relatively casual style of teaching compared to the science-
teaching field, female speakers in this genre tend to create intimacy between themselves and the audience with
various types of DPs whereas men have individual strategies to negotiate their relationship with the audience.

1591
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gender differences in pragmatic abilities of autistic children


and adolescents (Work in Progress)

Poster

Ms. Marie Belenger 1 , Prof. Mikhail Kissine 2


1. Université Libre, 2. Université Libre de Bruxelles

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by lifelong socio-


communicative impairments as well as restricted interests and repetitive behaviors (Psychiatric Association,
2014). One of the most robust specificities of ASD is that autistic individuals have difficulties with pragmatic
abilities (Paul, 2007). ASD is more frequently diagnosed in males than females with a 3:1 ratio (Loomes et al.,
2017). There is growing evidence that diagnosis tools are less likely to identify autistic females. Until very re-
cently, researchers did not focus on the interaction effect of gender & autism diagnosis on pragmatic abilities,
even though previous studies on the subject reported a gender effect within the autistic population. Autistic
females seem to encounter fewer difficulties than autistic males, but they are still note comparable to non-
autistic females (Sturrock et al., 2021). Furthermore, autistic females seem to be more likely than autistic males
to camouflage their autistic behaviors — including pragmatic functioning (Parish-Morris et al., 2017).
Therefore, this project aims at further delineating the pragmatic profile of autistic females, trying to determine
whether they present a unique pragmatic profile – different from their autistic male peers as well as from their
non-autistic female peers.
Participants are autistic & non-autistic adolescents (9-16 years old). The existence of a possible diagnosis bias
against females also warrants the inclusions of adolescents presenting a high likelihood of autism (i.e., an autistic
sibling in their family).
Pragmatic abilities are evaluated through a narrative task as narratives offer a more ecological way to investi-
gate pragmatics than standardized tests. After a small “get-to-know” talk with the experimenter, participants
are asked to tell a story based on a wordless picture book. Narratives are verbatim transcribed and detailed
discourse analysis of the transcript are performed. Discourse analysis includes: the story grammar – that is the
general coherence of the story – as well as the linguistic tools used to make meaningful connections between
phrases – that is the story cohesion (i.e., choice of referential expression, use of adequate connectives and dis-
course markers, disfluencies. It also includes the use of Internal State Language (ISL). In addition, parents are
asked to complete questionnaires assessing pragmatic abilities of their children.
Data collection is now in progress and should be over by June 2023. For discourse analysis, outcome variables
will be counts therefore linear regression will be used for analysis. Camouflage (measured by the disfluencies
ratio) will be analyzed by means of cumulative link regression models.
Our hypothesis is that narratives of autistic females will differ from those of both autistic males and non-autistic
females. We expect autistic females to include more salient elements, causal explanation and ISL than autistic
males. The increased use of those elements will make the narratives of autistic females more coherent than
those of autistic males but still less coherent than those of non-autistic participants. As there are very few
previous studies on this matter and because they included small sample sizes and/or lacked power, we expect
other differences to emerge beyond our specific hypotheses.

1592
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gendered perspectives on mansplaining

Poster

Ms. Kerrigan Beagley 1 , Dr. Lisa Johnson 1


1. Brigham Young University

This study considers the popular term “mansplaining,” gendered speech acts, and general miscommunications.
Although the term is common in public discourse, no universally accepted definition of mansplaining exists;
different writers identify different linguistic and interactional features with the term, and there is evidence
that men’s and women’s perceptions of the concept may differ (Bridges, 2017). Johnson (2020) defines one
kind of mansplaining within the framework of speech acts and illocutionary force (Austin, 1975), arguing
that mansplainers incorrectly interpret knowledgeable women’s assertions as questions or requests for
information. The mansplainers’ responses represent more than a benign misunderstanding, since “pernicious
social structures” encourage harmful presuppositions about women’s knowledge and expertise (17). While
Johnson provides a reasonable account of “speech act-confusion mansplaining,” she admits that only empirical
research can test the inferences made about mansplainers’ attitudes. The purpose of this study is to obtain
empirical data on mansplaining as it is perceived by both men and women. Primary research questions are
(1) What linguistic features characterize mansplaining? (2) Do most women/men view mansplaining in the
same way? (3) How might a female definition of mansplaining differ from a male one? (4) How do instances of
mansplaining differ from other instances of speech act confusion?

Data collection is divided into two phases. An online survey targets a broad sample of women to test basic
definitions and accepted characteristics of mansplaining. The information from the survey informs the next
phase, a series of semi-structured interviews with white, college-aged men at a religious university. In addition
to questions about demographics and upbringing, the interviews include discussions of such topics as social
interactions, (mis)communication, and the interviewee’s understanding of mansplaining. Finally, male partic-
ipants are asked to perform mansplaining while describing a stereotypically male-oriented task (like changing
a tire). Analysis compares the use of mansplaining features in the performance to the baseline discourse in the
rest of the interview.
This in-depth investigation into male attitudes and assumptions sets the present study apart from most pre-
vious work that focuses only on the female perspective. Yet such information is vital to understanding the
mansplaining phenomenon and to potentially mitigating communication problems and dismantling culturally
rooted presuppositions about gendered speech acts. It also differs from Bridges (2017) in using interviews to
follow up on men’s expressed opinions.
We expect to find that women’s ideas about and experiences with mansplaining will be similar to each other.
We expect men to view mansplaining differently from women and to unknowingly employ linguistic features
associated with the practice.
Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bridges, Judith. 2017. “Gendered metapragmatics in online discourse: ”Mansplaining man gonna
mansplain…” Discourse, Context & Media. 20. 94-102.
Johnson, Casey, R. 2020. “Mansplaining and illocutionary force.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. 6(4).

1593
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Gesture in learners signed-to-spoken language interpreting

Poster

Mrs. Elisabeth Hansen 1


1. University College Copenhagen

The aim of this study is to uncover which co-speech gestures students make use of on their 5th semester in the
Danish Bachelor’s programme of Sign Language and Speech-to-text Interpreting when interpreting from Danish
Sign Language to spoken Danish and identify any patterns in the appearance of these gestures. I hope to shed
some light on the subject to incorporate this new knowledge in our training program.
My research questions are:
Which types of gestures do the students use?
Are there any patterns in the use of gesture? If so, which patterns can I identify?
The study is a qualitative preliminary research project applying video analysis to recordings of semi authentic
dialogue interpreting in the classroom.
The empirical data consists of 5 video recordings (total length approx. 70 minutes) of semi authentic dialogue
interpreting by 5th semester students.
The primary participants in the dialogue were all dependent on the interpreting as the hearing participant does
not know any sign language and the two deaf participants have no hearing. The topics for the dialogues were
selected by the students and were all semi authentic but performed in the classroom setting. The room was
set up with tables, chairs and cameras and the students were asked not to make special adjustments in their
positioning for the sake of the cameras.
All the participants - both the students acting as interpreters and the primary participants -signed a written
consent-form beforehand as they were informed how the recordings would be treated and with which purpose.
They were not initially informed of the studies exact focus as I did not want the students’ performance to be
affected by that awareness. After the class was over, I did however inform all the involved parties of the aim of
the study.
The recordings will be transcribed using a detailed software program and analyzed using the method of multi-
modal video analysis and the theoretical framework of conversation analysis.
At the conference I wish to share my project idea, the design, and some preliminary results in a poster presen-
tation. I hope to engage in useful discussions and fruitful feedback from peers.
References:
Davidsen, Jacob & Kjær, Malene (2018). Videoanalyse af social interaction. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
Morgenstern, Aliyah & Goldin-Meadow, Susan (ed.) (2022). Gesture in Language. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.
Seedhouse, Paul (2004). Conversation Analysis Methodology. In Language learning (vol 54, issue S1).

1594
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Hidden inequalities in the L2 classroom: The case of


pragmatic markers in Spanish translation

Poster

Dr. Luzia Dominguez 1


1. Cardiff University

In my poster I will present a quantitative analysis of errors in the translation of pragmatic markers from English
into Spanish in a cohort of second year undergraduate students of Spanish in Cardiff University. The primary
objective of this analysis is to determine the correlation that exists, if any, between errors in the translation of
pragmatic markers and certain social categories that are interpreted as measures of disadvantage.
In particular, I will examine the correlation of these errors with ethnic identity and race. Also, I will look at
their correlation with variables that could be defined as a measure of socioeconomic class: household income
and parents´ level of education, amongst others. Other variables could be useful to measure disadvantage,
so this would be an interesting discussion to have with other researchers. Furthermore, the presence of a
second or third language in the household, and if this is Spanish, will be considered, as these variables may
have an impact in student´s pragmatic proficiency in Spanish. Other variables regarding use and competence
in different languages may be relevant.
Ultimately, I wish to learn about the (co)relation between social inequality and the development of pragmatic
skills in the context of academic learning of a second or further language. The enquiry will set some foundations
to further examine the link between academic success in a second or further language and measures of social
disadvantage. Thought a qualitative analysis may be limited and other approaches may be necessary to fully
understand any causal links between disadvantage and pragmatic performance, with this research I would like
to initiate a conversation on the issue.
This work is framed within a more ambitious project. The broader project aims to examine second (or further)
language acquisition in an academic context and encourage young pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds
in deprived areas of Cardiff (in Wales, United Kingdom) to take on the study of a second or further language
and, through the means of modern language education, wider access to Higher Education for these pupils.
Even if access to Higher Education is not achieved, current research shows that there are other benefits of
bilingualism and multilingualism, from cognitive improvement to job opportunities, between others. This, in
a context where, due to Brexit and a current recession, access to modern languages education is being cut in
comprehensive schools and risks to become accessible only to the most privileged in society.

1595
18th International Pragmatics Conference

How doctors and patients negotiate different interpretations


of empathy through the interaction of simulated medical
consultation in English as a lingua franca

Poster

Ms. Yukako Nozawa 1


1. Toyo University

This poster presents the initial stages of a qualitative case study, which is an on-going analysis on how doc-
tors and patients co-construct empathic communication in simulated medical consultations in English as a lin-
gua franca (henceforth ELF) by negotiating different perspectives and interpretations on the concept of empa-
thy. Empathy has been widely recognised as a core element of patient-centred communication; however, Hojat
(2002, 2007) points out that the number of research on behavioural aspect of empathy is still limited. Specifically,
Marsden (2014) argues the lack of participant’s perspective in defining the concept of empathy. This study, there-
fore, adopts the two phases of inductive approach, that is, grounded theory approach (e.g., Glazer and Strauss,
1967) and conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks et al., 1974). At the first phase, the researcher conducts interviews
on the participants: 1) two simulated patients from overseas and 2) seven student doctors from Japan, in order
to investigates how they interpret the concept of empathy. At the next phase, audio-recorded and transcribed
data of six sessions of simulated doctor-patient communication is analysed by using conversation analysis in
order to examine how they practice their understanding of empathy in medical interviews in ELF. The current
stage of analysis has revealed two findings; firstly, the student doctors tend to understand empathy as a cog-
nitive domain, while simulated patients tend to interpret as an emotional attribute. Secondly, conversation
analysis has revealed that the expression of empathy becomes more explicit as the medical interview proceeds,
which is similar to the study by Morse et al. (2008) stating that the expressions of empathy only appear in the
later stages of medical interviews. In the following process of grounded theory approach, the interview data is
to be analysed in a more detailed manner in order to investigate how the concept of empathy is informed by
the participants’ perspective. Likewise, the more detailed conversation analysis reveals how the expression of
empathy becomes more explicit through the medical consultation, that is, how the participants negotiate the
different understanding of the concept of empathy and co-construct more empathic communication through
interaction in ELF.

1596
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Identifying the effect of variability on word learning in ASD

Poster

Ms. Solene Jaspard 1 , Prof. Gaetane Deliens 1


1. Université Libre de Bruxelles

When developing language, children are exposed to a speech input which is, in several respects, highly vari-
able. The acoustic signal associated with the production of one word, for instance, differs every time this word
is produced by a new speaker. Additionally, a child is also likely to encounter one particular word in a variety of
semantic contexts. Studies focusing on typically-developing (TD) children have shown that speaker and contex-
tual variability can be beneficial for word learning, because variability increases the salience of the invariant
(and hence relevant) properties of a word-object. Whether this is also true for children on the autism spectrum
remains so far uncharted. We will also investigate whether a supportive effect of variability on lexical learning
might correlate with the linguistic development trajectory of autistic children.
We propose to address these objectives by presenting 9-to-11-year-old children with two implicit word learning
tests. In the first one, we will study the effect of speaker variability on autistic and non-autistic children. They
will be presented with 8 new label-object associations over the course of 2 successive days. Half of the to-be-
learned labels will be repeated multiple times by the same speaker (Same Speaker Condition), the other half
will be repeated each time by a different speaker (Variable Speaker Condition). Our second test will examine
the effect of contextual variability. To this end, autistic and non-autistic children will be presented with a series
of pseudowords embedded in a story. Half of those pseudowords will be presented in the same story repeated
twice by the same speaker (Repeated Context Condition), and the other half will be presented in two different
stories told by the same speaker (Variable Context Condition). Each child will take part in both conditions,
spaced apart by at least one week. Learning performances will be assessed immediately after reading time, and
again after a night of sleep at home.
Our principal hypothesis is that a deficit in invariance detection – a learning process whereby people manage
to extract, over multiple exposures, relatively invariant elements of the word-object exemplars – is likely to
significantly contribute to language impairments in autism. If this is true, we should observe poorer learning
performances in the variability conditions (vs. no variability conditions) for autistic children who have been
delayed in their acquisition of language. In contrast, we expect TD children and autistic children with no history
of language delay to reach better performances in the variability conditions.
Ultimately, the proposed project has the potential to provide valuable insights into the learning conditions that
are best suited to the needs of autistic children who present language delays, or at risk of presenting some.
Through this project, we also hope to make meaningful contributions to the debates about language predictors
in autism.

1597
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Impoliteness in Adversarial Contexts

Poster

Mr. Rodrigo Agustin Lana 1


1. University of Heidelberg

The present study aims to contribute to the body of research in cross-cultural pragmatics by comparing the
production of impoliteness in speakers of British English and Peninsular Spanish. Most research conducted in
the impoliteness field has so far been observational in nature and focused on contexts where there are clear
power imbalances between the interlocutors, including military trainings (Bousfield 2008) and interactions
between unskilled workers and exploitative employers (Márquez Reiter and Kádár 2022). The present study,
in contrast, adopts a more carefully controlled design to investigate the use of impoliteness in adversarial
contexts through the proxy of card game interactions. This design will allow me to answer the following
research questions: a) Is impoliteness sanctioned or neutralized by speakers in the context of card game
interactions? b) Are the type, directionality and frequency of impoliteness strategies used by my speakers
affected by external factors, including culture, gender and age?

The object of analysis will consist of a parallel corpus of card game interactions among speakers of British
English and Peninsular Spanish. This corpus will include 50-minute recordings of participants playing
sheddding-type card game Uno. Each group will involve 4 participants, with 6 interactions for each of the
languages under study being recorded. The corpus will also be stratified by gender and age. Instances
of impoliteness will then be identified according to the following criteria: a) speakers fail to mitigate the
face-threatening potential of an FTA when mitigation is needed, or b) speakers intentionally maximize the
face-threatening potential of an FTA. The next step will be to develop a coding scheme to categorise the
instances of impoliteness found in the corpus. In order to do this, I intend to refine existing taxonomies
of impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, Bousfield 2008) to create my own classification of impoliteness strategies.
Then, I will make use of statistical tools to establish whether there are any significant differences between
different social groups (old vs. young speakers, men vs. women). Combined with qualitative analysis of
individual instances of impoliteness, these tools will allow me to describe how impoliteness is constructed
beyond the single-utterance level. The present study also has the potential to expand the body of knowl-
edge regarding cross-cultural variation in the use of impoliteness. Although research has found the types
of impoliteness strategies in Spanish and English to be similar (Kaul de Marlangeon and Alba-Juey 2012),
it remains to be ascertained whether the frequency and directionality of said strategies are equally comparable.

References
Bousfield, Derek. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25(3): 349–367.

Kaul de Marlangeon, Silvia and Laura Alba-Juez. 2012. A typology of verbal impoliteness behaviour for the
English and Spanish cultures. Revista Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada 25: 69–92.
Márquez Reiter, Rosina and Daniel Z. Kádár. 2022. Sociality and moral conflicts: Migrant stories of relational
vulnerability. Pragmatics and Society 13(1): 1–21.

1598
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Inclusive language ideologies in a highly exclusive


educational environment: Teachers’ valorization of
multilingual repertoires at an international school in Flanders

Poster

Ms. Anne-Sophie Bafort 1


1. University of Antwerp

It has become a hallmark of educational excellence and employability to be able to speak several world lan-
guages. This has led elite educational institutions, especially international schools, to use their teaching of such
multilingual repertoires as a sign of exclusive distinctiveness, linguistic capital and language-based social supe-
riority. At the same time, however, they promote inclusive language ideologies and inclusive forms of multilin-
gual teaching. As such, international schools have become sites of ideological tensions, in which social actors
simultaneously express and embody ideologies of inclusivity and exclusivity. Little is known, however, about
how international schools reconcile these tensions, since the bulk of scholarly attention has been devoted to
non-elite schools. This poster discusses how middle/high school teachers reconcile such diverging ideologies
of language at an elite international school in Flanders. Fieldwork was conducted in one international school
with English as its official language but teaching a wide variety of multilingual students. Analysis of observa-
tional data and semi-structured interviews suggests a complicated, constantly ongoing ideological balancing
act among teachers. Through the use of yearly celebratory ‘mother tongue days’ and everyday translanguaging
pedagogies, teachers of all subjects aim to ‘holistically’ develop students’ multilingual repertoires. Yet, such ef-
forts are constrained by the use of English as the official language and by competing views that portray English
monolingualism as inclusive. Moreover, not all students’ linguistic repertoires are always valued equally: lan-
guages such as German, French and Chinese receive more pedagogical attention than Czech, Hindi or Gujarati.
By mapping the complex manner in which international school teachers aim to reconcile language-based exclu-
sivity with inclusive ideologies, this poster sets out to add to the growing body of research on the valorization
of forms of multilingualism in elite educational institutions.

1599
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Interactions of secondary-school students during


collaborative writing and their potential for writing
development

Poster

Ms. Julia Schrittenlacher 1


1. University Duisburg-Essen

Collaborative writing enables students to jointly create texts and engage in metalinguistic discussion on
writing (Myhill et al. 2016). Usually, it involves considerable interaction between two or more authors in a
face-to-face interaction (Swain & Lapkin 2001). In contrast to “peer planning or peer response activities, where
the interaction occurs only in the pre- or post-writing stages respectively” (Storch 2016, 387), the entire text
production process is carried out responsibly by (at least) two writers. Writing education assumes that the
mutual exchange and the need to verbalize thoughts creates a wide range of learning opportunities (Storch
2016). However, there are currently only a few studies on the actual procedural and interactive accomplishment
of collaborative writing situations (but see Herder et al. 2020). Particularly, the question of how collaborative
writing is realized in inclusive secondary school classrooms and how heterogeneously composed pairs work
together is a desideratum.
Thus, the PhD project to be presented in a poster aims to explore student interactions during collaborative writ-
ing in order to identify potential benefits and hurdles of working in heterogeneously composed tandems.For
this purpose, the data collection in the project starts with a preliminary assessment of students’ writing com-
petence and writing styles. On this basis, heterogenous ‘writing tandems’ are specifically put together. For the
collaborative writing task, argumentative tasks are chosen as they involve a certain level of complexity and
thus may well stimulate conversational exchanges on how to produce the text. Following this, a qualitative-
reconstructive analysis of the thematic structures and interactive practices of the students’ writing interactions
presents the first step of analysis. In a second step, these provide information about the learning potential of
collaborative writing and on their conditions for success. In this way, the project attempts to provide applicable
knowledge on collaborative interaction in inclusive German classrooms.
The poster presents the research design of the PhD project. In addition to the empirical procedure and theo-
retical framework, the poster presents first insights into the data collected in eighth grade German secondary
classrooms (videographed writing interactions, text products, screen capture recordings).
References:
Herder, A., Berenst, J., Glopper, K., Koole, T. (2020). Sharing knowledge with peers: Epistemic displays in col-
laborative writing of primary school children. In: Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 24, S. 100-378. DOI:
10.1016/j.lcsi.2020.100378.
Myhill, D., Jones, S., Wilson, A. (2016). Writing conversations. Fostering metalinguistic discussion about writing.
In: Research Papers in Education 31 (1), S. 23–44. DOI: 10.1080/02671522.2016.1106694.
Storch, N. (2016). Collaborative writing. In: Manchón, R. and Matsuda, P. Handbook of Second and Foreign
Language Writing, S. 378-404. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter.
Swain, M., Lapkin, S. (2001). Focus on form through collaborative dialogue: Exploring task effects. In: Bygate,
M., Skehan, P., Swain, M. (eds.), Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching, and testing,
99–118. New York: Longman.

1600
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Investigating the strategies used by Italian and British English


native speakers in making requests.

Poster

Ms. Beatrice Massa 1


1. Phrasee

Requests are one of the most ubiquitous speech acts in everyday talk and, due to their face-threatening nature,
are characterised by the use of numerous strategies dependent on sociolinguistic variables like power relations
and social distance (Stavans & Webman Shafran, 2018). Requests have been intensely investigated in English
and other languages, yet very few studies have examined them in Italian (Napoli, 2021; Pozzuoli, 2015). This
research aims to address this gap by comparing requests in British English and Italian. Specifically, the study
looked at the distribution of direct and indirect strategies, the relationship between these strategies and power,
and how these are affected by power relationships and social distance.
Data was collected via a web-based DCT, including nine situations adapted from the DCTs in Blum-Kulka and
Olshtain (1984) and Marti (2006), at two points in time (2019 and 2022). The study comprised 40 university-aged
(19-26) native British English (BrESs) and Italian speakers (ItSs). Responses were coded following Blum-Kulka
and Olshtain’s (1984) request strategy framework, comprising three main strategies (i.e., Direct, Conventionally
Indirect, and Non-Conventionally Indirect) divided into 9 sub-strategies. The Italian data was also searched for
the pronoun mi ‘to/for me’. Instances were then manually sorted to eliminate cases where mi did not belong to
the construction Mi X?.
Findings reveal that, overall, both BrESs and ItSs favour Conventionally Indirect strategies. This is consistent
with previous studies on English (e.g., Fukushima, 2000) and Italian (Pozzuoli, 2015). ItSs, however, used Direct
strategies more than twice as often as BrESs, especially in situations presenting both power differences and
social distance. Mi X? was observed only in situations with no power or social distance differences (Rossi, 2012),
but a variation of this construction, Mi + potere X? (where potere means ‘can/could’) occurred in all types of
social power and distance situations. This study supports previous research on English requests and provides
important insights on the use and performance of requests in Italian.
References
Blum-Kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization
patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 196-213.
Fukushima, S. (2000). Requests and culture: politeness in British English and Japanese. Bern: Peter Lang.
Marti, L. (2006). Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests.
Journal of Pragmatics, 38(11), 1836-1869.
Napoli, V. (2021). Requests in Film Dialogue and Dubbing Translation: A Comparative Study of English and Italian.
Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Pozzuoli, L. (2015). Universality and relativity in cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies in English
and Italian. In S. Gesuato, F. Bianchi, & W. Cheng (Eds.), Teaching, learning and investigating pragmatics: Prin-
ciples, methods and practices (pp. 415-438). Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Rossi, G. (2012). Bilateral and unilateral requests: The use of imperatives and Mi X? interrogatives in Italian.
Discourse Processes, 49(5), 426-458.
Stavans, A., & Webman Shafran, R. (2018). The pragmatics of requests and refusals in multilingual settings.
International Journal of Multilingualism, 15(2), 149-168.

1601
18th International Pragmatics Conference

Invitations in Japanese: An analysis of their turn formats and


sequential organisations

Poster

Dr. Chisa Matsukawa 1


1. University of Central Lancashire

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the associations between linguistic form of various actions
(e.g. requests) in turn design (Drew, 2012) and the specific interactional and sequential environments in which
different forms are used (Drew and Couper-Kuhlen, 2014). In line with this, the cluster of studies explored the
activity of invitations in authentic telephone calls in seven different languages (e.g. English (Drew, 2018) and
French (Traverso et al., 2018)) from the Conversation Analysis (CA) perspective. The studies demonstrated the
relationship between a certain grammatical format of invitation and the interactional and sequential environ-
ment in which it is made. With respect to Japanese invitations, Szatrowski (1993, 2004) explored the organi-
sations of the invitation sequences by using authentic telephone data from 談話分析 danwa bunseki (Japanese
Discourse Analysis). However, the analytical focus was not their turn design formats and the interactional con-
texts in which particular formats of invitations commonly occur.
Therefore, the present study aims to explore Japanese invitations in authentic telephone calls by using the CA
methodology. The analytical focus is placed on their turn design formats and the interactional contexts in which
particular formats of invitations commonly occur. The data will be gathered by several exchange university
students from Japan. The participants will be asked to record their telephone conversation for ‘a study on
decision making’. The potential telephone conversation would be an informal conversation among their friends.
Possible results would back up one of the findings of Matsukawa (2017) that explored invitation sequences
in Japanese by using open role plays. The analysis of the data revealed the relationship between a certain
grammatical format of invitation and the interactional and sequential environment in which it is made – for
example, the use of imperative in the invitation proper reflected the indication of certainty displayed by the
invitee in the pre-expansion (Schegloff, 2007). In the presentation, the preliminary findings of the present study
will be presented.
References
Drew, P. (2012) Turn design. In T. Stivers & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 131-149).
Chichester: Blackwell.
Drew, P. (2018). Equivocal invitations. Journal of Pragmatics, 125, 62-75.
Drew, P. & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). Requesting–from speech act to recruitment. Requesting in social interaction,
1-34.
Matsukawa, C. (2017). Politeness in British English and Japanese: A contrastive study of invitation sequences
from a pragmatic-discursive approach. Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Bristol.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Szatrowski, P. (1993). Nihongo no danwa no kozo no bunseki: Kanyu no sutorateji no bunseki [An analysis of
Japanese discourse organisation: An investigation of invitation strategies]. Tokyo: Kuroshio.
Szatrowski, P. (2004). Weak and strong opposition in Japanese invitation-refusals. In P. Szatrowski (Ed.), Hidden
and open conflict in Japanese conversational interaction (pp. 221-279). Tokyo: Kuroshio.
Traverso, V., Ticca, A. C., & Ursi, B. (2018). Invitations in French: A complex and apparently delicate action.
Journal of Pragmatics, 125, 164-179.

1602
18th International Pragmatics Conference

L1 pragmatic transfer in Japanese L2 students’ written peer


feedback

Poster

Dr. Sugene Kim 1


1. Nagoya University of Commerce & Business

Peer review is an important component of collaborative learning in which students provide feedback on each
other’s written work. Empirical studies have shown that peer review in second language (L2) writing class-
rooms not only helps to improve students’ writing skills but also activates (meta)cognitive processes conducive
to self-regulation by engaging students in critical thinking and reflection. Despite these pedagogical benefits
and prevalent use, some studies (e.g., Carson & Nelson, 1996; Hyland, 2000; Mangelsdorf, 1992; Nelson & Car-
son, 1998) observe that students from group-oriented Asian cultures are predisposed not to reap these benefits
because of their reluctance to criticize others’ work. These students’ abstention from making negative com-
ments has been explained in terms of their culture, in which verbal negotiations or expressions of one’s inner
thoughts are less valued than preserving group cohesion.
To verify and extend the claim of the previous research, this study explored whether anonymity helps amelio-
rate their alleged reluctance to give negative feedback. Nineteen Japanese L2 students reviewed essays in the
face-to-face and anonymous modes, and their feedback commentaries were comparatively analyzed according
to their types (i.e., praise, suggestion, criticism), levels of negativity (i.e., bluntly negative vs. mitigated), and
mitigation strategies implemented.

Results showed that Japanese L2 students adopt an extremely polite interpersonal rhetorical stance regardless
of the peer review mode. Of the negative feedback commentaries, bluntly negative comments accounted for a
scant 5% in both modes. Criticism almost always assumed a mitigated form, and it was not uncommon to employ
multiple mitigation strategies or lexical hedges in a single commentary. The provision of critical comments in
the form of a suggestion was by far the most common, followed by making requests for clarification, providing
explanations, and making positive remarks. As consistently reported in previous studies, lexical hedges used
to express uncertainty, possibility, and imprecision—e.g., the introductory verb “to think,” downtoners (e.g.,
“a little bit,” “somewhat”), adv

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